Troy stayed grimly silent for a long time after Camilla had finished telling him everything.
He’d given her his promise not to lose his temper, and he was keeping it the only way he knew how, which was to say nothing at all until he was certain that whatever finally came outof his mouth wouldn’t frighten her worse than she was already frightened. She’d come to him because she had no one else left in the world to go to. He understood that, and it gutted him clean through. Richard was eight months in the ground, her mother long years before that, and the girl had gone and built her entire small careful life around a man who had apparently spent six months letting her believe she was loved and then turned around and informed her, in as many cold words, that she had never been anything more than a clause in a contract.
He wanted to drive across town to The Res and put Flint through one of those forty-story windows the man was so proud of. He had the reach to do it and the temper to enjoy the doing. But that was not what she needed from him, and Troy had learned a long, long time ago that what Camilla needed and what he badly wanted to give her were almost never the same thing.
“First of all,” he said at last, weighing out each word before he let it go, “I’m going to have to pretend you never told me a word of this. You signed an NDA about that marriage. If I act on any of it, if anyone so much as suspects you’ve talked, it comes straight back down on you.”
“That’s smart,” she said, with the quick, faintly surprised approval of someone to whom it would simply never have occurred.
He nearly laughed, except that none of it was funny. It was, in point of fact, the entire problem with her, summed up neat in a single exchange. What she had done, signing her whole life over to a cold stranger on the strength of her dying father’s word, was reckless to the absolute brink of madness by any normal person’s accounting. But Camilla had never once kept her books the way the rest of the world kept theirs. The things that frightened everyone else didn’t frighten her at all, and the things the rest of the world spent its life chasing, she stepped around on the sidewalk like she genuinely couldn’t see them lying there.He’d always privately believed it had something to do with her heart. When you grow up being told, gently, every year at a checkup, that your time might run shorter than everyone else’s, you stop putting much value on the things people who expect a long ordinary life take for granted, and you start putting it on things nobody else even thinks to count.
Which was the exact thing that worried him now, sitting across from her with her face still blotched from a night of crying.
“When was your last checkup?” he asked.
She blinked at the swerve in the conversation. “Last month.”
“And the next?”
“Next week.” It came out of her almost as a question, the way things always did when she sensed she was about to be told off for something.
“That’s too long to wait. Move it up. See your cardiologist this week.”
“But I feel fine?—”
“That’s a thing for your cardiologist to decide, not for you.” He kept his voice level, because he knew from long experience that raising it would only make her dig her heels in, but he made very sure she could hear the steel running underneath it. “You have a bad heart, Camilla. You’ve had one your entire life. And your husband has just gone and broken the rest of it. So you are going to get yourself checked this week, and the two of us are going to sit here and hope that whatever that man’s been putting you through these last weeks hasn’t gone and shortened the time you’ve got left.”
Chapter Seven
“Breathe in for me. Good. And let it out, slow.”
I breathe the way Dr. Meyers tells me to, the way I’ve been breathing for him since I was nine years old and a school nurse first heard something in my chest that didn’t belong there. His office hasn’t changed in all those years, the same framed diagram of a heart gone soft and faded on the wall, the same jar of lollipops on the counter he’s never once stopped offering me even now that I’m a married woman, the same paper crinkling under me on the same vinyl table. He moves the cold disc of the stethoscope a few inches across my back and listens again, his face doing the careful nothing it always does while he listens, the very same nothing he wore back when I was small enough to swing my legs off the edge of this exact table while he let me listen to my own heart through his earpieces and told me it sounded like a horse running somewhere far away.
It still sounds like that to me. A horse, somewhere, running. Even most of the time. Not always.
He has me lie back for the rest of it, the cool gel and the wand gliding slow over my ribs, the grey shapes pulsing and folding on his monitor that have never once meant a thing to me and mean everything to him. He prints his long strips of paper. He frownsdown at numbers I can’t read. He has been the one constant of my whole life that no contract and no marriage and no death has ever managed to touch, this quiet careful man with his nothing-face, who has known the inside of my heart longer and far better than anyone I have ever loved, and who has spent twenty-odd years of his life trying to coax it into beating a little longer than it strictly wants to.
When he’s finished he helps me sit up, and he pulls his wheeled stool in close, and he takes his glasses off, which after a lifetime of these appointments is exactly how I know we’ve arrived at the part of the visit that isn’t a test.
“Right now,” he says, “you’re fine.”
I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.
“But.” He goes on gently, because he has always been gentle with me and the gentleness is somehow worse than blunt would be. “Mr. Barrymore was right to send you to me early. I don’t much like what I’m seeing in your rhythm this month. Nothing dangerous yet, mind. But your heart was never built to carry a great deal of strain, Camilla, and the one truth nobody can hand you is exactly how much it can carry, because we don’t get to learn that number until it’s already been reached. And by then, I’m afraid, it tends to be rather too late to be of any use.”
“So what do I do?”
“You take it easy.” He says it like a prescription, because to him that’s exactly what it is. “Whatever’s been weighing on you these last weeks, and something plainly has, I’ve watched you carry it in through that door, you find yourself a way to set it down. Rest. Stay calm. And”—here he hesitates, because he’s a cardiologist and not a marriage counselor and he knows exactly where the line sits—”do whatever you can to make your peace with your husband. I don’t need the details of it. I only need your life to have a good deal less storm in it than your face is telling me it’s had.”
Make peace with my husband.
Easier said than done, I think, in the back of the car on the way home, watching the grey city slide past the window without taking in a single block of it.
He doesn’t want peace with me. He told me so himself, in the plainest words a man has available to him, across the width of my father’s old desk. Peace isn’t on the table. The only things on the table are a child and an exit, plus a tidy itemized list of all the ways I can be cut out of my own baby’s life if I put a single foot wrong. And you cannot make peace by yourself. Peace takes two people who both want the fighting to stop, and my husband doesn’t want it to stop. He wants to win, and somewhere in the last two months he’s decided that I am the thing he’s winning against.
But I don’t want to die, either.
That’s the plain animal fact of it, sitting there underneath all the heartbreak when I dig down far enough. I’m twenty-two years old. I’ve lost my father and I appear to have lost my marriage, and I am not, on top of all of that, prepared to go and lose my actual life to a heart that was never built to take the strain. Dr. Meyers said take it easy. So I will take it easy. And if taking it easy means making my own private kind of peace in a place where no real peace is on offer, then that is exactly what I’ll do. I’ll make it on the inside, quietly, where Trey doesn’t get a say and can’t refuse to sign.
