Chapter 4
Christopher
“Cut! Drop the act, I know you’re awake, Christopher Vale.”
Trisha’s voice hit me like a fire alarm in a library. Sharp, nasal, and completely unnecessary at whatever ungodly hour this was.
I kept my eyes closed. “Go away.”
“Your heart rate changed on the monitor thirty seconds ago. You’re not fooling anyone.”
“I’m in a hospital bed, Trisha. Have some compassion.”
“Compassion is not in my job description. Keeping you alive and employable is. You’re failing on both counts.” I heard her shift in the chair beside me, the creak of leather and the tap of fingernails on a tablet screen. “Open your eyes. We need to talk.”
I opened one eye. Fluorescent ceiling. IV in my arm.
Hospital gown that made me look like a man who had given up on life, which, fair enough, was not entirely inaccurate.
My throat felt like I’d gargled with gravel and my thigh ached where someone had jammed an EpiPen into it with enough force to stake a vampire.
“Your voice,” I said, opening the other eye, “sounds like a nail being dragged across a chalkboard.”
Trisha didn’t miss a beat. “Good. That means it works. Wakes you up every time.”
“How does your husband listen to that first thing in the morning?”
“Because Archer has appreciation for quality, which is something you will never understand.”
She crossed her legs and fixed me with a look that could peel paint off a wall.
She was wearing a blazer over what appeared to be a pajama top, her hair in a clip that was losing the fight, and her reading glasses were sitting on her nose at an angle that suggested she’d put them on in the dark.
“Now. Are we going to talk about what you did? I walked out to answer a call and you nearly ended your own life. You knew you were allergic, for chrissake!”
And there it was.
“Stop screaming, will you?” I sat up. The IV tugged and my head swam for a second before the room stopped moving.
The hospital was doing its hospital thing, machines beeping in a rhythm that was supposed to be reassuring but wasn’t.
The smell of antiseptic and recycled air seeping into everything, a nurse’s shoes squeaking somewhere down the corridor.
She glared at me. “Your allergy is documented in every hotel booking, every restaurant reservation I have ever made in six years of managing your life.” Her voice was trembling now, her fingers clenched as though she was fighting the urge to strangle me.
“I have personally called ahead to more kitchens than I can count, just to make sure kiwi isn’t within breathing distance of your plate.
” She paused. “And you ate it on purpose. For what?”
“The dessert looked good.”
“Christopher!”
“Fine.” I leaned back against the pillow.
“I was stressed, ok? The board. The company. Grandma’s one-woman campaign to turn me into a CEO.
I figured if I ended up in a hospital bed, if I looked reckless enough, unstable enough, the board would write me off.
Find someone else. Someone who actually wants the job. ”
Trisha’s mouth fell open. “Let me make sure I understand,” she said, and I knew from her tone that what followed would be unpleasant.
“You deliberately ate a known allergen. You risked anaphylactic shock. You traumatized an entire film crew.” She held up a finger for each item.
Three fingers. “All because you didn’t want to sit in an office. ”
“When you put it like that…it kinda sounds bad.”
“It sounds bad because it is bad, Christopher. It’s spectacularly bad. It’s keep-publicists-awake-at-night bad.”
She wasn’t wrong. I knew she wasn’t wrong. But knowing something and caring about it are two different skills, and I’d spent my whole life perfecting the first while actively avoiding the second.
“Listen, I know it was stupid,” I admitted, meeting her gaze. “Really stupid. It was an impulse. I wasn’t thinking about what would happen after.”
Trisha stared at me for a long moment, like she was deciding whether to yell or throw something.
“You could have died, Christopher.”
“I know.”
“No, I don’t think you do.” She shook her head and let out a frustrated sigh. “You can't keep treating your life like it’s something you can gamble with whenever you’re cornered. One day, that’s going to catch up with you.”
I looked away.
“Playing games with life and death never ends well,” she said quietly.
The door opened before I could respond. No knock. No warning.
My grandmother, Eleanor Vale, walked into the room and the temperature dropped.
She was five-foot-three and seventy years old, but she still possessed the ability to silence a boardroom with a single look. She was wearing a navy cardigan, pearl earrings, and an expression that I’d seen exactly four times in my life, each time preceding a conversation I did not enjoy.
