The Chair

She does not turn around.

She stands at the study door with her hand on it for three seconds, and he watches the back of her head and waits for her to look, and she does not. Then she opens it and walks out and pulls it shut behind her, not hard, just shut.

Down the hall, the guest room door closes the same way.

He sits at the desk for a long time with the change order in front of him and the empty third line under his thumb.

_

That night, Brent knocks at ten.

He does not come in. He holds his phone out over the threshold, screen tilted up, and says, "You asked to be told."

Everly's account. Posted four hours ago. Two women in a white salon, capes on, a mirror behind them. The caption says rebirth era. Everly is laughing with pink curls in her face. Beside her is his wife.

Aitana has short hair. Very short. Cut close at the sides and soft on top, and it makes her neck look longer, and her collarbones show at the open neck of an Oxford shirt that is not hers. She is not smiling. She is looking down at her own hands in her lap, and she looks younger and thinner and like a stranger who has taken her place.

Pedri looks at it for a long moment. He saw that haircut once today, across his own desk. The photograph is worse. It cannot look back at him.

His fingers tremble. He does not say anything about it. He hands the phone back and closes the door.

She has boxes by the elevator. He counted them this morning. Nine. She has short hair, and if he is honest with himself — and he is only honest at this hour — she is getting ready to leave.

He should feel relief. Three years of work, finished. The debt collected. He tells himself this on the way to his bedroom, and the sentence does not hold, and he stands in the dark with his coat still on.

Isla is gone.

He says it out loud to the empty room, quietly, the way he has said it to himself for eleven years.

She has no right to a rebirth while my sister has none.

It is a good sentence. It has teeth. He has used it before and it always worked.

It does not work tonight.

He takes out his phone and calls Brent. "Put a driver on her. Every stop. Report to me."

"Yes, sir."

He puts the phone on the nightstand and lies down with his clothes on.

Stay.

He said it. He heard himself say it, and it came out of him like a stone out of a wall, and it is the one word he would take back if he could take back anything.

_

The chemo room is small and warm and hums.

Aitana has told Keith she is coming alone. She says it in the corridor with her coat still on, and he nods, and he does not look like he believes her.

Twenty minutes into the drip, the door opens.

Pedri walks in and takes the chair in the corner, behind her. He does not sit close. He does not take his coat off. He does not look at her, and he does not say hello.

Keith looks up from the chart. "Family waits outside."

Aitana's chest does something she does not want it to do. She has spent all morning telling herself he would not come, and here he is, in the chair, in the corner, with his coat on.

"He can stay," she says.

Keith looks at her, then at the man in the corner, then back at her.

"He can stay," she says again, quieter.

Pedri does not look up. "I'm here to see where my money goes."

The room goes still.

Keith's jaw works. He does not say anything. He goes back to the chart.

Aitana sits very straight in the chair and looks at the drip and does not let her face change. She had thought — for twenty minutes, in the corridor, at the door — that he might have come for her.

She was wrong. She files it away with everything else.

_

An hour in, Keith checks her wrist.

He holds her hand to read the monitor, and his thumb rests on the inside of her wrist, and he says, not looking up, "Good call on the cut. It softens the shock when it starts to go."

She nods.

Behind her, in the corner, the chair creaks, as if someone on it has gone very still.

She hears his coat shift. She does not turn around.

Then his voice, low, from the corner, in the flat tone he uses when he wants to hurt someone and does not want them to know it.

"Cutting your hair before it falls out. Very brave." A pause. "Very convenient for sympathy."

Aitana's fingers curl into the blanket.

Keith's hand tightens, one degree, on her wrist.

Nobody says anything. The drip runs down. Aitana looks at the wall and thinks about nothing at all, on purpose, the way you do it.

_

An hour and ten minutes in, she goes grey.

It comes on fast. The room tilts left. Cold sweat breaks across her forehead and runs into her collar, and her hands start to shake, and she says Keith with no voice in it.

Then she is sick into the basin he gets to her face in time, and then the lights go out.

In the corner, Pedri's body moves.

His hand comes off the arm of the chair, and his foot is on the floor, and he is half out of the seat before he understands what he is doing.

Keith is already there. Keith has her by the shoulders, turning her, keeping her head down, calling for the nurse with the tone of a man who has done this a hundred times.

Pedri stops.

He sits back down.

He puts his hand back on the arm of the chair. He looks at the wall.

"Handle it," he says.

Keith does not answer him.

_

At three in the morning, Aitana wakes in a hospital bed.

The room is dim. Her mouth tastes of metal. There is a drip in her arm and a blanket tucked to her chin, and she does not remember being moved.

There are two chairs by the bed.

The one nearer the door is empty.

Keith is asleep in the other one, coat still on, arms crossed, chin down on his chest. A nurse has put a folded blanket under his head at some point and it has slipped to one side.

Aitana looks at the empty chair for a long time.

She does not ask where Pedri went, because there is no one awake to ask.

_

In the morning, Keith is the first person she sees.

He is standing with a paper cup of coffee and looking worse than she has ever seen him look. He asks how she feels. She says fine. He tells her it was not fine, it was dehydration on top of the drip, and that she is going to spend the next two weeks being careful.

Then he says, "Stay in my spare room."

She blinks at him.

"Two weeks. The chemo is going to get worse before it gets better, and I'm not going to have you alone in a penthouse with nobody on the floor." He says it plainly, as a doctor, and not as anything else. "The guest room's made up. You can bring the boxes."

She is still opening her mouth to answer when the door opens behind him.

Pedri comes in with his coat on and his jaw set.

He has heard it. It is obvious from the first word he says.

"She is my wife," he says. "She will recover in my home."

"With respect, Mr. Miller—"

"I'm not asking for your respect." He takes a step into the room. "The nurses sitting with her father report to my office. I pay for her father's care. I can see where she is without asking her." He looks at Aitana for the first time. "You'll come home."

Keith turns to Aitana.

Aitana looks at the two of them, standing on either side of the bed like two bookends.

"I'm not a decision for you two to make," she says.

Keith's mouth closes. Pedri's does not open.

She sits up, slowly, with one hand on the rail.

"I'll come to the penthouse," she says. "Not because you told me to. Because my father is the reason I have to stay in this city, and because you have people watching me anyway, and because you owe me something, and I intend to collect it."

Pedri says nothing.

Keith looks at her for a long moment, and then nods, once, and steps back from the bed. He is not happy. He does not argue. That is the thing about Keith — he never makes her choose him.

_

In the car, she turns to Pedri before he starts the engine.

"Terms," she says.

"Go on."

"One true question a day. You answer it. Any question. Except the third line." She keeps her eyes on the windshield. "That one you can keep. For now."

He is quiet for a second. Then he turns the key.

"Fine," he says. "I promise nothing you'll like."

She watches the hospital doors go past in the glass.

"Where were you the night I lost the baby?"

His hands stay on the wheel. The car does not slow. He does not look at her, and she does not look at him, and the heater hums, and the city goes by, and for a long moment she thinks he is going to drive all the way home without answering.

Then he says it.

"At Alessia's. Connor had a fever." His voice is flat. He says it like a man reading a charge sheet against himself. "I saw your name on my phone. I let it ring."

The car turns onto the avenue.

Neither of them speaks again.