Chapter 18 – MADDIE
MADDIE
By morning it was everywhere.
The sick man had a name now and a face, Edward Playne in his fishing hat, and his photograph sat beside Damon's under headlines that married Sterling to unsafe drug in a way no correction would ever divorce.
The clips of his daughter at the gala were cut and circulating before I finished my first coffee, her in the coat, her pointing, you should be ashamed, looped and captioned and set to ominous music.
By noon there were three follow-up pieces. By two there were opinion columns from people who'd never heard of the trial a week ago and now held firm views on cardiac safety thresholds.
Damon had left before light. He'd kissed my shoulder in the dark and said he was sorry, and I'd told him to go, and meant it, because eight years had trained me to know when his work was the thing that mattered and to clear the runway without being asked.
I spent the day inside the coverage I'd sworn off. The same three phrases were in too many mouths at once, the story handed out rather than dug up, the outrage arriving fully assembled. Mark called the house in the afternoon, which Mark did and Damon didn't, to ask how I was holding up.
"It's coordinated," I told him. "It feels bought."
"It is. We're fairly sure it's them." He was quiet a moment, but I knew he meant Brighton.
"Doesn't make it easier to fight. And Maddie, off the record, just between us.
The father's real. Edward Playne is really in the ICU.
Whatever Brighton's doing with it, there's a real man on a ventilator in the middle of it, and that's the part that keeps me awake. You can't spin a man on a ventilator."
"Does Damon know that's the part that matters?"
Mark didn't answer that, which was an answer.
Damon came home after nine, gray, ten years older than he'd looked at breakfast. He poured himself a drink and didn't touch it, just held the glass like a thing to do with his hands.
"We have to push the trip," he said.
I'd known before he said it. It still stung. "Okay."
"It's not okay, I know it isn't. The second the trial reads out clean, we go, I swear to you. But I can't be in another country with my phone off while this is happening. You have to see that."
"I do see it." I crossed the room and put my hand on his arm.
I wanted to be on his side. I'd spent the whole day wanting to be on his side.
"I'm not angry about the trip. The trip was never the thing.
" It was true. "I'm worried about you. You haven't slept since the gala.
You're carrying this like it's going to break you in half, and maybe two weeks out of the country is exactly what you need.
To get far enough back to actually think. "
"There's nothing to step back from. I have to be in it. Stepping back is how you lose."
"And what if being in it is the wrong instinct?
" I kept my voice careful, because I could feel the edge under us.
"What if all of this, the woman, her father, the trial dragging on and on, what if it's the world trying to tell you something?
What if the right thing, the human thing, is to pull the drug.
Just pause it. Until you know for certain no one else ends up on a machine. "
He went very still. When he looked at me there was nothing warm left in his face.
"Pull the drug?"
"I'm saying if there is any chance at all that it's real, then one man's life is worth more than one quarter."
"Do you have the faintest idea what you're asking me?
" His voice was low, and dropping lower.
"Eighteen months. Two thousand jobs. Eight years of my life, my father's name on the front of the building, and you want me to set fire to every bit of it because Brighton paid a grieving woman to crash my gala?
That is not the human thing, Maddie. That is the selfish thing.
That's you wanting the easy exit so we can go look at paintings in Amsterdam and pretend the year never happened.
I expected better from you. You of all people, I thought you understood what this costs me. "
His words went off like a bomb inside me. I knew he was upset. Stressed out and angry and he had every right to be. If the drugs were unsafe, Damon wasn't the one who'd made them so, but this… this was on him.
And this was how he saw me. He thought this was about paintings?
"You don't get to call me selfish," I said, very quietly. "Not you. Not this year. Not after everything I've swallowed to keep your life smooth enough that you could forget I was even in it."
He didn't answer. He set the untouched glass down hard enough that it slopped over his hand, and he took his keys, and he walked out.
The engine turned over in the drive. The headlights swung across the kitchen wall, and then they were gone, and the house was as quiet as it had been the night I locked the guest-room door.
I stood there a long time. The three good weeks had been a held breath, the whole house holding it with me, and I'd let myself believe holding a breath was the same as healing.
He'd just let it out. Everything underneath was sitting exactly where it had always been, waiting for me to stop pretending I couldn't see it.