Chapter 33
I ’m thrown. Totally. Completely. Undeniably.
I’m not even sure how to come up for air after this. I might as well grow gills and learn how to breathe underwater. Leo is my half-brother. Joe has cancer. It’s one thing after another, and yet, instinctively, I know we’re nowhere near done with this.
“Plenty,” Asher declares. “He’s keeping plenty of other secrets.
” His unrelenting gaze nails Joe where he stands.
He folds his arms and leans casually against the edge of Randolph’s desk.
“He’s the one who leaked my shoulder injury to the press and the one who’s had the paparazzi stalking my building.
But that’s nothing compared to the rest of it.
You need to tell Wynter what you did.” The hardline, suffering-no-fools steadiness in his eyes has me turning back to Joe.
Joe bristles. “I don’t know—”
“You know!” Asher bellows, his hands now gripping the edge of the desk as if he’s restraining himself.
“Don’t do that! Don’t look at me and lie, but worse yet, don’t look at her and lie.
You have been a miserable piece of shit father your entire life, and this is not the time.
Tell her how you used her! Tell her how you manipulated her!
Tell her how you deceived everyone!” He takes a deliberate step in Joe’s direction, his finger pointed at Joe in accusation.
“Because I swear to God, if I have to do it, you will forever be sorry.”
Joe picks up something from Randolph’s desk and chucks it straight across the room, making it shatter on impact, and I jump. Randolph is at just as much of a loss as I am, neither of us sure what to do or how to react.
“You can’t know!” Joe yells, his face red with rage.
“I know,” Asher declares with so much certainty that there is no mistaking him. “I know everything. Firewalls are only as good as the man hacking it, and my man is the best.”
“Fuck!” Joe growls, raking his flustered hands through his hair as he starts pacing.
“Tell me,” I plead, even as my heart rate starts to spike, and my palms sweat.
Joe shakes his head and storms toward the window, where he pounds his fist against the glass.
I turn to Asher who is furious and repeat myself. “Tell me.”
When Joe still refuses to talk, Asher snarls, calling him a coward and a weakling, and then he marches over to me and takes my hand, staring intently into my eyes with so much sorrow and vehemence, my knees nearly give out on me.
“He falsified my MRI results.”
I blink about sixty thousand times, a wave of some malformed adrenaline shooting through my veins, making my vision hazy.
“No. That’s not…” Only I trail off because it makes so much sense it’s almost obvious, and I’m suddenly irate that I didn’t come to that conclusion before.
There was nothing on the MRI that would have indicated it was from a different man.
No degenerative changes in the bones. Nothing.
Other than the scarring that indicated a previous injury, which Asher had claimed to have had, there was nothing.
“That’s why the MRI showed a completely different picture from what I found when I went in.
” I’m not even questioning. I’m nodding like the fool this man made me as it all comes together.
My stomach roils.
“Asher?” Randolph looks like his head is about to pop off his body.
Asher turns to Randolph. “Your coach forced your hand to get Leo higher in the draft because he’s his son. In doing so, he wanted Leo—not me—to start. I got hit in the left shoulder during training camp, and it was the perfect opportunity for him to make that happen.”
“I don’t… I’m not sure I…” Randolph walks over to his desk and pulls out a cigarette, of all things, and lights it, the caustic smoke pluming from the flaming end of the butt as he puffs.
“I haven’t smoked one of these in two years.
” He takes a deep inhale and then exhales a stream of gray smoke into the air.
I scrunch my nose and step back, so I don’t have to inhale it. “Tell me it’s a lie, Joe.”
Joe remains silent, still over by the window as his life—and his lies—fall apart around him.
“You did that to force Asher’s surgery?” Randolph exclaims, pointing the cigarette at Joe, ashes scattering to the carpet before he takes another hasty drag and then turns to Asher. I swear, the man is one inhale away from a heart attack. “And it was designed to keep you out for the entire season?”
“Yes,” Asher confirms since Joe isn’t saying anything. “Or at the very least, out for half the season. But it wasn’t my true MRI. I don’t know whose it was, and I don’t know how Joe managed to get it into my medical record as mine, but somehow, he did.”
