Chapter 22: Grandma Beatrice's Defense

 

Eliza Vane did three shifts a week at the hospital's nursing station reception desk. She came in at nine and left at one and spent most of the time between looking at her phone.

Briar arrived at eight fifty-five with a container of coffee and a plan Mabel had described as optimistic.

The plan was simple: be present, be helpful, let Eliza get used to her. Eventually ask about the compound.

She set the coffee on the desk. Eliza looked at it. Said nothing. Briar took that as a neutral sign.

There was a supply cart in the corridor that needed moving to the second floor. Briar volunteered before anyone asked. She got the cart into the elevator fine. She got it out of the elevator fine. She misjudged the turn into the supply room by about six inches and the cart clipped the doorframe and the top tier shifted and went over.

Gauze rolls. Tongue depressors. An entire box of latex gloves that opened on impact and scattered across the linoleum in every direction.

She crouched down and started collecting them.

"Leave it," said a nurse who appeared from nowhere.

Briar left it.

She walked back to the nursing station. Eliza was watching her with the particular expression of someone whose existing opinion had just been confirmed in every detail.

"You can sit over there," Eliza said, pointing to a chair against the wall. "And not touch anything."

Briar sat. She had been there maybe ten minutes, trying to think of something to say that would not make it worse, when the voice came from the room to her left.

"Eliza Marie Vane."

Eliza's spine straightened.

Beatrice Vane was being helped into a wheelchair in the adjacent doorway. Killian's grandmother moved slowly but with great precision, her white hair pinned up, her eyes the same dark navy blue the whole family carried. She looked at Eliza.

"You did not come yesterday."

"I had"

"You said you would come yesterday." Beatrice settled into the wheelchair. Then her eyes moved to Briar and her expression shifted into something warmer and immediate. "Briar. Come here, child."

Briar stood up and crossed to her. Beatrice took her hand in both of hers and looked up at her.

"You look tired," she said.

"I'm okay," Briar said.

"You look tired," Beatrice said again, not unkindly, not accepting the correction. She looked at Eliza. "Why is she sitting against the wall?"

"She volunteered to help," Eliza said. "She scattered gloves across the entire second-floor corridor."

"The box wasn't closed properly," Briar said quietly.

"Girls." One word. Both of them stopped. Beatrice looked at Eliza steadily. "This is your brother's wife. She came here. You will treat her accordingly."

"Grandmother"

"Accordingly," Beatrice said.

Eliza turned back to her desk with her jaw set.

Briar looked at Beatrice. "Thank you."

"Don't thank me. Sit."

Briar sat. Beatrice asked her several questions, just about her. What she had been doing. Whether she was eating. Whether she was sleeping.

Briar answered them and felt something strange and quiet happening in her chest.

Then the elevator opened and Killian walked out.

He looked at the nursing station, at Eliza, and then at Briar beside his grandmother. His expression moved through several things quickly before settling into something carefully neutral.

"Grandma." He crossed to her and crouched beside the wheelchair. "You said it was urgent."

"I said come when you have a moment," Beatrice said. "You took two hours."

"How are you feeling."

"Considerably better than your marriage is looking," Beatrice said, at a volume that carried clearly to the nursing station and the waiting area beyond it.

Killian went very still.

"You have a wife," Beatrice said. "She is sitting right there and she looks like someone has been wringing her out for months. And I hear from four separate people that you have been spending every available hour with the Thorne girl." She looked at him. "You do not court another woman in front of your bonded mate. You do not do it in public and you do not do it where your grandmother hears about it secondhand. That is not how this family conducts itself."

"This isn't the place for this conversation," Killian said quietly.

"You have been making it everyone's place for months," Beatrice said. "So we will have it here. You took a Luna. She is your responsibility. Whatever complications exist in your bond, you do not resolve them by humiliating her and installing another woman in her place before the first one is properly gone." She paused. "You will do better. Are we clear."

The corridor was very quiet.

"We will talk at home," Killian said.

"Good," Beatrice said. "Bring your wife."

Killian stood and looked at Briar and she could feel the displaced anger radiating off him before he said a word.

"What are you doing here," he said.

She opened her mouth. And then something across the corridor caught her eye.

A woman in the waiting area had her phone angled toward the wall screen, and the sound was coming through quietly. A news segment. Border patrol. An incident. Three members of a patrol unit transported to regional medical.

Liam's name in the crawl at the bottom.

Briar was already moving toward the elevator.

"Briar." Killian's voice behind her.

"Liam is hurt," she said. "He's at the regional center. I have to go."

"You are not going anywhere right now."

"He's there because you sent him there because of me." She turned around. "I have to go."

She went.

Liam was in a four-bed ward, his left arm in a sling, bandaging running up his collarbone and the side of his neck. He was awake. He looked at her with the expression of someone trying to appear more all right than he was.

Briar sat in the chair beside his bed and looked at the bandaging and started crying without any preamble.

"I'm okay," he said.

"You're not," she said. "You're in a hospital wrapped in bandages because of me. I should have told you not to help me."

"It was my choice," he said. "Made with full information. Stop."

She sat with her hands in her lap.

The door opened behind her.

She knew the footsteps. She stood up.

Killian stood in the doorway. He looked at her wet face. His expression was very cold.

"I'll go home," Briar said. She looked at him directly. "I'll go home and stay there. Just stop hurting him. "

Killian said nothing.

She picked up her bag and walked out past him.

The house felt slightly wrong when she came in.

She could not have said how exactly. Everything was in its place. The entry hall looked the same. The kitchen looked the same.

She stood in the hallway for a moment and looked around and could not locate it specifically.

A different dish soap by the sink. She used the yellow one. This was white. She had assumed the housekeeper had changed brands.

A throw blanket on the couch folded in thirds instead of halves. She always folded it in halves.

She stood in the kitchen doorway and turned these things over slowly and did not land on any particular conclusion, just a low-level unease she could not name.

Then she started dinner because her hands needed something to do. Old habit. She had made dinner in this kitchen hundreds of times hoping he would notice. She did not entirely know why she was doing it now. But the stock was on and the onions were going and the kitchen smelled like something real and that was enough for the moment.

She was reaching for the herbs when she heard the front door.

Not Killian's walk.

The code entered with the ease of someone who had done it many times.

Vivienne came down the hallway in different clothes than she had arrived in, a soft cashmere sweater and fitted trousers, her platinum hair loose, moving through the house with the unhurried ease of someone who knew exactly where everything was.

She stopped when she saw Briar in the kitchen.

The throw blanket. The dish soap. The warm second bathroom.

Briar understood now.

For one moment neither of them said anything.

Then Vivienne looked at the stove and said, pleasantly, "Something smells good...It was really an unexpected encounter to meet you here."