4. Chapter 4
Julian
I gave up on sleep an hour ago.
I'm on the terrace with my coffee, watching the lake go from black to gray while the heat works through the mug and into my hands. The tomato planters need water. I water them, all four, slow, and when the last one's done I'm still just a man standing outside at five in the morning.
Nine thousand dollars.
She stood at the back of that room, bid nine thousand dollars with her chin level and her face giving nothing, and then she got up on that stage and told me it was for the kids.
And I said sure because the alternative was saying what I actually thought in front of four hundred people with a microphone two feet away.
I rinse the mug. Take the stairs down to the garage instead of the elevator, because my legs need something to do.
My car is in its spot, the same one it's always in.
A fourteen-year-old Land Cruiser with a cracked rear bumper I keep meaning to fix and never will.
My mother picked this car. She drove it twice, negotiated the price down four grand, and made the salesman visibly nervous.
Every mechanic I've met since has told me to sell it. I drive it anyway.
I'm on the floor by six-thirty. Lorraine went home five days ago. Walter is in step-down, two weeks out from his repair, and when I come into his room he's sitting up in the chair by the window while his wife reads headlines off her phone.
"There he is." Walter's voice still has the rasp from the breathing tube. "My wife has something she wants to show you, and I told her not to, so that's on her."
She's already holding the phone out before he finishes the sentence. "You're in Chicago Confidential."
The photo fills the screen. The ballroom, last night, me at the edge of the stage under the lights. At the back of the room, small but in focus, a woman in black with a paddle raised.
A mystery bidder paid nine thousand dollars for the city's most eligible heart surgeon. The pediatric unit thanks her.
"Mystery bidder." Walter's wife pulls the phone back and looks at it herself. "Is she pretty? You can't really tell from the back of a ballroom, but I have a feeling."
"Your husband's pressure numbers look great today," I say.
"That's not an answer."
"It's the one I've got. Walk the hall twice before lunch, Walter. All the way to the ice machine."
Walter points at me as I'm leaving. "She's pretty," he says to his wife, not bothering to lower his voice. "You can tell by how quickly he changed the subject."
Derek finds me at the nurses' station at nine while I'm writing orders. He leans on the counter next to me and doesn't say anything for a few seconds. Just sets his phone down on top of my chart, screen up, Chicago Confidential already open.
"What?"
"Nine thousand dollars," he says.
"I know the number."
"There's a second photo." He picks the phone back up, scrolls, holds it out. "They got her on the stairs. You're reaching down for her hand, and you have a face going on, man. You have a full, entire face."
I look. I shouldn't, but I look. The photographer caught the exact second her hand went into mine, and the whole thing is right there on the screen, and I'm grateful the camera was behind her so it didn't catch what was on hers.
"It's a charity auction," I say. "It went to the kids."
"Sure." Derek pockets his phone and pats my shoulder twice. "Whatever helps you sleep."
Dianna corners me at eleven outside the cath lab, tablet against her chest, walking sideways to keep up with my pace.
"Logistics," she says. "The Brennans are lending the house and the plane, so when you see Howard at the next board dinner you will be gracious about it.
Wheels up in one week, the executive terminal at Midway, eight in the morning.
The house manager stocks it before you land.
Chef comes the second night. Your schedule's covered, your father approved it himself, which honestly surprised me, but I stopped asking questions when things go my way. "
"Who contacts the winner? About all of this."
"Normally I email the event firm, the firm passes it along." She stops walking. I stop walking. She looks up at me over the tablet. "Why."
"She works at the firm. It's more direct if I go."
Dianna stares at me for a long second. "The publicity from last night has been genuinely outstanding for this hospital." She taps the tablet twice and my phone buzzes with the itinerary. "Don't do anything that makes my job harder." She's already moving again. "Or do. I give up."
My last case ends at two. Clean, on time, exactly as it should go. I change into the gray shirt that fits right, stop at the Italian place on Superior because the lunch line is gone by three, and I order two sandwiches and a lemonade and carry the bag four blocks back to my car.
Vivian Marsh Events is in a brick building in River North, coffee shop at street level.
I find parking on the block, feed the meter, and I'm crossing the sidewalk when a guy with a camera bag comes off the curb across the street, lifts his lens, and shoots twice before I'm at the door.
He doesn't pretend to be doing anything else. He waves at me.
I hold the door for a woman on her way out and take the elevator to the third floor.
The floor smells faintly of burned popcorn and good coffee.
There's a corkboard wall, glass conference room to the left, desks running down the center of the room.
The woman at the nearest desk has braids and a lanyard twisted around her wrist, and she sees me come off the elevator and freezes with her tea halfway to her mouth.
"Oh my God." She says it quietly, to herself.
"Hi. I'm looking for Christina Whitfield."
She sets the tea down without blinking. "You're the magazine guy." Her eyes move over me top to bottom, openly, taking her time.
