Chapter 7 #2
Silence pooled between them. God, what went on behind those guarded eyes these days? Did he let down that wall for some other woman, now? He must. No one who stole all the air from the room like he did could possibly evade female company for long.
“What’re you doing here, Aubrey?” he finally said.
She looked away. The question sounded innocuous, but he hadn’t asked casually. Nick didn’t do casual.
She dredged up the same serene expression that had reassured Gallant in the car. “I’m just on sabbatical. New York was getting . . .
chaotic, and I needed a break. I won’t be here long.” Lies, lies, and one hopeful not-lie.
“You’re okay, though?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I don’t know.” He squinted. “Now that I’m seeing you up close, you just . . . have that look.”
She frowned. “What look?”
Nick sipped his tea while holding her gaze. “That look. Like something’s wrong and you’re trying to pretend it isn’t.”
“I . . . I . . .” Her words turned to ash in her throat.
His eyes changed. She finally caught a glimmer there—a dark softness, the fleeting edge of an invitation.
She burst into tears.
The breakdown hit her hard and fast, utterly beyond her control to stop. Not now, she thought desperately, but here she was, sobbing her heart out to the one person she least wanted to see.
“Oh, Aubs.” Nick reached out.
She couldn’t explain why she did it. She should have pushed him away, but instead, she tipped forward and buried her face
in his neck. Her nose squished against the wool of his sweater. His chest felt like warm iron beneath her cheek.
He pulled her close. Aubrey’s back heaved, each sob bringing another rush of him into her lungs—fire and soap and something metallically sharp, like a birthday candle that had just been snuffed out.
His grip felt so much stronger than she remembered, yet the effect was somehow the same.
Years peeled away, and here they were again, safe together in a circle of fireglow, each other’s refuge, and god, why had she turned off the lights?
Why had she let him set foot in this house? What had she thought would happen?
“You can tell me.” His warm breath filtered through her hair. “Whatever it is, I’ve got you.”
That only made her cry harder. Aubrey groped in the direction of wherever her sanity had gone and came up with a handful of
mettle, which she used to disengage from Nick’s embrace and scoot back. He watched her go, looking strangely bereft, but that
must have been a trick of the firelight.
She took a few calming breaths and scrubbed at her cheeks. “Sorry. I don’t know where that came from. It’s nothing.”
His mouth thinned. “You’d never cry if it was nothing. So tell me.”
She tried not to. She hadn’t even told her mother yet. But somehow, the confession leapt from her like it was jumping ship to freedom.
“If you really want to know, I lost my job, okay? My dream job. That’s why I’m here. Because I couldn’t afford my place in New York anymore. And I had nowhere else to go.”
His brows lowered. “Lost your job? You? That . . . doesn’t sound right.”
“Yeah, well. Lose isn’t really the right word. It was more like someone stole it from me.”
“What?” The air around him thickened. Darkened. “How?”
She sniffled and pinned her focus to the facts. Facts were simple. Quantifiable. “It’s complicated, but . . . you know I’m
a mathematician, right?”
“Yeah. Though to be honest, I don’t know what that actually means.”
“It means I work with patterns. Figure out how to measure and make sense of them. Kind of like solving a puzzle. And ever
since I finished my PhD, I’d been working for a company called Osos. We . . . or they, I should say . . . manage paired kidney donation.”
Nick shook his head as if she’d spoken Greek. “Kidney . . . what? Like transplants?”
“Yeah.” She swiped at her nose with a hand. She probably looked like a mess. A fact that shouldn’t bother her as much as it
did.
“What does that have to do with math?”
She smiled faintly. It was a common enough question. “A lot. Paired kidney donation is for transplant recipients who have
willing donors that can’t donate to them directly, for whatever reason. Their blood type doesn’t match, or some other incompatibility.
So Osos figures out who the donor will match with and arranges a swap. As in, A’s donor gives their kidney to B, and B’s donor gives their kidney to A. Everyone
goes home happy.”
He did a slow blink. “Wow. I didn’t even know that was a thing. Could you do a three-way exchange?”
Her breath caught. She’d explained this process to laymen countless times, but none had ever grasped the implications as quickly
as he just had. “Yeah, and that’s where the math comes in. You can do a three-way swap, or four. Theoretically, if you could
write a powerful enough algorithm, you could build a whole daisy chain of transplants. A’s donor gives to B, B’s donor gives
to C, C’s donor gives to D, on and on until it circles back to A. But it takes a lot of data and a lot of math to figure out
the best way to do that. To maximize the number of transplants and minimize the chances of organ rejection.”
“So that’s what you’ve been doing all these years?” He sounded awed. “Saving people’s lives? With math?”
“Well,” she said. “Yes.”
“That’s fucking incredible.”
“Like I said.” She sniffled. “It was my dream job.”
His breath caught and held. “That someone stole from you.”
“Yeah.”
“But how?” Acid coated his words.
She searched for something that might occupy her hands and settled on her tea. The mug gifted her palms with warmth. How Nick
had goaded her into sharing, she couldn’t say, but confessing to someone at last felt like shedding a steel weight. “Well,
for the past year, I’d been working on a project on the side. Our biggest limitation with building daisy chains is that the
pool of donors is only so large. A lot of the registries are regional, which means someone in New York might match with someone
in North Dakota, but we’d never know because the donor pools are fragmented. So I built a program that could compare data
across regions, then came up with an algorithm that would wade through all that information and build prospective swaps. Big ones. It effectively knit a whole bunch of smaller databases into a national one, and made the match process way more powerful.
