I love her.
My wife.
I love my wife, and I will never forgive myself if something happens to her.
Chapter Eleven
The corridor outside the cardiac unit was the kind of quiet that came with money, carpet instead of linoleum, real art on the walls, a hush you paid extra for, and Troy had been pacing the length of it for the better part of an hour with his jacket gone somewhere and his sleeves shoved up and the whole night still roaring in his ears. He’d ridden in with her. He’d told the team in the ambulance everything they needed to know before they’d thought to ask it, the cardiologist’s name, the medication, the resting numbers he’d had memorized since she was nine years old and he was a gangly teenager who’d appointed himself her shadow, and he’d held her cold hand the whole way and talked to her unconscious face the way you talk to someone you refuse to let leave. She was stable now. Stable was the word they kept using, as though it were a thing you could trust.
He heard the elevator before he saw the man step out of it.
“How is she?”
Troy’s face remained cold and hard at the arrival of Camilla’s husband, who had come straight from the ball, still in his dinner jacket, the tie pulled loose and his face the gray of a man who had run a long way to a place he wasn’t wanted.
“Why are you here?”
“I’m her husband?—”
“—and you almost killed her.”
He expected the man to bristle at that. He expected the famous cold, the leverage, the lawyer’s quickness Flint was so known for, some version of the voice that had built a fortune out of never once being caught at a disadvantage. He expected Camilla’s husband to deny it.
But when Waymakers’ new team owner only whitened at the words, said nothing, took the blow standing and wore it where Troy had aimed it, something shifted a fraction in Troy’s chest. He had spent two months wanting to put this man through a window. He had built an entire architecture of contempt around him, brick by brick, every time he’d seen Camilla’s face do the careful brave thing it did now whenever Flint’s name came up.
Maybe there was still hope for this man.
“I didn’t know.”
Camilla’s husband was speaking in a tone that could only be described as numb. Or dead. Troy had heard that tone before, from men at gravesides, from a teammate the night his kid stopped breathing. It was the voice of someone whose mind had walked out ahead of the rest of him and was standing somewhere down the corridor refusing to come back.
“I know it’s no excuse, but you were right. She never told me, and she’s so young, I would never have thought to ask about it. And Ericsson…” The man’s jaw worked. “He never told me either.”
“He wanted to keep it a secret, and everyone working for the family followed suit.” Troy heard his own voice come out level, almost gentle, and resented it for coming out that way. “They didn’t want to risk anyone finding a way to exploit her illness.” Which somebody always would, he didn’t add, in a city like this one, where a weakness was just an asset you hadn’t bought yet.
For a long moment Flint said nothing. Then, low, as though the question cost him something to push out: “How…bad is it? Her heart.”
And there it was, the thing that decided Troy, against his every instinct, to keep talking to this man instead of leaving him to rot in his thousand-dollar shoes. He hadn’t asked what it would cost him. Hadn’t asked how it touched the team, the deal, the optics. He’d asked how bad it was. Just that.
“She was told to keep it easy,” Troy said. “Low stress. No shocks. Nothing that makes that heart of hers work harder than it was built to. She’s lived her whole life inside a circle drawn around her by people who loved her, and most days you’d never know there was a circle there at all.” He let the next part out slowly, because he wanted it to reach bone and he wanted it to hurt. “But when she saw you dancing with your ex?—”
“I know it’s still not an excuse.” Flint’s eyes came up, and there was something raw in them now, something working its way loose. “But I did that when I saw you with her.”
Troy stared at him.
“Nothing’s going on between us,” he said impatiently, the words almost a reflex, the same denial he’d have given a reporter or a rumor or a man in a bar who’d looked too long.
“You and Camilla have been seeing each other behind my back?—”
“We spend time together,” Troy snapped, and the calm he’d been holding cracked clean down the middle, because of all the rotten, backwards, upside-down things this disaster of a night had produced, this was somehow the one that lit him up, “because I practically raised her. She’s like a baby sister to me.”
The words rang down the quiet corridor and hung there.
Flint didn’t answer, but Troy could see, in the set of the man’s shoulders, in the careful blankness that came down over his face like a shutter, that the other man was still unwilling to accept hiswords as truth. Two months of believing a thing did not come undone in a hospital hallway in the space of a sentence, however true the sentence was, and Troy understood that, even as it made him want to take the man by the lapels and shake the wrongness out of him.
So he tried the only currency he had ever fully trusted.
“I’m known to be many things,” Troy said, “but never a liar. You know that. The whole city knows that. You should’ve remembered that before you started building whatever it is you’ve built.” He watched Flint’s face. “Unless…”
