My Alpha Mate Rejected Me

"Damian Hale, your son is dying, so put down the glass."

The quartet played on for two more bars because nobody had told them to stop, and then the cello gave up and four hundred heads turned toward the doors. A woman in a wet dress stood there with a five-year-old hanging over her shoulder, one of his shoes missing, a paper crown sliding down over his ear.

Up on the stage Damian lowered his champagne and smiled the way he smiled for photographers, as if she were something the planners had arranged. Vivienne Ashgrove stood at his elbow in silver, her fingers resting on his sleeve. Iris looked at those fingers, and then she started walking.

Nobody stopped her. The carpet was so thick she couldn't hear her own steps, only Theo's breathing against her neck, a thin high whistle like a kettle in another room. She had been listening to it since six o'clock.

"He can't get air," she said at the foot of the stage. "I called you five times."

Damian covered the microphone with his palm and bent down, and he smelled of the cologne she had bought him in March. "Lower your voice."

"Did you hear what I said?"

"I heard you. Take him to the hospital and I'll come after the speech, it's twenty minutes." His eyes went past her to the front tables, checking who had noticed. "You're doing this in front of every investor I have."

"Every time that child coughs, somebody has to pay for it," said a dry voice from table one. Eleanor Hale was buttering a roll and did not look up. "I told you before the wedding, Damian, those lungs come from her side."

Vivienne took the microphone out of his hand as easily as taking a coat off a hook. "Poor Iris," she said softly, to the room. "Damian says she hasn't been herself since the spring."

A sound went through the guests, a low, kind sound, and at table three a woman pressed a hand to her chest and looked at Iris the way you look at a stray dog in the road. All of them had been told something about her before she walked in.

She looked at Damian's wrists. The cufflinks were hers, a birthday present, silver with a small blue stone, and she wanted to pull them off him with her teeth.

"He hid his inhaler at Marcus's party," she said. Her voice came out smaller than she meant it to, and she hated it for that. "You told him big boys don't use it. He's five, Damian, he believed you."

Something moved in his face and was gone. He came down the three steps and took her arm above the elbow, hard enough that she felt each finger, and spoke into her ear so the front tables couldn't hear. "One more word and you won't see him again."

She slapped him.

It was very loud in a room that size. Somewhere a phone clicked, and a woman gasped, and Damian's head stayed turned to the side for a second, and Iris noticed that her palm was hot and that she was glad of it.

Then the whistle in Theo's chest stopped.

She waited for it to start again. She counted, one, two, three, and it didn't, and the quiet was so much worse than the noise that her knees gave way and she was on the carpet with him in her lap.

"Theo. Theo, look at me." His eyes were half open, fixed on the chandelier. "Please, baby, is there a doctor, somebody, please."

A grey-haired man from table nine was already running, tuxedo jacket coming off as he ran. He took Theo out of her arms, laid him flat on the marble beside the stage and started pressing on his chest with both hands, and Iris knelt next to them with her fingers pushed against her mouth. Damian's shoes were beside her, black and polished, two feet from their son's head. They did not move toward him.

"Pell," Damian said quietly, to the man at the edge of the stage with the headset. "Turn off the cameras."

Not call an ambulance. Iris stared at his shoes and kept staring until her eyes burned.

*****

The man from table nine was a cardiologist called Aldous, and he had pushed on Theo's chest for fifty seconds before a pulse came back. He told her in the hospital corridor, bow tie hanging open, with Theo's paper crown in one hand. He didn't seem to know he had picked it up.

"Fifty seconds, Mrs. Hale. If I had been at another table I would be telling you something different." He glanced down the corridor. "Is his father coming?"

"He's coming," Iris said. "He's always coming."

Damian arrived forty minutes later, straightening his cuffs, with Eleanor a step behind and a phone already at his ear. He ended the call when he saw her. He did not look at the door where his son was.

"Is he stable?"

"Yes."

"Good. Then we can manage this." He lowered his voice, the boardroom voice. "My people have a statement. A medical episode, a wife under strain, nobody mentions the slap. You say you're sorry for the disruption and it's finished."

Iris laughed, once, and it came out wrong. "He stopped breathing in front of four hundred people and you want me to apologise for the disruption."

"I'm trying to protect this family."

"Eleanor." She turned. "Do you know why he hid his inhaler? His father told him big boys don't need it. Go on, Damian, tell your mother what you taught a five-year-old."

"I taught him nothing." Eleanor's lips thinned. "A child like that is a liability, and anyone sensible would say so. Careful, Iris. I can have a custody petition in front of a judge by morning, and a mother who slaps her husband in public and lets her son collapse on a ballroom floor won't look fit to anyone in this city."

Iris thought of six years of dinners kept warm under foil, and of the chair at the table that Theo had stopped saving for his father, and she took her phone out. There was a name she had saved two years ago and never once pressed.

"Mr. Vance. It's Iris Calloway. Pull the file, I'm ready to sign."

Damian stared at her. "Calloway? You haven't used that name in six years."

"I know," Iris said. "That's why nobody was looking."