But I kept it secret, because the company awards a prize every year, the Innovation Cup. Whoever does the most to help the
company wins a two-week vacation, plus a trophy, and this was going to be my year to win. The first time any woman would’ve won in ten years. Except when I finished my algorithm, I made the mistake of telling a coworker about it.
Before I told my boss.”
Nick’s eyes slitted. “And let me guess. That coworker took the credit?”
“Yeah.” Heat prickled at her throat again, but she tamed it.
“He took me out for drinks, supposedly to celebrate, then swiped my thumb drive and brought everything to my boss. And when I tried to explain, this guy accused me of trying to steal his work. I . . . didn’t handle it well.
I freaked out. Which looked bad. It made me seem guilty, and it was a death sentence
for my career.”
Nick’s fingers curled into fists. “Who was this guy, exactly? What was his name?”
She raked her gaze over him. Uh-oh. She knew that look. “It doesn’t matter. It’s my problem. That’s the other reason I’m here—to
write an appeal that’ll convince my boss that nobody but me could’ve created that algorithm.”
He considered. “That sounds time-consuming.”
“Things worth doing usually are.”
“Or you could just tell me this asshole’s name.”
She leaned back but couldn’t seem to open any distance between them. He dominated her vision, every feature sharpened to fierceness
by the firelight.
“Nick,” she warned. “This has nothing to do with you.”
“Yeah, I get that.” His eyes flashed. “I know I’m no one to you, anymore. Just some jerk you used to date who now makes steel
and likes to fight.”
The words pricked at her, each one a bloodying jab. “What? God, no. You’re not a jerk. You’re . . .”
She clamped her lips together. She couldn’t admit the truth—that ever since leaving Indiana, she’d compared every man to him
and found them lacking. That even after all these years, she still considered Nick Thacker the blueprint for the ideal human,
minus one very specific flaw she could never forgive: he’d let her go.
When it became clear she had no plans to continue, Nick squared his shoulders. “The point is, I might not save people with
math, but I still have some sense of justice. And nobody should be allowed to get away with what this guy has.”
“Maybe not, but it’s not your job to defend me. Not anymore.”
He swallowed, the long column of his throat rippling. “I know. But you could let me, anyway.”
She turned her mug around to cover the catch in her breathing. She’d lost control of this conversation in the most spectacular
of ways. “Look. Obviously it would be great if someone could just magically solve my problem, but . . .”
Her tongue twined around a cold chuckle. The idea of him fighting for her now, after he hadn’t when she’d needed him to, was
laughable. “What’s this really about? The fire, the furnace . . . you threatening my coworker? This isn’t because you still
feel guilty, is it?”
He flinched.
“Oh, wow,” she said slowly. “It is. Seeing me has brought back memories, and you think you can fix the past by fixing this. Well, news flash, you can’t. Nothing’ll
ever change what happened. How it ended.”
“Aubs, I—” He cut himself off, strangled. “I know that. I know you’ll never forgive me. And you shouldn’t, because what I
did was stupid. I was stupid. But I’m not that dumb fuck kid anymore. Or . . . Jesus Christ, maybe I am. I don’t even know.” He slammed his
eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose.
Aubrey plunked down her tea, her throat dry. She hadn’t even been back a day, and here she was, having a heart-to-heart with
the man who’d broken hers. “Look, thanks for the help, but I shouldn’t have told you all that.”
His eyes shot open. Those black mirrors reflected the firelight, and suddenly she could see everything—the dark heat brimming
behind them, inside him, a whole seething landscape he kept locked away and only let show in the rarest of moments.
Like this one.
Her heart lurched around in her chest as if searching for a place to hide. She inched back. “This was a mistake. I think you should go.”
“Yeah, I fucking know I should go. I really, really do.”
But he made no move to leave. Silence piled in, freighted with memory, saturated with heartbreak, and she fled its weight
by getting to her feet. Anything to sunder the open connection his eyes were begging her for.
She couldn’t remember why she’d wanted to see that vulnerability in the first place. Last time, answering it had nearly cost
her everything.
“You know the way out.” She scooped up both mugs and hobbled away as quickly as her bad ankle would allow.
But when she reached the doorway, something stopped her, some awful pocket of yearning his presence had drilled down into
and broken open. She paused and spoke over her shoulder. “I just want to know one thing. Do you regret it? Would you change
what happened, if you could go back?”
There it was. The question that had haunted her for years, out in the open now.
Behind her, Nick made a throaty, broken sound. Aubrey tensed, already knowing what it meant, already collapsing like a shell
of ashes around a burned-away heart of wood.
“I regret hurting you,” he said. “But no, I wouldn’t change it.”
She closed her eyes and dragged in a breath while her bones dissolved like wetted plaster. Honestly, what had she expected?
“But,” he continued, “it’s not that simp—”
“Good night, Nick.”
She brought the mugs to the sink and washed them out with water that emerged from the tap miraculously hot, then took her
time setting them in the drying rack.
By the time she ventured back to the fire, the living room was empty, even though she hadn’t heard him go.