I stagger a step, nauseated. Dizzy. I lean against the far wall, my hand on my forehead as I grapple with this. “I performed surgery on a patient who didn’t need it.” I committed an egregious medical error. Not necessarily at my own fault, but does it really matter in the grand scheme of things?
I rechecked the MRI after the surgery, but the films all appeared to be authentic. They just didn’t line up with what I found when I started cutting, but I blew that off. Imaging isn’t one hundred percent accurate. There is fault in it.
But... I knew better.
Instinctively and medically, I knew what I saw on the films was bogus compared to what I found when I opened Asher up, but I was so relieved at the outcome, that I didn’t question it beyond that. I didn’t think deeper than what it was. I just didn’t.
Joe risked my license.
My reputation.
Asher’s future.
All so he could get Leo on the field instead of Asher.
I turn to Joe. “Did you do that? Did you compromise my integrity as a physician? My license?”
He makes a noncommittal noise, still staring out the window as if the empty field holds promise and hope of rescue for him.
I start to lose it. His nonchalance about what he did drives me absolutely insane.
“Have you no conscience? No moral code? How could you do that to me?!” I scream at him, ready to pound my fists against him.
“How could you be so… remorseless? So calculating. I knew you didn’t love me—you never did and made that clear—but I never fathomed you could still be so heartless and uncaring. ”
He heaves a heavy breath and keeps his back to me, and it only makes me want to shake him.
“It was my MRI,” he states solemnly, his voice low as it pierces the cloud of smoke and tension in the air.
“It was taken two years ago. No doctor would touch me after I injured my shoulder in my last year of playing. It’s why I retired early.
I had hoped the years would have healed some of the injuries I sustained, and it would finally be operable.
It is, if I want a shoulder full of screws.
” He turns, folding his arms over his chest, attempting to look foreboding, and yet it comes across as meek and broken.
His eyes meet mine. “I talked you into the surgery knowing you’d do it, and Asher’s shoulder wouldn’t require much surgical intervention.
He’d heal, and his career wouldn’t be over, but in the meantime, Leo would shine and take over the team, and I’d have a valid reason to get rid of Asher and keep the kid as the starter. ”
I can’t even begin to describe how infuriating that is.
My fists ball up, my body shaking with rage.
What a bullshit attempt at an excuse. “You falsified medical documents. That’s a felony,” I tell him in no uncertain terms. “That’s why you brought me in.
Because I was stupid and emotional and took the bait when you pushed me just right. ”
Joe looks rattled. Lost. Desperate. I know the feeling.
“No,” he swears. “I brought you here because you moved to this city, and I felt it was a sign. I’d been watching you your whole life, Wynter. Even when you didn’t know it, I was there.”
“Fuck you! You have no right to say that. You were never there. Never! I was a little girl who blamed herself for her father leaving. For her father no longer loving her. I cried myself to sleep every night for years, praying you’d come home and forgive me.
How dare you say you were there. How dare you. ”
Asher walks over and takes me in his arms, holding me close as I tremble and fall apart and fight my tears.
“I never wanted children,” Joe states, his voice cracking ever so slightly.
“I never wanted to be a father, and I sure as hell never wanted to be a husband. Then I met your mother, and I fell in love. You were born ten months later, and that was that. I did love you, Wynter. Both you and your mother. But I couldn’t make it work.
I just didn’t know how to make it stick. ”
I glare disdainfully at him. “You mean you were selfish.”
He nods. “Yes. I was selfish. I did everything wrong that day you broke your arm. It wasn’t your fault; it was mine, but I was angry, and I took it out on you because I could.
I had been looking for a way out, and when you presented it to me, I suddenly didn’t want it the way I thought I did, but it was too late.
I knew you were better off without me in your life.
So, I left. Then I did the same thing with Leo’s mother.
It was a fuck up. Anyway, like with you, I watched him from afar.
Then I was diagnosed with cancer, and when I saw that Leo had a shot in the NFL as a quarterback like I was—that a piece of me would live on in the game—I didn’t hesitate.
With him or with you. I wanted to see you because even though you no longer figure skate, I knew you were a brilliant surgeon, and again, I had a part in that.
Plus, well, I suppose part of me wanted to make amends for what I had done to you as a small child. ”