"I'm Julian."
"Kate." She shakes my hand once, firm. Then she sits back in her chair with an expression I can only describe as recalculating. "Nine thousand dollars," she says, mostly to herself.
"Can I help you?" The voice comes from my left.
The woman from the gala, white blouse now, dark hair, the same composed smile.
She walks toward me slow, hand out. "Rachel Sutton.
We weren't properly introduced the other night.
You were a little occupied." Her hand is cool.
Her eyes drop to the takeout bag and come back up.
"That's thoughtful. She's a sweet girl. A little impulsive with money, but sweet. "
I take my hand back. "It went to a children's hospital."
"It certainly went somewhere."
"Rachel." Christina's voice cuts across the floor.
She's standing at the door of an office down the row, one hand on the frame, and she's in jeans today, hair up, a pen behind her ear, and she looks from Rachel to me to the bag and back to me.
"Conference room," she says to me. "Ten minutes."
The conference room has a full glass wall facing the floor. I'm fairly sure that's intentional on her part.
She sits at the head of the table with her arms folded. I sit at the corner beside her, close enough that I can see the pen behind her ear, and I start unpacking the bag. Italian beef, dipped, hot peppers on the side, bread wrapped separate.
She watches my hands.
"What is this."
"Lunch." I slide the sandwich across to her with the peppers. "You're going to tell me you already ate."
"I did already eat."
"What did you eat?"
She doesn't answer. She picks up the sandwich anyway and she takes a bite and closes her eyes for just a second, and I look away before she opens them.
"Okay," she says. "Ten minutes."
"I came about the trip. Logistics." I put my phone on the table with the itinerary up. "I thought it was better to come than have it run through the firm."
She reads the screen without picking up the phone. She reads it twice. I can see the exact line she lands on, because her shoulders come down a fraction.
"A private plane."
"Howard Brennan donated the package. He doesn't do small."
She looks at the itinerary for another second, then pulls the phone toward her by the edge, the way you'd touch something you're still deciding about. Wheels up from Midway, executive terminal, eight a.m. The house, the chef, three days.
"Three days," she says.
"Yeah."
She sets the phone down and picks up the sandwich again. I watch her think. She's quiet for a while and I don't fill it, I just sit there with my own food and wait, and outside the glass Rachel has walked to the far end of the floor and I can feel her not looking at us from all the way over there.
"Ground rules," Christina says finally.
"Okay."
"It's a charity package. You're the prize, I'm the winner, that's the full arrangement. We go, we come back, we go back to our lives. I need you to be able to handle that."
"I can handle it."
"I mean it."
"I know you do." I hold her eyes. I don't agree to anything past what I said, and I watch her notice that, and the slight shift in her jaw when she does. She opens her mouth to push on it.
Movement at the glass stops us both.
Rachel is walking the length of the floor toward the far office, the one with the half-open blinds. She's carrying her phone in one hand and a printed page in the other. Inside the corner office, a silver-haired woman in reading glasses looks up from her desk.
Christina's whole posture changes.
"That's Vivian," she says. "My boss."
I watch through the blinds. Rachel sets the printed page on the desk, turns it around to face the silver-haired woman. It's the same square shape as the Chicago Confidential photo. Rachel starts talking, one hand moving in a gesture that ends pointing at the conference room. At us.
Christina is already wrapping her sandwich.
"You should go."
"What's she doing?"
"Nothing that concerns you." She closes the bag, hands me my half, and stands up. Her voice drops as she walks me to the door. "One week. Executive terminal, Midway, eight in the morning. I'll be there."
"I could pick you up."
"No."
"It'd be easier," I say.
"It really wouldn't." She pushes the door open and I step through it, and she's right behind me as I move across the floor, close enough that I can feel her there without looking.
I'm two desks from the elevator when she stops and I stop, and it happens without either of us planning it, me turning back and her already there, closer than she was, and the whole office goes quiet in the way a room does when it's pretending very hard to work.
I look down at her. She has to look up, just a few inches, and she knows I'm about to say something she doesn't want me to say, and neither of us moves.
I reach out and pull the pen from behind her ear.
She blinks.
I set it on Kate's desk next to us, because it was about to fall, and then my hand comes back and tucks the loose piece of hair behind her ear where the pen was, and it takes about two seconds and I keep it light, barely there, and her breath catches just enough that I hear it. Her eyes stay on mine.
"See you in a week," I say.
She swallows. One small movement in her throat. "Okay."
I push the elevator button. Kate is frozen with her tea and the expression of someone watching the best thing that's happened to her all year.
Vivian's office door opens behind me. Christina turns, and the last thing I see before the doors close is her shoulders pulling back, chin up, walking toward whatever Vivian is about to say, and Rachel standing in the doorway holding it open with a smile that has no warmth in it at all.
The doors shut.