by Amelia Wilde
Except I can’t quite tear the two things apart.
“I see. Were there any other updates you wanted to share with me?” I want to shout at this woman, to ask her how she can be so blind, so selfish, but I’m brought back from the brink—that would show her that her decisions are under my skin, and I won’t do that.
“That was all.”
“Thank you.”
“Of course, Mr. Hunter. I’ll keep you apprised of how things proceed.”
“Excellent.”
With that, Sarzó turns on her heel and waltzes out of my office.
She hasn’t been gone five seconds when my cell rings in my pocket.
The name on the Caller ID is the prison where my father lives.
For the first time in a long time, I feel a rush of pity instead of sickening hatred.
And I answer the phone.
“Hello?”
Before my father can speak, I sit through a prerecorded warning about accepting calls from inmates.
“Jax?”
His voice is tired and worn.
“Hello.” I don’t know why he’s calling. More than that, I don’t know why I answered. It’s been years.
“Hello, son. I’m—I’m calling about your mother.”
Ah. “I’m not sure why.”
“Well—” The silences are painfully awkward while he searches for the words. “Someone from her place got in touch with me. In the letter they said she wasn’t doing very well.”
“She isn’t.”
“They said—” Another excruciating pause. “They said she’s been asking for me. That she can’t remember the divorce.”
The urge to rip him to shreds for everything he did still rises in my chest, but it’s somehow softer, more controllable.
Something clicks into place in my mind.
Cate is working herself to death out of a desperation I still don’t entirely understand.
That same motivation, whatever is at the heart of it, is what drove my father to do what he did.
“That’s true,” I tell him.
“So I was…” He’s wary, waiting for me to lash out. “I was thinking, that if you thought it might help her, I could send a few letters. I won’t be out for another year, but I could write.”
I let out a deep breath, and with it goes a large part of the animosity I’ve felt toward him all these years. “I’m sure she’d love that.”
“All right.” The relief in his voice is palpable. “Okay. I’ll do that.” There’s noise in the background. “I’ve got to go. Thanks…thanks, Jax.”
“You’re welcome.”
I hang up and slip my phone back into my pocket.
She might hate me for it, but I’m getting Cate out of this job before it kills her.
34
Cate
I stay late at the office—very late—trying to keep up with all of Sandra’s latest directives. My motivation is back in full force. Now that I have a plan, I feel like I can do anything. With a little Advil in the mix, I’m unstoppable.
I’m about to leave the office when the message from Jax comes in. He doesn’t text me often, and when he does, I know it’s important.
I won’t be home until very late—possibly not until tomorrow. You don’t have to stay at my place alone if you don’t want to.
I consider it for a minute, but…we’re not there yet. I’d feel weird about being there with his staff if he was away.
That’s okay—I’ll be at home.
I love you.
That’s the first time he’s sent me those words in a text. A physical record exists now. My heart beats faster.
I love you. Is everything OK?
No.
I wait. He’ll send more if he wants me to know.
My mother isn’t well. They need me to come right away, and I’m not sure how long it will take before I can leave.
I’m so sorry!!
Part of me wishes he’d taken me with him, but that’s an insane expectation to have at this point in our relationship. And Sandra needs me here.
The thought brings me up short. Would I choose Basiqué over him if he asked me to go?
The answer that comes immediately to mind makes me uncomfortable in its clarity. Am I that much of a monster?
It’s all right. I’m here now. Have to go.
I send him back a heart.
Mark drives me back to my apartment, and inside of ten minutes I’m dressed in my comfiest sweats, Chinese food ordered from the restaurant down the street, a glass of wine in my hand.
After everything that’s happened, I need a breather.
I wish it could have come under better circumstances.
The food is good, but I find myself missing Laurence’s smile, his laughing enthusiasm, the way he’d take something simple that I liked and make it into an artistic creation.
Don’t be so sappy, I tell myself. You’ll be back there before you know it.
An hour later, full of Chinese food and wine, I tuck myself into bed and fall asleep almost instantly.
Tomorrow will come early. And I’ll be ready to meet it.
I make it a point to be extra charming at my session with Carl, and I don’t fight it when he won’t push me to the max. If I’m going to make it through the next few months, I’m going to need to take everyone’s advice into account—especially Carl’s. One bad decision at the gym can throw me off my game for the entire day, and I can’t afford that.
At my apartment I choose my favorite pieces, dressing like I’m dressing for battle. No makeup team today, but I take my time applying every layer until I’ve almost done it as well as they can.
I sweep my hair back into a no-nonsense chignon and admire myself in the mirror.
I look hot.
The bags under my eyes aren’t nearly as pronounced now that I’ve made a firm decision about what I’m going to do.
The only snag?
Mark doesn’t show up.
For months, he’s been waiting at the curb when I come down, always right on time. But when I get there, there’s no town care waiting.
My stomach turns.
Something must have happened.
