34. Ronan
RONAN
The bathroom is full of steam. I towel off slow, in no hurry, still humming that stupid song I can't get out of my head. It's been stuck there for two days. I don't even know what it is.
I'm happy. Almost suspiciously so. I keep checking the spot in my chest where that happiness lives, over and over, like a man patting his pockets to make sure his wallet is still there. But every time I look, there it is. Happiness. Undeniable.
Tonight, I'm going to tell her.
Not everything. But enough. I decided it at the lake and I've only gotten surer since. I think it will all be fine. I'm simply choosing to give her the facts and let her choose what to do with them. Before the ugly things come knocking. Because they always do.
I wrap the towel around my waist and open the door.
"Hey," I say. "Sorry. Who was it?"
The bedroom is empty.
I stand there a second, expecting her to be curled up on the bed, or over by the window, or coming out of the kitchen with a glass of water. But the room is still. The bed is made—neat, with hospital corners. The lamp is on.
"Cali?"
Nothing.
Frowning, I roam through the apartment. The living room is dark. The kitchen is empty, the counters clean. The front door is shut but not locked, and that's wrong, because I locked it when we came in, I always do, and it's unlocked now.
I go back to the bedroom.
That's when I see it.
The napkin.
It's lying in the center of the bed, dead center, on the white duvet. I know what it means before I pick it up.
I cross the room slow, like the floor might give out at any moment. When I reach out to touch it, I see my fingers are shaking. A memory unspools in my head.
If at any time you decide I'm just as bad as him… hand me this and I'll walk away.
I can't bring myself to pick it up. Instead, I reach and grab the phone lying next to it. All at once, what happened becomes clear to me. The color drains from my face.
I snatch the phone up and dial Navi. It barely has a chance to ring before he picks up.
"Ro, listen—"
"What did you say to her?" My voice doesn't sound like mine. It sounds like the man in the warehouse. It sounds like my father. "Navi. What the fuck did you say?"
A grim, terrible, and all-too-brief silence.
"I didn't know it was her," he says. "I swear to God, Ronan, I didn't know. It rang, I thought it was you, I just started talking—"
"What did you say, goddammit?"
He exhales shakily. "I said, 'Everything's good to go. We can seize the Bradshaw woman's shares whenever you're ready.'"
I close my eyes.
The steam is still leaking out of the bathroom behind me. I can feel it against my bare back, warm and damp, the ghost of a nice night, the last vestiges of a happy ending I never predicted would be mine.
Fucking hell—thirty minutes ago, I was inside her and she was moaning my name and I was happy.
Now…
… all of that is gone.
"She understood?"
"Yeah. She put it together fast. I couldn't… I—Ro, I couldn't lie to her. I just told her to talk to you. And that I was sorry."
"You told her you were sorry?"
I'm asking dumb questions, but my head feels like it's full of shower steam. Thoughts won't connect. I just feel numb and delirious.
"What the hell was I supposed to say, man?" There's an edge in him now, defensive, but underneath it, he sounds sick. "She was breathing like she'd been shot. So I just told her to talk to you and I hung up because there was nothing else I could do that wouldn't make it worse."
I open my eyes.
The napkin is still on the bedspread. I force myself to look down at it.
Such a cheap, fragile thing. I only kept it in the first place because it was hers.
I kept it in my desk for a week before I brought it to her door, and I told her the truth then: It's just designed to show you I was paying attention.
I was paying attention.
But not in the ways she thought I was.
I was paying so much attention because I was building a cage out of everything I learned.
The invoice. The power of attorney. The filing I blamed on Todd.
The full access to her corporate books. Every door I held open, every fire I put out, every time I told her, Trust me, I'll handle it, don't move, don't leave—I was measuring her for this.
Navi warned me it would come to pass like this. He stood in my office and told me flat out, Don't be surprised when she can't tell the difference between you and Todd. Because from where she'll be standing, there won't be one.
He was right.
There isn't one.
That's what kills me most of all as I stand here in a towel in a room that suddenly feels like a hotel I've never lived in.
From where she's standing right now, there's no difference at all.
A man who smiled to her face and did his damage behind her back.
She has a word for that man. She built an entire machine to catch him.
She stood in a conference room and took him apart slide by slide and never raised her voice.
This time, that man is me.
"Ronan," Navi says in my ear. "You still there?"
"Yeah."
"What do you want me to do?"
I don't answer right away. Instead, I walk to the window. Central Park is a black mass below, the city lit up all around it, forty stories of steel and concrete separating me from the ground. I can see my own reflection in the glass, hollow-eyed and gaunt.
I wonder what Cali would see if she saw her own reflection right now.
"Ronan," Navi says again. "What do you want to do?"
I look at the reflection in the glass. At the man my father made. At the man I swore, on my mother's grave, I would never become.
The napkin was a promise that I'd walk away.
But now that she's handed it to me… can I really go that easily?