Chapter 2
I held my hand out across the bar and watched her face.
Her mouth opened a quarter inch, and her deep eyes went wide.
For half a second, she looked like a person catching a stair wrong, and then she shut it down.
She picked up the glass she'd been wiping, set it back down, picked up a different glass, set that one down too, and ran the towel along the rim of the new one without looking at me.
The towel did three slow circles.
"Nice to meet you, Mr. Cross."
It was polite, flat, and professional. That's the voice you use with customers you want to get rid of.
I lowered my hand.
That was when I knew I was in real trouble.
She wasn't going to take it back.
I'd watched her realize who I was. The bartender who told me a joke had become the bartender who'd just insulted her boss to his face. She wasn't going to walk it back, nervous-laugh, or apologize.
She just wiped a glass that didn't need wiping and let me sit with what I'd learned about her.
I liked her.
I shouldn't have because I didn't even know her name yet.
I saw her tag—SAbrINA, in the black capitals the catering company used.
Sabrina…
Well, Sabrina just called me a trust-fund baby with my father's name on the wall and four hundred guests in the next room, and I liked her.
Christ.
She was beautiful.
Not in the soft way the women at this auction were beautiful.
There was nothing soft about her. Curly dark hair piled on top of her head, with a pen tucked behind her left ear.
A jaw that did things when she was annoyed.
A figure the apron tried and failed to hide.
She moved fast behind the bar. Her hands didn't stop moving.
She talked to herself when she thought nobody was listening—I'd watched her do it earlier, mouthing something to a bottle she was rotating on the shelf.
She was the type of woman who'd destroyed more than one man, and always with a committee behind her.
I wondered, with a quiet, lingering curiosity I hadn’t felt about another person in years, if I was about to volunteer for the list.
“Sabrina.” I murmured her name, testing it on my tongue.
She looked at me without blinking. "Mr. Cross."
I grinned. Couldn't help myself. "I thought we were partners in crime a minute ago. You did ask me to keep your secret."
She didn't answer.
She turned her back to me and started arranging bottles on the shelf, slow and exact, like she was building a wall I was meant to look at.
I cleared my throat. "I'll take that drink. Come on, recommend something."
She turned around and pulled a bottle off the shelf—green glass, label too small to read from where I was sitting.
She poured something into a mixing glass, added a second pour from a different bottle without measuring, dropped in two ice cubes, and stirred.
She didn't look at it while stirring. Instead, she stared at the back wall while her wrist did the work.
Then she strained the whole thing into a coupe, ran a piece of orange peel along the rim with what I'll call decisive prejudice, and set the glass down in front of me.
Well, not technically. The glass hit the wood, not set.
"How graceful," I said.
She scoffed.
I picked up the glass, sniffed it, held it close to my mouth, and paused.
She stood watching me without blinking, hands on her hips, brows raised.
I lowered the glass an inch. "Sabrina."
"Mmm…"
"You didn't spit in this, did you?"
She kept her hands on her hips. "Go ahead and find out."
We held eye contact. I'd been negotiating with grant officers, board members, and federal agencies for ten years.
But I hadn't, in any of those rooms, encountered a stare like the one Sabrina was currently holding me with.
There was no flinch in it, no apology, but—if I read it correctly—there was an invitation.
I pushed the glass away.
She raised one eyebrow. “Are you afraid of a little spit?”
“Not in my drink, no.”
She didn't blink. “Pervert.”
“Excuse me?” I raised a brow.
She smiled. It should've come with a warning label. “Nothing.”
I stared at her.
Nobody talked to me like that.
I don't mean that as the pampered observation of a man who couldn't take a hit.
I mean it literally. In the room I'd been standing in for the last decade, every interaction was prefaced by money, by my father's name, or by something I might one day fund. I’d grown accustomed to it, stopped noticing it, and assumed it was simply the price of admission to whatever it was I had built.
Sabrina wasn't adjusting.
