Chapter Three

Ashford’s Pov

  Marcus Webb found me in the hospital cafeteria at seven in the morning.

  I knew who he was before he introduced himself. Adrian's CFO. I had seen him at functions during the marriage — big, quiet, the kind of man who listened more than he spoke and remembered everything. He had always been polite to me in the way people are polite to someone they feel sorry for.

  He sat down across from me without asking if he could.

  "I need to tell you something," he said.

  "I know." I wrapped both hands around my coffee cup. "Adrian warned me last night."

  "Then you know it's about the wedding."

  "Marcus." I said his name the way I said a patient's name when I needed them to stop talking and listen. "Whatever you're about to tell me — say it straight. No preamble."

  He said it straight.

  It took him four minutes. I know because I was watching the clock on the wall behind him, not because I was impatient, but because I needed something fixed and external to look at while he talked.

  Richard Cole had approached Cara six weeks before the wedding. He had told her that Lena was not what the Cole family needed, that the marriage was a mistake he intended to correct, and that her participation would be compensated. Cara had agreed. What Adrian saw that night, what everyone saw, was staged. A door left open. A story seeded in the right ears before morning. The annulment had been Richard's design from the beginning, and Adrian had signed the papers believing he was cleaning up a mess he had made.

  He hadn't made it. It had been made for him.

  When Marcus finished, I didn't say anything for a moment.

  "Does Adrian know all of this?" I asked.

  "He's known the broad version for about two years. He found out the specifics from me last night."

  "And Cara?"

  Marcus looked at the table. "She's been living with it."

  I thought about my sister. I thought about the last time I saw her face — at the airport, briefly, one of those moments where we were in the same space and both pretending we weren't. I thought about how much energy I had spent being angry at the right person for the wrong reasons.

  "Thank you for telling me," I said.

  He looked up. He had clearly expected something else — tears, maybe, or anger. He nodded slowly.

  "I should have told you five years ago," he said.

  "Yes." I picked up my coffee. "You should have."

  I left him sitting there.

  I spent the next three hours doing what I always did when the ground shifted under me. I worked.

  I reviewed Adrian's imaging with a radiologist who talked too much and caught nothing I hadn't already caught. I requested two additional panels — a perfusion scan and a metabolic workup — that his team hadn't run, because the deterioration pattern in his left ventricle was bothering me in a way I hadn't named yet. Something about the rate of decline didn't match the underlying pathology. I filed the requests and moved on.

  At noon I had the preliminary consultation with Adrian.

  Dr. Hayes was in the room. A nurse. Adrian's personal attorney, which was unusual enough that I noted it and said nothing.

  Adrian was sitting up in bed. He looked like he had slept, which was more than I had managed. He looked at me when I walked in with that same careful attention from the night before, and I looked back at him with the same thing I gave every patient — full presence, no weight.

  I walked him through the surgical plan. The approach, the risks, the timeline, the recovery. I answered every question Hayes asked and two that Adrian asked, both of which were intelligent and specific and told me he had done his reading.

  At the end I asked if he had any further questions.

  He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "Marcus talked to you this morning."

  "He did."

  "And?"

  I looked at him. "And I'm going to perform your surgery on Thursday. That's what I came back to do."

  "That's not what I meant."

  "I know what you meant." I picked up my folder. "It's not a conversation I'm prepared to have in a consultation room, Mr. Cole."

  His jaw tightened. "Adrian."

  "Get some rest," I said. "Thursday is close."

  Sophie called me at six while I was eating a sandwich in my temporary office on the fourth floor.

  "Tell me everything," she said, which was how she started every call.

  "Nothing to tell."

  "Lena."

  "I learned something this morning that changes the shape of something I thought I understood. I haven't finished deciding what to do with it."

  A pause. "That's the most words you've used for your feelings in four years."

  "Goodbye, Sophie."

  "Are you okay?"

  I looked at the sandwich in my hand. I thought about Marcus's voice. I thought about Cara agreeing to something that cost me a continent and five years and the particular kind of loneliness that comes from rebuilding yourself in a place where no one knew your name before you broke.

  I thought about Adrian signing papers he didn't understand, in a room I wasn't in, and calling it mercy.

  "I don't know yet," I said.

  She didn't push. That was why she was still my person — she knew when to hold and when to let something breathe.

  "Call me when you do," she said.

  After I hung up I sat for a long time without moving.

  Then I opened my laptop and pulled up Adrian's additional scan requests. The preliminary results on the metabolic workup had come back faster than expected.

  I read through them once. Then again.

  I sat very still.

  The deterioration wasn't natural. The markers were wrong in a way that had a specific explanation, and the explanation didn't come from disease.

  Someone had done this to him.