Trisha was on her feet and out of the room before Eleanor said a word. I noted this with irritation. Trisha argued with me about everything. She once fought me for twenty minutes about the color of a press release font, but the second my grandmother walked in, she vanished like smoke.
Just perfect!
Eleanor closed the door, crossed the room and sat on the edge of my bed. Her gaze lingered on the IV, the monitors, and the hospital gown before she turned to face me.
“How are you feeling?”
“Fine.” My voice sounded less convincing than I’d hoped.
“Good. Then you can explain to me why a man who has managed a kiwi allergy since he was seven years old suddenly forgot he had one.”
Her eyes were steady. Dark and sharp and missing nothing. I’d seen those eyes shut down hostile board members, stare down my father when he was at his worst, and reduce Esmeralda to silence at a family dinner with nothing but a look and a pause. They were on me now, and they weren’t blinking.
I said nothing.
“I think you did it on purpose,” she said.
Again I said nothing.
With my grandmother, silence was the only strategy.
She’d spent fifty years winning fights men assumed she’d lose, and she could take apart any argument, find the crack in any defense, turn my own words into weapons.
The only move was to say nothing and let her get to wherever she was going, because she’d get there whether I helped or not.
But Eleanor didn’t go where I expected.
Her hands started trembling first. Then her voice, which had been steady and controlled for sixty seconds, came apart.
“One of my grandsons is in a wheelchair.” Her chin dipped. She was looking at her hands now, not at me. “The other is lying in a hospital bed because he’d rather poison himself than sit in an office.”
“Grandma—”
“I am seventy years old, Christopher.” She looked up, and her eyes were wet.
For a moment, I forgot what I was going to say, because Eleanor Vale did not cry.
She maneuvered. She played chess with people’s lives and won.
But she did not cry. “I have buried my son. I have watched Dominic lose the use of his legs. And now I am standing in another hospital room, looking at my other grandson who doesn’t care enough about his own life to protect it.
Do you know what you mean to me? To risk your life like this? ”
I remembered being eighteen. Gangly, angry, convinced the world owed me nothing.
I’d told her I wanted to audition for a film, a real one, and I’d braced for the dismissal.
The eye roll. The same message I got from every other Vale: that I was wasting time on something frivolous, that I should focus on something useful, that I was already disappointing enough without adding acting to the list.
She bought the audition tickets. Drove me herself.
Sat in the waiting room for four hours while I read lines with thirty other kids who wanted the same part.
When I got the callback, she took me to dinner and ordered champagne.
Though I was eighteen and drank sparkling cider, she raised her glass and toasted me like I’d just won an Oscar.
“I’m so proud of you,” she’d said, and those words had never left me.
“What am I supposed to do?” she asked. “Watch the company your father built be torn apart by strangers? Watch everything I helped create disappear? Tell me, Christopher. What do you want me to do?”
Her breathing changed. Shorter. Quicker. Her face went pale and her hands stopped trembling because they’d gone still in a way that was worse than the shaking. Suddenly her eyes fluttered, and she slumped sideways against the bed.
I lunged. The IV stand came with me, nearly pulled the needle from my arm. I grabbed her shoulder with one hand and slammed the call button with the other.
“I need a nurse! Now!”
Staff came fast. Two nurses, then a doctor, then more machines beeping and people talking in calm, clinical voices while I pressed myself against the wall and watched them work on my grandmother. It took two minutes to stabilize her. The longest two minutes of my life.
I sat in the chair beside her bed and took her hand. It was small. Warm. The skin was thin and I could feel the bones underneath as I held on carefully.
“I’ll do it,” I said to the quiet room.
When she opened her eyes, the room was dim. Just the monitor glow and the thin line of light from the hallway. She blinked twice, focused on me, and her expression cycled from confusion to relief to annoyance in about three seconds.
“How long was I out?” she let out a whisper.
“Fifteen minutes.”
“Fifteen minutes.” She looked at the ceiling. “I missed my cooking class.”
I stared at her. She was lying in a hospital bed, but thinking about a cooking class.
“I’m hiring you a personal chef,” I said. “At your age, you don’t need to be standing over a stove—”
“At my age?” Her eyes narrowed and her voice found its edge again, which was both reassuring and irritating. “What do you know about what I need? Cooking is a passion, Christopher. It’s not something you hand off to the help.”
“I’m trying to take care of you, grandma.”