Chapter Fourteen
The end of the dream, if this is a dream, is always the most painful.
She is with Marc again. Somehow, she both knows he is dead and yet completely accepts that he is alive.
Yes, this makes no sense, but that’s true of most dreams when you analyze them.
Or maybe it’s different this time. In the past, Marc has always come to her.
This time, maybe, just maybe, she is coming to him.
Either way, Marc is there. They sit at an old wooden table in the middle of a vineyard.
There are two glasses of red wine in front of them.
Neither has been touched. The sun is setting, the sky a burnt orange.
She and Marc sit side by side. He looks out over the vineyard.
She stares at his profile. She can’t look away.
She fell in love with that profile. It belongs on a Roman coin, she would joke.
A tear runs down Marc’s cheek. “I promise you that your life will be extraordinary,” he says to her.
Those had been the closing words of his wedding vows.
She remembers how overwhelmed she’d been when he said it, standing in front of everyone they loved and cared about, that line, that final line.
“I promise you that your life will be extraordinary.” Damn, she’d thought at that moment, such a good line that when she finished her own vows, she’d repeated it.
“I promise you that your life will be extraordinary.” Not happy.
Not fulfilling. Not complete. Extraordinary.
They were not going to buy that suburban house and work in private practice and do the work of married physicians with two-point-four kids and a barbecue in the yard and a basketball hoop in the driveway.
In the dream, a tear runs down Marc’s cheek, as it did when he spoke on their wedding day.
But that tear had been one of joy. This one is not.
She takes his hand. His hand is real, she notices.
She can feel it. She wouldn’t be able to feel it if it was a dream.
It’s flesh. It’s Marc’s hand. This is reality.
Marc is alive. So why is her heart sinking?
He finally turns to look at her and when he does, his grip slackens.
No, no. Stay. You’re here. With me. But Marc is pulling away.
She reaches out and grabs the hand tighter.
But the hand is gone. He’s still there. The tear is still on his cheek.
Comfort him. Love him enough so that he would never ever go.
She throws her arms around him, pulls him close.
Don’t go. Please, Marc, stay. This isn’t a dream.
This is real. Except now she is starting to awaken.
There is nothing crueler. She tries desperately to swim back down, to stay, to cling to this old wooden table in this dream vineyard.
Marc is alive here. That’s all that matters.
But something is pushing her to the surface.
She fights it. But she knows she can’t win.
Marc begins to fade away. She is in that crest now, that strange crest between the dream world and full consciousness.
There is clarity here, terrible clarity—this is only a dream; Marc is still dead—and it crushes her anew.
She feels the tears on her cheeks, real ones, and she knows.
Marc is gone. Marc is dead.
When Maggie blinks her eyes open, a man’s face is staring down at her.
It’s not Marc, of course. It’s Charles Lockwood. The playboy from Ragoravich’s ball.
“You’re okay,” he says to her. “You were hurt in a car accident. But you’re okay now.”
The dream flees. It is amazing and merciful how fast that happens. The only remnants are the tears on her cheek. Maggie opens her mouth to speak to him, but nothing comes out.
“Here,” Lockwood tells her. “Take these.”
He scoops some ice chips into a cup and puts them in her mouth.
Maggie knows the move—it gives someone water but won’t let them take in too much at once.
Charles wears a white dress shirt, the sleeves rolled up on his knotted forearms. He checks her vitals.
The playboy is gone now. The physician has emerged.
“Don’t try to talk yet. Just tap your finger once for yes, twice for no. Do you remember the accident?”
It takes a second and then the memories of her escape rush in—opening the bedroom window, the biting cold, the roof, the gunfire, the Ferrari. It’s all there. Jumbled maybe. But enough.
They’d chased her. They’d shot at her. They wanted her dead.
She had tried to get away. Something hit her. She lost control…
She signals yes. She does so with the finger tap, but she also tests out a head nod. The pain is minimal.
“How…?” she manages to say.
“You reached out to me.”
She gives him a confused face.
“The phone number you called. Our emergency line. It came through. We moved fast.”
Emergency line. She tries to remember. Her head is swimming.
