Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Ismile despite everything when I see the way the whole street reacts to Troy the second he unfolds himself out of the back of his limo.
It’s a good corner for it, just off the park, the kind of block where people are used to money but not to fame, and so the ordinary midmorning bustle of it stutters and turns.
A woman with a stroller actually stops walking.
Two teenagers fumble for their phones. A hot dog vendor leans clear out over his cart to get a look.
He’s Manhattan’s favorite, always was and always will be, and as unlikely as it sounds he might honestly be more famous now, a year retired, than he ever was in the jersey.
Part of that is the winning, the twelve seasons and the two championships and the easy way he carried my father’s whole franchise up the standings on his back as though it didn’t weigh anything at all.
But part of it, lately, is the gossip, because a few weeks ago the paparazzi caught some mysterious brunette slipping out of his building in the small hours before dawn, and the entire city has been busy trying to put a name to her ever since.
Nobody’s managed it. I’ve never asked him about her myself, not once.
He’s a deeply private man under all that easy public shine, and so am I under mine, and it’s one of the oldest reasons the two of us have always understood each other.
He keeps my secrets, I keep his, and neither one of us has ever once gone poking at the door the other one prefers to keep shut.
He’s already scowling like the overprotective big brother he has insisted on being since I was twelve by the time he reaches me on the sidewalk, and the easy red-carpet charm drops clean off his face the instant he gets a proper look at mine.
“You look like?—”
“Don’t say it,” I warn him.
“It’s Flint.” Not a question. He’s aggressive about it, the way he’s been aggressive on the entire subject of my husband since the day I married him, his jaw setting hard as a fist. “What did he do this time?”
“Well. That’s the thing.” I press my hands together hard in front of me to keep them from shaking, because now that the moment is actually here I find I don’t have the first idea how to begin saying any of it out loud.
Saying it out loud will make it true in a way that crying alone in a guest room all night somehow didn’t.
“But before I tell you anything, Troy, I need you to promise me something first. Promise me you won’t lose your temper. ”
He goes very quiet, which from Troy is so much worse than shouting would be, and I know him well enough to see exactly what the quiet is costing him.
Then he nods, once, short, and takes my arm, and steers me off the busy sidewalk and somewhere we can talk, somewhere the whole adoring city isn’t standing around watching its princess come apart at the seams.
?
Troy stayed grimly silent for a long time after Camilla had finished telling him everything.
He’d given her his promise not to lose his temper, and he was keeping it the only way he knew how, which was to say nothing at all until he was certain that whatever finally came out of his mouth wouldn’t frighten her worse than she was already frightened.
She’d come to him because she had no one else left in the world to go to.
He understood that, and it gutted him clean through.
Richard was eight months in the ground, her mother long years before that, and the girl had gone and built her entire small careful life around a man who had apparently spent six months letting her believe she was loved and then turned around and informed her, in as many cold words, that she had never been anything more than a clause in a contract.
He wanted to drive across town to The Res and put Flint through one of those forty-story windows the man was so proud of.
He had the reach to do it and the temper to enjoy the doing.
But that was not what she needed from him, and Troy had learned a long, long time ago that what Camilla needed and what he badly wanted to give her were almost never the same thing.
“First of all,” he said at last, weighing out each word before he let it go, “I’m going to have to pretend you never told me a word of this. You signed an NDA about that marriage. If I act on any of it, if anyone so much as suspects you’ve talked, it comes straight back down on you.”
“That’s smart,” she said, with the quick, faintly surprised approval of someone to whom it would simply never have occurred.
He nearly laughed, except that none of it was funny.
It was, in point of fact, the entire problem with her, summed up neat in a single exchange.
What she had done, signing her whole life over to a cold stranger on the strength of her dying father’s word, was reckless to the absolute brink of madness by any normal person’s accounting.
But Camilla had never once kept her books the way the rest of the world kept theirs.
The things that frightened everyone else didn’t frighten her at all, and the things the rest of the world spent its life chasing, she stepped around on the sidewalk like she genuinely couldn’t see them lying there.
He’d always privately believed it had something to do with her heart.
When you grow up being told, gently, every year at a checkup, that your time might run shorter than everyone else’s, you stop putting much value on the things people who expect a long ordinary life take for granted, and you start putting it on things nobody else even thinks to count.
Which was the exact thing that worried him now, sitting across from her with her face still blotched from a night of crying.
“When was your last checkup?” he asked.
She blinked at the swerve in the conversation. “Last month.”
“And the next?”
“Next week.” It came out of her almost as a question, the way things always did when she sensed she was about to be told off for something.
“That’s too long to wait. Move it up. See your cardiologist this week.”
“But I feel fine?—”
“That’s a thing for your cardiologist to decide, not for you.
” He kept his voice level, because he knew from long experience that raising it would only make her dig her heels in, but he made very sure she could hear the steel running underneath it.
“You have a bad heart, Camilla. You’ve had one your entire life.
And your husband has just gone and broken the rest of it.
So you are going to get yourself checked this week, and the two of us are going to sit here and hope that whatever that man’s been putting you through these last weeks hasn’t gone and shortened the time you’ve got left. ”