Mark would never bail on me. There must have been an accident of some kind, probably a bad one.
Oh, god.
I don’t call him—what if he’s lying in the hospital somewhere?—and hail a taxi instead, urging the driver to get to the Basiqué offices as soon as I can.
I’m jittery and nervous as the elevator takes me up. I’m a little later than usual, but not so much that Sandra will be here. I need to find out what happened with Mark. That’s my first priority.
I hurry down the hall and move to unlock the office doors…
…only to find that they’re already unlocked. All the lights are on.
I’m not alone.
I pull open the doors and step inside, the hairs on the back of my neck pricking up.
Sandra isn’t here, but someone else is.
She’s tall and has auburn hair that has been straightened into a shining wave down her back. It’s pinned in place like a work of art.
And she’s sitting at my desk.
“Hello,” she says with a big smile as I step into the office. “How can I help you? Ms. Sarzó isn’t in yet.” She gets up from the desk and comes around to greet me.
“I’m—” I can’t find the words. What the hell? What the hell? “Who are you?”
“My name is Lydia, and I’m Ms. Sarzó’s assistant. Did you have a meeting scheduled with her?”
“No, I—” I sputter, then take a deep breath. “I’m Catherine Schaffer. I’m Ms. Sarzó’s assistant. I’ve been working for her for over a year.”
Lydia blushes, biting her lip. “Oh, I didn’t—I didn’t know that. I got a call yesterday evening about filling the position this morning, and of course I took it. I didn’t think—”
Sandra sweeps into the room.
“Lydia,” she says. “I have chang
es to the schedule.” Then she reaches out a hand and beckons for Lydia to come take her purse. The other woman rushes to Sandra and takes her purse, then shoots me an apologetic look.
“Sandra,” I say. “There’s been a mistake.”
“There’s no mistake,” she says in a clipped tone. “Mr. Hunter told me last night that you’re being transferred, effective immediately.”
“Mr. Hunter?”
How could he do this to me?
Lydia follows Sandra into her office, and Sandra takes her place behind her desk and starts rattling off changes. Lydia doesn’t even have a notepad ready.
“Sandra, that wasn’t discussed with me. I never wanted—”
“It’s done, Ms. Schaffer. Now, if you don’t mind, there’s a lot of work to be done.”
In the space of a moment, my work for Basiqué is over.
35
Jax
My head is fogged and tired when I get back to the penthouse. The visit with my mother was harrowing.
The staff is doing everything they can to keep her comfortable, keep her from harming anyone or herself, but her agitation turns so quickly to rage.
She’s slipping away, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. All the money in the world can’t buy her mind back, and believe me—I’ve poured as much of my capital into it as I can. Donations to research labs, founding my own research labs, fundraising organizations…I’ve tried all of it, short of becoming a researcher myself, and it’s come to nothing.
When I get to her room, she doesn’t know who I am.
It takes half an hour for the staff to convince her that I’m not an intruder, and I spend several hours after that meeting with her nurses and doctors, every caretaker available, to come up with a solution.
The doctor is a nice guy in his early forties.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Hunter,” he says, my mother’s file spread out in front of him on the meeting table. He’s being way nicer than he needs to be, considering I came in here like a blustering asshole and demanded that everyone meet with me well past business hours. “There’s been too much brain deterioration. Even with recent clinical trials…” He shakes his head, his disappointment seeming genuine enough. “We can’t reverse the damage. All we can do is make her more comfortable.”
I slam my fist down on the table, then cover my face with my hands. “She’s out of control,” I say through gritted teeth. “She doesn’t know who I am. Why isn’t more being done to calm her?”
“We’re doing everything we can.” This is a man who doesn’t flinch at the first sign of an outburst. “We’re giving her every relaxation service we offer, but as you saw tonight, sometimes there’s nothing we can do outside of sedatives.”
“I don’t want her sedated.”
“Mr. Hunter, you have been very clear about that from day one, and I’ve made a careful note of each of your requests. But your mother is past the point where we can keep the possibility of sedatives off the table if she’s going to remain here. She’s becoming a danger to our staff members, and more pressing, she’s becoming a danger to herself.”
I hang my head, giving myself one long breath to feel sorry for myself. That’s it.
“I want this carefully monitored,” I say, trying to keep the quiver out of my voice. “She’s not going to become one of the living dead, drugged out of her mind until she’s barely living.”
He nods, acting like my opinion means something in the face of his medical experience. “You have my word, Mr. Hunter. We will only do what’s absolutely necessary, and no more.” He glances through the files in front of him again. “You should also know that although episodes like this are becoming more common, she’s still having many pleasant moments throughout the day. She always responds very well to our daily painting class. Most days, when she paints, she becomes lucid enough to share stories about her favorite topic.”
“What’s that?”
“You.”
My heart tears in two inside my chest.
It’s still torn when the elevator lets me out into my penthouse. I don’t want Cate to see me like this, so shaken up, so weak, but she’s the only one I can even begin to speak to about this.
