“I’m in a hospital bed, Trisha. Have some compassion.”
“Compassion is not in my job description. Keeping you alive and employable is. You’re failing on both counts.” I heard her shift in the chair beside me, the creak of leather and the tap of fingernails on a tablet screen. “Open your eyes. We need to talk.”
I opened one eye. Fluorescent ceiling. IV in my arm. Hospital gown that made me look like a man who had given up on life, which, fair enough, was not entirely inaccurate. My throat felt like I’d gargled with gravel and my thigh ached where someone had jammed an EpiPen into it with enough force to stake a vampire.
“Your voice,” I said, opening the other eye, “sounds like a nail being dragged across a chalkboard.”
Trisha didn’t miss a beat. “Good. That means it works. Wakes you up every time.”
“How does your husband listen to that first thing in the morning?”
“Because Archer has appreciation for quality, which is something you will never understand.”
She crossed her legs and fixed me with a look that could peel paint off a wall. She was wearing a blazer over what appeared to be a pajama top, her hair in a clip that was losing the fight, and her reading glasses were sitting on her nose at an angle that suggested she’d put them on in the dark. “Now. Are we going to talk about what you did? I walked out to answer a call and you nearly ended your own life. You knew you were allergic, for chrissake!”
And there it was.
“Stop screaming, will you?” I sat up. The IV tugged and my head swam for a second before the room stopped moving. The hospital was doing its hospital thing, machines beeping in a rhythm that was supposed to be reassuring but wasn’t. The smell of antiseptic and recycled air seeping into everything, a nurse’s shoes squeaking somewhere down the corridor.
She glared at me. “Your allergy is documented in every hotel booking, every restaurant reservation I have ever made in six years of managing your life.” Her voice was trembling now, her fingers clenched as though she was fighting the urge to strangle me. “I have personally called ahead to more kitchens than I can count, just to make sure kiwi isn’t within breathing distance of your plate.” She paused. “And you ate it on purpose. For what?”
“The dessert looked good.”
“Christopher!”
“Fine.” I leaned back against the pillow. “I was stressed, ok? The board. The company. Grandma’s one-woman campaign to turn me into a CEO. I figured if I ended up in a hospital bed,if I looked reckless enough, unstable enough, the board would write me off. Find someone else. Someone who actually wants the job.”
Trisha’s mouth fell open. “Let me make sure I understand,” she said, and I knew from her tone that what followed would be unpleasant. “You deliberately ate a known allergen. You risked anaphylactic shock. You traumatized an entire film crew.” She held up a finger for each item. Three fingers. “All because you didn’t want to sit in an office.”
“When you put it like that…it kinda sounds bad.”
“It sounds bad because it is bad, Christopher. It’s spectacularly bad. It’s keep-publicists-awake-at-night bad.”
She wasn’t wrong. I knew she wasn’t wrong. But knowing something and caring about it are two different skills, and I’d spent my whole life perfecting the first while actively avoiding the second.
“Listen, I know it was stupid,” I admitted, meeting her gaze. “Really stupid. It was an impulse. I wasn’t thinking about what would happen after.”
Trisha stared at me for a long moment, like she was deciding whether to yell or throw something.
“You could have died, Christopher.”
“I know.”
“No, I don’t think you do.” She shook her head and let out a frustrated sigh. “You can't keep treating your life like it’s something you can gamble with whenever you’re cornered. One day, that’s going to catch up with you.”
I looked away.
“Playing games with life and death never ends well,” she said quietly.
The door opened before I could respond. No knock. No warning.
My grandmother, Eleanor Vale, walked into the room and the temperature dropped.
She was five-foot-three and seventy years old, but she still possessed the ability to silence a boardroom with a single look. She was wearing a navy cardigan, pearl earrings, and an expression that I’d seen exactly four times in my life, each time preceding a conversation I did not enjoy.
Trisha was on her feet and out of the room before Eleanor said a word. I noted this with irritation. Trisha argued with me about everything. She once fought me for twenty minutes about the color of a press release font, but the second my grandmother walked in, she vanished like smoke.
Just perfect!
