I get my hands on her shoulders and I push her off me, hard, fast, a full pace of cold air opening between us, but I already know from the heat climbing the back of my own neck and the particular new pitch the room has taken that the half-second was enough. A half-second is always enough. It’s the whole principle the folder in my desk is built on. Everyone saw. Three hundred people and every camera Ronna so carefully arranged, and not one of them caught the shove, only the kiss, only the picture, time-stamped and high-resolution and worth a fortune to exactly the kind of people who deal in such things.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I bite out.
“I’m sorry.” She doesn’t look sorry. She looks like a woman who has just been handed something enormous. “I couldn’t resist it, can you just imagine what this will do for my?—”
I don’t hear the end of the sentence. I’m already turning, already leaving her standing alone in the middle of the floor with her career and her camera angles, because the only thought left in my head is a single hard imperative that has burned everything else out of it. I need to find my wife. I need to get to her before the picture does, before the whisper does, before she watches the thing the room just watched and adds it to the two months of evidence I’ve been so careful to build against myself. I need to find Camilla?—
Someone screams.
And I am running before I have decided to run.
I have not run in years. I have not needed to. I am a man who arrives at a walk and waits for the room to come to him, and I am running now, full out, through a crowd of the most expensive people in the city in their gowns and their black tie, and I am shoving them out of my way with both hands and I do not care, because I know. That is the thing I will never afterward be able to explain to anyone, least of all myself. I know before I’ve reached her, before I can see anything past the wall of backs and bare shoulders closing in around a point on the floor, before a single person has said a single word to me. I know the way you know your own name. Something has happened to her. Something has happened to Camilla, and I damned her ten minutes ago across a ballroom and danced with another woman to prove I didn’t care, and now I am running and the knowing is the worst thing I have ever carried and I carry it straight through the crowd,I know, I know, I know.
I push through the last of them, and there she is.
On the floor, in a ring of horrified faces, my wife is unconscious in Barrymore’s arms.
He’s gone down to one knee with her gathered against him, her head fallen back over the crook of his elbow, her face the wrong color entirely, no color, the careful blush standing outagainst a paleness that stops my heart in my chest as cold as hers looks stopped in hers. His hand is at her throat, two fingers under her jaw, and his face when he lifts it to mine is white and savage and afraid.
“You—” The word comes out of me with nothing behind it, because there is nothing behind it, there is no arithmetic left anywhere in me, the entire cold machine has gone over the side at once. I drop down across from him. I get my hand against her cheek and it is cool, too cool, and her chest under the red of her dress is doing something shallow and wrong and uneven.
“If anything happens to Camilla,” I hear myself say, and I do not recognize the voice as mine, it has come up out of the part of me I locked away in a room full of another man’s trophies and swore never to open again, “I’ll kill you.”
Barrymore doesn’t even waste breath answering me. That’s the first thing that’s wrong with the picture I’ve been carrying, the very first crack in it, though I’m in no condition to see the crack for what it is, that the man I’ve spent two months hating is not looking at me with guilt or triumph or anything but a fear that matches my own.
And then the emergency team is there.
They come through the crowd fast, faster than anything has any right to come at a charity ball, two of them in dark uniforms with a bag and a folding gurney and the calm hard speed of people who have done this exact thing many times before, and they have her out of Barrymore’s arms and laid out on their backboard with an oxygen mask over her white face before I have fully understood that they were ever in the building at all. I am on my feet. I am moving with them, my hand on the rail of the gurney, because wherever she is going I am going, that is not a thing that requires deciding.
Barrymore gets there first.
He puts himself between me and the gurney, one hand to my chest, and he looks me dead in the eye, and what he says stops me where I stand.
“If you want your wife to live, let me go in your stead.” His jaw is set like poured concrete. “I know more about her medical history than you do.”
And the terrible thing, the thing that takes the legs out from under everything I thought I knew, is that he’s right, and I can hear that he’s right, and I do not have one second to spend learning how he came to be right because the gurney is already moving and one of us has to be on it and it cannot, it turns out, be me. I have been her husband for six months. I do not know her cardiologist’s name. I do not know what to tell them in the ambulance. I am the man who shares her bed and her name and I am, in this single most important moment of her life, useless.
I let him go.
I stand in the wreckage of my own ball and I watch them load my wife into the back of an ambulance that was somehow waiting at the curb, watch Barrymore climb in after her without a backward glance, watch the doors close on the pale shape of her under the lights, and the siren starts up and the whole thing pulls out into the night and is gone, and I am still standing on the sidewalk in my dinner jacket with her warmth not yet faded off my hand.
I turn back toward the building.
The Res staff have come out onto the steps, the ones working the event, the coat-check girls and the waiters and the men in maintenance grey, and they are not looking at me the way three hundred guests are looking at me, with appetite, with the delight of people who have just watched something they’ll dine out on for a month. The staff are looking at the place the ambulance went, and they are afraid, openly, the way you’re only afraid for someone you’ve known a long time.
I go to the oldest of them. A man in grey with a name tag and a face I’ve passed a thousand times and never once spoken to, the way you don’t speak to the walls of a building you own. The tag says Joseph.
“Joseph.” My voice has stopped being mine entirely now. “Do we always have an ambulance on standby?”
“Yes, sir.” He says it gently, the way you’d say a thing to a man you can see is only now finding it out. “Ms. Camilla has always had a bad heart since she was a kid. That’s why we have ambulance around always. Mr. Ericsson made sure of it, all these years, in case something happens to her.”
A bad heart. Since she was a kid. All these years.
I feel my own chest begin to tighten as the words go in, slow, one after another, each of them a door opening onto a room I never once thought to look inside. A father who built a standing ambulance into the bones of a building because the daughter he loved could go down at any moment, on any ordinary night, from nothing more than feeling too much. And I have spent two months making certain she felt too much. I demanded an heir from a body that was never built to survive the carrying of one. I sent her down a red carpet alone into a wall of cameras. I danced with another woman in front of her and would not even turn my head, while the thing in her chest her own father spent a fortune guarding came quietly apart across the room, and the only person who reached her in time was the man I’d just sworn to kill for reaching her.
She could die. Tonight. In the back of that ambulance, with my handprint still cooling on the floor where she fell. She could die, and the last clear thing she’ll have known of her husband is the back of his head turned away from her on a dance floor.
And the room I have kept locked for two months, the one with the door I welded shut the morning I opened that folder, comes open all at once, and there is no arithmetic in it, no board,no leverage, no cold useful sum. There is only the one plain fact that has been sitting in the dark of me this whole time waiting for me to stop being a coward long enough to read it.