She was looking at me like she'd already decided I was nothing she needed to be careful about, and that decision was the most attractive thing anyone had handed me in a year.
She thinks I'm a pervert. God help me, I love it.
She picked up another glass and started wiping it.
"Come on," I said. "We were getting along."
"That was before."
"It can be after, too. There's no rule."
"I'd like to do my job, Mr. Cross. You can leave."
I leaned my elbow on the bar and considered, for half a second, telling her that I would personally hire her—that she was on the schedule because my event coordinator had told me Sabrina was the best bartender in the city, and I’d said, “Book her. Whatever it costs.” But then I considered the look on her face when I'd said my name, and I decided I would prefer to live.
"It's been a hell of a night," I said instead.
She didn't look up from the glass. "I have seen worse."
"I bet I've had worse."
Her eyes came up. "Is this a competition, Mr. Cross?"
"Maybe."
She set the glass down, put her hands flat on the bar, and leaned in. "Mmm…and what does the winner get?"
I leaned in to match. "Bragging rights. And—"
That was when I heard a soft, deep thud.
Then a scream. It was high and broken, a sound you don't forget the first time it leaves a person you love. It came from the windows.
Sabrina and I looked at each other for one beat.
I turned.
The room had pulled toward the windows—bodies, suits, a ring of backs forming around a shape on the floor I couldn't see.
People were moving in. Other people were moving back.
A waiter was running with a glass of water.
A woman near the front was on her phone with her free hand flat against her sternum.
I saw the shoe.
I pushed off the bar with both hands. The carpet under my feet felt thicker than it had a minute ago. The woman near the front got out of my way without me having to ask.
I went through the ring of backs.
He was on the floor.
My mother was on the floor with him. She had his head in her lap. Her hands were on either side of his face. She was saying his name over and over. His eyes were closed, and his mouth was open.
My brother, Cade, was already on the phone. He was kneeling. He gave the address in a low, hard voice—the ballroom, now—urgent, unstoppable, telling them like there was no time left to waste.
Suzanne was on the floor next to my mother. Her hand was on my mother's elbow.
I dropped to my knees.
"Dad." I said it out loud in a room with four hundred people, and I said it like a child.
He didn't move.
His mouth was open, and it was a shape I'd never seen his mouth in. I'd been looking at it my whole life. I knew his mouth. His mouth didn't do this.
The room got very far away.
I knew the sounds—Cade on the phone, my mother saying, “Henry, Henry, baby, Henry”—but they were behind glass. The ringing in my ears was louder than any of it. Somebody touched my shoulder. Suzanne, I think. I don't know.
It's probably because of the stress, the room, or the air-conditioning. He's been working too hard. He told me last week the new specialist had him on something that made him groggy. It's the medication or the alcohol on top of the medication. It's nothing.
It's probably nothing.
I wiped my palms on my trousers. I didn't know my palms were wet until I wiped them.
The paramedics came through the door at a pace I hadn't seen before that night.
There were two of them carrying a board.
They asked my mother to move, but she didn't. Cade put his hand on her shoulder, and said her name.
Then she moved. They got him on the board, got the board onto a stretcher, then got the stretcher up.
One of them looked at me. "Your family?"
I nodded and couldn't make a word.
"You can ride. One of you."
Cade was already saying he'd drive us. He was already moving. He had his hand on my elbow and was steering me through the room toward the service door—closest exit, the door I wouldn't have thought of.
I followed.
I didn't look back at the bar, at the ring of guests who had moved aside to let the stretcher through, or at my mother's face when she walked past me with one hand pressed to her mouth.
The hospital was twelve minutes away. Cade drove there in eight.
I sat in the back seat with my mother. Her hand was in mine. Her palm was dry, warm, and shaking. I pressed it between both of mine. Nothing said in the car registered with me. The streetlights moved across her face every two seconds, then not moving, then moving again.
Suzanne was in the front seat with her hand resting on Cade's thigh.
