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I watch him carefully. “She said she was thinking of calling herself The Magnificent Monroe. Because her middle name’s Marilyn.”
He goes still, studying me, the shutters coming down behind his eyes. Jesus, I was right.
“And Gaby told me she runs Hepburn Education,” I continue. “Because her middle name’s Audrey.”
He still doesn’t say anything.
“Belle told me your middle name’s Clint.”
He puts his glass on the bedside table, then turns back to me slowly.
“So,” I say, “I’m thinking that maybe you use the name Eastwood sometimes. Like, for example, an insurance company?”
We study each other for a long time. I wait for him to explain, but eventually I realize he’s not going to say anything.
Eventually, I say, “I don’t understand. You own the insurance company that Lee’s policy was from?”
He runs his tongue over his top teeth. “Not quite.”
“What do you mean?”
He breathes in, then lets it out slowly. “It’s not a real insurance company.”
I blink. “What?”
“I made it up as a way to give you the money.”
My eyes widen, and my jaw drops. I go to say something, but the words refuse to come as questions fly around in my head. “That doesn’t make sense. The policy paid out in January. That’s before I met you.”
“But not before I met you.”
I frown. “You’re not making any sense.”
He moves the box of chocolates off the bed, then sits back against the pillows. “Last December, I went to the hospital for a regular meeting I have every week to discuss which patients will benefit from therapy with MAX. The doctor took me on a walk through the ward, and that’s when I saw her.”
“Who?”
“She was sitting by the bedside of a young lad, her elbows on the rail that stopped him falling out, watching him sleep. She looked tired and tearful, she wasn’t wearing any makeup, and her hair was up in a scruffy bun. Her clothes looked wrinkled, as if she’d slept in them. But she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.”
His brown eyes study me. Holy fuck. He’s talking about me.
“I asked the doctor who she was,” he continues. “He told me her name was Mistletoe Macbeth, that she’d just lost her husband in a car accident, and she was there with her son, who’d suffered a spinal column injury. ‘It’s bad,’ he said. ‘The kid won’t walk again. No point in wasting your time on him.’”
“Oh God. Dr. Michaels.”
He nods. “I decided right then and there that I was going to get Finn walking again, no matter what.”
I remember talking to him about Dr. Michaels on the first day I met him in the park, and the quiet anger I felt radiating from him.
“I watched you for a long time,” he says. “You didn’t see me—you were lost in thought. But I was absolutely captivated. You’d just lost your husband, though, and your son was badly injured. I couldn’t even bring myself to talk to you, because you were obviously grieving. At one point you even started crying. I watched you, and I wanted to walk in and take you in my arms and hug you, but I couldn’t. So instead I went back to Kia Kaha, and I told the guys we were going to start work on an exoskeleton for kids. I began drawing plans for THOR that evening.”
My jaw is still sagging. “You built THOR for Finn?”
He nods. “That poem I read to you? I wrote it that night.” He gives a mischievous smile.
We study each other for a moment. My head is spinning.
“And the money?” I ask eventually.
