My fingers tighten around the gazebo’s column as I recognize the voice, my panic sharpening into tension instantly. While I still have my back turned to her, I take a deep breath.Stay calm. Detach.
I turn, and my iron will snaps at the sight of Delaney standing in the rain. She’s soaked, her pale pink suit a saturated fuchsia. “I know, I know, you’re totally fine.” She holds up her dripping hands, palms out. “But you don’t need to be. And if you aren’t, and you need someone to talk to…”
Tears well in my eyes as I nod, unable to speak. She steps up to the gazebo platform and gets her slender arm around my shoulders just as the floodgates open, and then everything is raining, thesky and my eyes and my greedy, idiotic heart who wants another ending, any ending, where I don’t leave here alone.
“Have you told him?” she asks. “That it’s real for you?”
I take three big breaths, one and one and one, hoping too much oxygen might short-circuit my sobbing. “No. I can’t.”
“Why?”
Because the clock is ticking, and Arthur goes after everything he wants, and I can’t want someone who doesn’t want me, who’d pick a car over my heart, I think.I spent my entire childhood having happily ever after ripped away from me over and over, living in other people’s houses, watching other people’s lives. I’m supposed to know better than this.
But out loud, I say, “I just can’t.”
Delaney doesn’t ask me anything else after that. She only squeezes my back and sets her chin on top of my head, and lets me watch the rain shimmer over the grass until my chest doesn’t burn.
Chapter TwentyThe Netherlands
When I get to my room that night, I unbag the Panasonic camcorder, chuck it in the trash, and crawl into bed to wallow in my own self-hatred without stripping off my rain-drenched clothes. Then, ten minutes later, I pull the camera out of the trash can, cry, and fall asleep.
This is a bad idea.
By Tuesday, I have a tickle in my throat. Wednesday, a full-blown cough. I lose my voice the Thursday we arrive in the Netherlands, and begrudgingly send Max an email that I’ll be “off work” while Sarah squeezes me onto the team doctor’s Saturday morning schedule. “I’m completely okay, though,” I rasp out, then clear my throat. “See? Better.”
The elderly doctor eyes me over his wire-rimmed glasses. “Is this your first time traveling this much, Ms. Graywood?”
“Yes, but I used to move all the time as a kid.”
“And how’s your appetite?”
“Voracious.”
“Have you been caught in any bad weather recently? Snow? Rain?”
“Well…”
He agrees that I’m probably not going to die, grabs me pillsfrom the cabinet across the clean white room, and slaps my name on the clinic door. “You seem to be getting better, but you may be contagious. Best to stay here in our bed for the rest of the day and heal up so a cold doesn’t travel through the paddock.”
The official racing clinic is tiny, four private rooms with linen-covered windows overlooking the Circuit Zandvoort, so I guess it’s a good thing that a sick documentarian is the only patient. Sighing, I let the doctor help me up onto the medical bed, grab me water and orange juice, and leave me with the ceiling-mounted television flickering through local news. After an hour of warm sunshine and subtitles, I’m dozing off, more relaxed than I have been in days. There may be something to medical intervention and extremely crisp cotton beds.
Only problem is, I haven’t talked to Arthur since the accident—and now it’s been too long and I don’t know how to bring anything up when I’ve smelled his blood mixed with burnt rubber. Every text I start feels frivolous.Want to actually sneak around so we can get dinner?Silly.I could wear a mustache to your hotel room so nobody sees me.Ridiculous.
He doesn’t reach out to me, either.
That’s why, in my half-awake, partly lucid dream state, I think I’m hallucinating Arthur’s quiet, angry voice from the other side of the closed clinic door.
“Who’s in there?”
“Mr. Bianco, I must ask you to leave. These are private rooms.”
“That name on the door—Graywood. Is that Lilah?”
I pull myself up the stacked pillows. I’m not dreaming; I couldn’t mistake his British-Italian accent for anyone else.
“That’s private medical information, even for you, son.”
“Private? Her name’s on the door!”