The moment I see her, I know that’s going to be off the table.
She stands in the middle of the living room, shoulders tight and tense, arms crossed in front of her body, feet planted. Her face is white with rage.
“Cate.”
She lets the silence hang between us for far longer than she needs to before she speaks.
“What the fuck, Jax?”
I run a hand through my hair, over my aching head. “Tell me what you’re talking about, Cate.”
A sharp burst of incredulous laughter escapes her lips. “Are you serious?”
My chest still aches with the state I had to leave my mother in. I can’t even engage with her on this level. For the moment, at least, the fight has gone out of me. “I’m serious.”
“You got me fired from my job, you controlling bastard.”
It dawns on me all at once.
The nightmare with my mother kept me away from Cate all last evening, and this morning…and now I see what that bitch Sarzó has done.
“Cate, that’s not what I intended to have happen. What I meant was—”
“What gives you the right?” It would be better if she screamed at me, but her voice is deadly soft.
“I didn’t get you fired. You have to know that.”
“I went in this morning and they already had a replacement at my desk. You did this yesterday. Yesterday I had a job, and today I don’t. And it’s all because of you.” Her face is twisted from the betrayal.
I hold both of my hands up. “Believe me, Cate. I never intended for you to be replaced overnight.”
“This wasn’t your business,” she spits at me. “Do you honestly think that you can screw around with people’s lives because you have a lot of money?”
It cuts me, because for a long time I’ve been living that way. But when I called Sarzó and told her to prepare for Catherine to transition out of the office, I was explicit: I told her that she would have two months to find a suitable replacement. Plenty of time for Cate to warm up to the idea, and for me to show her what I have in mind. It stings that she thinks I’ve done this with no consideration for what she wants out of life.
“Please, Cate, give me a minute to explain.”
“I don’t want to hear your explanation. I don’t want to hear any of it.” Her cheeks go pink. “I’m mortified that I got involved with you at all. I should have known—I was warned that you were selfish and arrogant and I didn’t listen. Now I’ve lost my job over it, and you have some trite explanation? Fuck you. Fuck you. We’re done, Jax. Done.”
36
Cate
Jax’s shoulders slump, but I’m so furious that I feel nothing when I see his defeated posture. A tiny voice in my head is trying to pull me back, trying to remind me that he’s had a hard day—that he’s losing his mother to a slow and agonizing disease, that his father is in prison, that he’s done so much for me that I can at least hear him out.
But I don’t want to.
Nothing he can say can possibly make up for what happened to me this morning, with all my hard work dismissed as worthless. I’m back out on my ass, back at the bottom. I’m starting over somewhere else and it will be years, years, before I can finally feel secure enough to move forward with all the other plans I have for my life. The anxiety is like a pair of hands around my neck. Years…
“I didn’t tell your boss to fire you.” He says the words, but he must know they’re going to have no effect. “And I meant to talk to you about this last night, but things…got in the way.”
“You couldn’t send me a message?”
“It’s not the kind of thing I thought you’d appreciate hearing about in a text.”
“You couldn’t call?”
He shakes his head, shoulders raising in a hint of a shrug. “It was
late when I was finally free…”
This is all so irrelevant. The fact that Jax did this and said nothing to me is a secondary problem, though I can’t help but dig at him over it. The main issue is that he thought he had the right to make a change like that in my life, and he did not. He absolutely did not. It’s unforgivable.
I step over to him, looking him straight in the eye. “Let me make something crystal clear to you, Mr. Hunter.” I watch the last two words twist the knife. “Nobody makes decisions for me. Nobody. Not even men like you.”
For an instant, I almost feel sorry, because Jax doesn’t give me a cocky smile. He doesn’t have a cutting reply ready. He doesn’t step forward and try to overwhelm me with kisses, doesn’t press his body to mine until all I can think of is the clean scent of his skin, of his clothes, until I’m so lost in him that all I can do is dig my nails into his back and surrender to the most intense pleasure I’ve ever experienced.
He looks down at the floor.
“I’m sorry, Cate. It didn’t play out how I thought it would.”
“No, I imagine it didn’t.”
He twists away from me, a hand over his eyes, and a moment later straightens up, taking in a deep breath and letting it out. Well, isn’t he the model of self-control.
“Is there anything else you’d like to discuss?”
“Discuss?” I get it. Now that I haven’t folded, haven’t gone along with his grand plans—never mind that he couldn’t take the time to consult me about my own life—he’s going to treat me like another business associate.
“Yes. Was there anything else?”
I take a deep breath and prepare to unleash another stream of anger on him. It’s my right after what he’s done. But my phone buzzes in time to cut me off.
The habit is so ingrained that I don’t even think about the situation I’m in, think about the gravity of what’s happening between the two of us. I pull it out and look at the screen even as I swipe to answer it.
It’s Dex.