The phone number. The one the Marc griefbot had given her.
When she tries to speak, Lockwood shakes his head and tells her that she should rest. She ignores that and tries again to shake her vocal cords free.
When she finally gets out a few words, they sound muffled and far away. “You knew Marc.”
“I did, yes. I assume he gave you my phone number?”
How to answer that…? She can’t. Not really. So she just nods.
“There’s a lot to tell you, Doctor McCabe,” Lockwood says. “I need your mind clear for that. It’s not yet. I know, I know. You think you’re ready. But you’re not.” He moves his chair closer to her. “First though, I need to know why you’re here.”
How to even explain it all to him?
“I need to know why you’re staying with Oleg Ragoravich.”
He waits. She lets her head fall back on the pillow. Her eyes close.
Does she trust him?
Marc—or the griefbot version anyway—had given Maggie his phone number and told her to call. That means when he was alive, Marc trusted Charles Lockwood. Shouldn’t that be enough? Maybe. But then again—and it may be because her head can’t stop spinning—
how does she know what Charles Lockwood just told her about getting a call is true?
Everyone has been playing head games with her.
She knows that now. None of this is accidental or coincidental.
Ever since Dr. Barlow approached her at Johns Hopkins, Maggie has felt the thing she hates the most—out of control.
She feels manipulated, lied to, like she’s fighting against too strong a current.
So is Charles Lockwood another part of that?
Is he telling the truth or another liar?
There is one way to know for sure: Ask the griefbot.
She sucks on more ice chips. There’s an IV in her arm.
She takes a second or two to scan herself and assess her own injuries.
There are places of soreness and pain, but she feels pretty damn good.
She wants to ask him about that, about her injuries, but she gets that right now Charles is focused on his own questions.
When the chips melt and her mouth is moist enough to speak, she says two words: “My phone.”
“What?”
“I need my phone.”
“I don’t advise you calling anyone,” he says. “They’ll be monitoring anyone close to you.”
“Who will be monitoring?”
He shakes his head and scooches a little closer. “Maggie, listen to me. I will explain everything when you’re ready. It’s a lot. But right now—and I can’t stress how important this is—I need to know why you were staying at Oleg Ragoravich’s house.”
“I need my phone first.”
“I don’t have it,” he says. He leans back, blinks, runs his hand through his hair. “Your”—he stops, searches the air for the word—“extraction—it was not easy. Do you remember the crash?”
She nods.
“A bullet grazed your upper back. Wait, are you in pain? I should have asked you that first.”
“I’m fine,” she says.
“The old Ferrari didn’t have seat belts and luckily, I guess, your windshield was shot out.
So you didn’t slam into it on impact. You rolled down a ravine.
That’s what saved you. You were hard to reach.
Ragoravich’s men couldn’t get to you right away.
They figured the exposure would kill you anyway.
You have frostnip, by the way—you’re lucky it wasn’t full-on frostbite.
That will hurt for a while. Point is, they saw no point in rushing to you.
The ravine is tricky in the snow. That gave us time to get there.
” He looks off, his eyes welling up. “Do you remember an SUV chasing you?”
She nods.
“There were two men in it. They’re both dead.”
Silence.
“So I don’t know where your phone is. In that Ferrari, I guess. Maybe in that ravine, I don’t know. It’s not important. We can get you another. If you’re too tired to answer questions—”
“I’m not.”
“You had my emergency phone number,” Charles says.
“Yes.”
“Only one way: Marc gave it to you before he died.”
That wasn’t the way, of course, but it would be too much to explain the griefbot right now.
“And if he gave you the number, then you know you can trust me.”
She doesn’t know that, but it makes sense. And what choice does she have? She doesn’t even know where she is. She only knows that Marc had warned her that Ragoravich or Brovski would try to kill her, that they had indeed tried, and that someone, probably Charles Lockwood, had saved her.
So why not? She had to trust someone.
“I was hired to do plastic surgery,” Maggie says.
Charles Lockwood frowns at that answer. “On?”
“Oleg and a young woman named Nadia.”
“That’s the mistress I saw you talking to?”
She nods.
“So how did they end up hiring you?”