The waiting room was beige.
We sat in beige chairs.
My mother cried into Suzanne's shoulder. Suzanne held her. My brother stood at the desk, asked the right questions in the right order, and wrote things down on the back of a receipt because he hadn't grabbed paper. I sat in a chair, held my elbows, and didn't move.
I told myself it was going to be fine over and over.
Dad's going to be fine. He's sixty-three. He's not even old. He runs three miles every weekend. He's fine. People collapse from stress. This was a stressful event. The event was suffocating — I told the bartender it was suffocating, I told her, and she laughed, didn't she laugh, didn't she —
I closed my eyes.
The doctor came out forty minutes later.
She was small, tired, and had her glasses pushed up into her hair and a clipboard against her chest. She said all our names in the wrong order, “Cade Nightingale, Vivienne Cross, Beau Cross, Suzanne Cross.” Cade corrected her quietly without making it a thing, "Jenkins," and she nodded without apologizing because there wasn't time.
“Could we step into the family room?” she asked.
We followed her.
The family room was smaller than the waiting room and more beige.
She didn't sit. None of us sat.
“Mr. Cross had a seizure,” she said. “We've stabilized him. He's awake. He's confused but oriented. We did a CT scan when he came in, and the radiologist found a mass.”
The room got smaller.
“It's on the right frontal lobe. It's significant.
We'll need an MRI tonight to get a clearer picture and a biopsy to be certain, but the radiologist's preliminary read is—” She glanced at her clipboard.
She didn't want to read what was on it, but she read it anyway.
“Consistent with a high-grade glioma. Most likely glioblastoma.”
The second I heard glioblastoma, my body recognized the word before my mind did.
I'd funded research on it and read summaries about it. I'd stood on a stage at a hospital and read the word off a teleprompter while shaking the hand of a researcher we had given two million dollars to. I knew what high-grade glioblastoma meant.
It meant my father was going to die.
The room got smaller again.
My breath went shallow, and my heart went up against the inside of my chest. Cold started at the back of my neck.
My mother made a sound.
It was the sound she'd made on the carpet, only smaller, because there was less air to make it with. She reached for me. Her hand came out, fingers open, and Suzanne caught her elbow. Cade put his hand on the small of her back, and they held her up.
She reached for me.
I couldn't.
I couldn't take her hand and couldn't move toward her. I watched my reflection in the glass from the corner of the family room. My legs were locked.
But I forced myself to turn around and walk out.
“Beau.”
Cade called my name.
I kept walking.
“Beau.”
That was my mother.
I kept walking. I went through the waiting room, through the double doors, and down the corridor under the fluorescent lights that made everyone look ill. My hands were shaking, and my breath wouldn't slow down.
I got to the elevator bank and leaned against the wall.
I tipped my head back and tried to get a breath all the way down. Someone had drawn a small smiley face on the wall near the corner. Probably some bored kid waiting for a parent to come back through a door.
Dad is going to die.
The thought arrived in my head fully formed in my own voice, and I couldn't get rid of it.
I tried to put another thought on top of it.
I tried to put the foundation on top of it—We have funded glioblastoma research.
We have the names of the four best surgeons in the country in a folder in my office.
I'll call them tonight or in the morning.
I'll buy whatever needs buying—and the thought sat there underneath all of that and didn't move.
Dad was going to die.
I didn’t need to think about it.
I didn’t need to think about it for ten minutes. I needed somewhere in the city that wasn't this hallway, not the family room, not the ballroom, not the apartment my dad had been in two hours ago, joking with my mother about his shoe.
Sabrina.
The name dropped into my head the same as before, just Sabrina, and the second I thought it, the panic loosened.
I'd hired her.
I'd hired her through the events team. The bar she worked at—the regular bar, the one I'd pulled her from for tonight—was in the file. I could find her.
I need to.
Maybe Sabrina was the only place in the city where the weight of this devastating news couldn’t quite reach me.