Chapter 10 #3
‘Yeah, but I think with all of us in here, all our attentions on her. It was a lot for her. She’s really wound up and she’s clearly exhausted. We shouldn’t push her.’ Mav looks at me when he says it and my eyes narrow at him, but I nod.
‘Okay,’ I say reluctantly. ‘It’s just… We can’t help her when we don’t have all the facts and I hate it. It’s frustrating that she won’t just tell us everything, you know? It’s like she doesn’t trust us.’
‘It is frustrating,’ Mav agrees, ‘but I don’t think it’s because she doesn’t trust us.
She doesn’t talk about having any friends in England.
I haven’t heard her mention anyone from her life before.
Maybe she’s been relying on herself for so long, she isn’t sure how to let others take some of the load. ’
Mav makes sense, I concede. ‘You two go. I’ll stay in the hotel, make sure she stays safe.’
I go down to the basement with the guys and, by the laundry rooms, a guy waits. He’s wearing heavy boots and a winter knit cap on his head with an LED attached to it.
‘Ready?’ he asks gruffly.
He barely shows his face and his voice sounds croaky, like he doesn’t use it much. He presses his hat and the light turns on.
Without a word, Mav and Blake take out their phones and put on the flashlights. I watch as they disappear behind a door with a keypad on it into a dark hallway beyond that slants downward.
Going by Mav’s directions, I locate the open hatch that I assume leads to the lab. I go down, finding myself in a kind of square, concrete pit with an open door on one side. Light pours from it and I squint as I approach and peer into the lab.
I see Daisy immediately. She’s sitting at the small table in the middle of the white room going through some numbers on a screen. Her long hair is in a messy bun on top of her head.
She looks tired even after the hours she slept last night.
She’s thinner too. With a frown, I notice that she doesn’t have anything to eat or drink in the lab with her.
Knowing how she forgets that stuff when she’s in the zone, I quickly message the guys to tell them to bring some of her favorite snacks while they’re topside.
Then, I message Sauvage himself. He said she’d have whatever she needed, after all.
I watch her for about ten minutes, cataloging her movements, noticing that her body seems almost stiff as she walks slowly around the lab.
I turn at a noise behind me to see a young woman in black dress pants coming down the ladder behind me. At the bottom, she freezes when she notices me. Her nametag says ‘Anne’ and ‘Senior Manager’.
‘Oh, sorry, sir,’ she says. ‘I didn’t expect anyone else to be here.’
I open my mouth to ask her what she’s doing down here, but before I can, she walks under the ladder to the wall, where I hear something slide, and she comes back into view with a tray in her hands. There’s a bottle of water, a small teapot, and some dry pretzels in a bowl.
I glance past her curiously, and she follows my gaze.
‘It’s a dumbwaiter,’ she says as she goes past me.
At the lab threshold, she knocks on the door. I hear Daisy murmur a ‘yes?’ and Anne takes the tray inside.
‘If you need anything, all you need to do is use that phone on the wall to call room service and use that code there,’ I hear her say. ‘Something will be brought within ten minutes. Day or night.’
She exits a moment later and goes back to the ladder without a word.
‘Wait,’ I say.
She looks back. ‘Would you like me to bring you something, sir?’
I shake my head. ‘No thanks. I just… Isn’t this weird to you at all?’
She looks around the concrete pit and shrugs. ‘I get paid not to be weirded out,’ she says and disappears up the ladder.
I stare after her for a second, half wondering if she’s loyal to Sauvage, or if he just pays her that well, before going back to the door to find Daisy sipping at a cup of tea while looking thoughtfully at the numbers on the screen.
‘Everything okay?’ I ask from the doorway.
Her body jerks in surprise at my voice, her tea sloshing from the cup to splash down onto the table. I wince.
‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.’
She gives me a small, reserved smile. ‘You didn’t. I was…just thinking, I guess.’
I step into the lab.
‘You need a new white coat,’ I murmur and she gives me another smile.
‘It’s not really a necessity,’ she answers, wiping up the tea from the table with a paper napkin from the tray. ‘Where are the others?’
‘One of Sauvage’s guys is showing them how to get in and out of the hotel without being seen. They’ll be back a little later.’
She nods and we stand there for a moment in silence, just staring at each other awkwardly.
‘I’m sorry,’ I blurt.
She looks confused. ‘For what?’
‘The things I said yesterday. I know it wasn’t a picnic for you in my dad’s house for the past few days. I didn’t mean any of that stuff. I was just…’
‘I know,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry too. I…’ She looks down, frowning at herself a little. ‘There are things that I should tell you…’
Her eyes find mine again. ‘I will tell you. Because I know that I’m supposed to, that it’s healthy to,’ she looks like she swallowed a bug for a second, ‘open up.’
‘But you don’t want to,’ I murmur.
‘No.’
I ache to hold her, but I can tell from the way she’s acting right now that she’d pull away immediately.
‘Why?’ I ask instead.
‘Afraid.’
I move closer, taking her small hand slowly in mine instead of what I actually want to do. ‘Afraid of what?’
‘That it’ll change things. Maybe you’ll look at me differently.’ Her lower lip trembles and I watch her clench her jaw. ‘What if, when you know everything, when you realize that I’m not what you thought…you don’t like me anymore?’
I let out a slow breath. ‘That isn’t going to happen.’
She shakes her head and opens her mouth to speak, but I beat her to it.
‘Nothing you ever do or say will change the way I feel about you. Mav and Blake, too. We love you, Daisy. That isn’t going to change, no matter what.’
I cup her cheek and raise her face to look at me.
‘I can see you don’t believe me, but that’s okay,’ I say softly. ‘We’ll prove it to you as many times as you need us to. We’ll spend our lives making sure you know how important you are. You’re never getting rid of us.’
She lets out a shaky breath and gives a tiny nod before she pulls away.
‘I need to focus, now,’ she says, turning back to the tablet.
‘Okay,’ I say, smiling in spite of being summarily dismissed.
She doesn’t notice me leave.