6. Chapter Six
Chapter Six
Demetrius
Three days, I managed to avoid Madison Berwick.
Seventy-two hours of impeccable, focused self-discipline, and then my stomach overrules every rational decision I've made since she walked through Stronghold's front door.
I have been productive. Objectively productive.
Cornelius's old study has more square footage than most Boston apartments and an internet connection robust enough to support a small nation-state, and I have used both fully and without interruption in the service of not being anywhere Maddie might also be.
My team has the Rotterdam deal solidly scheduled. The Windemere legal review is three days ahead of schedule. I have read every document Patel forwarded twice and drafted three separate memos with my notes.
I have also been very aware, through all of this, of where she is in the house.
That part is less productive. She has a way of carrying herself through Stronghold that produces sound even when she isn't being loud.
It's not her, really, if I'm being fair about it.
It's just that her musical voice carries down the long hallways all the way to wherever I'm holed up.
I can hear her laughing and chatting away with Agatha even when I don't want to.
Even when I put background music on or my noise-canceling headphones on.
It's like I can isolate myself from the entire world except for that one sound.
I've officially become a reverse stalker.
It's a skill I did not need and did not ask for. Still. Here we are.
I've worked sixteen hours straight today and it's eleven at night. I skipped dinner again and I am hungry enough to consider chomping down on the blown glass fruit bowl in the main hall.
The coast should be clear now. In the past three days, Madison went to her rooms around ten and didn't get out until six the next morning. Not that I've taken notes. Only I did.
Casting glances around like a toddler about to commit some misdemeanor, I make my way down the long hallway and the grand staircase, then all the way to the Stronghold kitchen.
It's enormous and built with state-of-the-art professional equipment, all pale stone and hanging copper and a ceiling high enough to put the echo in every sound.
I frown when I see the light over the center island is on, but by then, my stomach has taken over my body and I couldn't stop if I tried. I turn the corner and step into the kitchen, then stop like I've been hit with a baseball bat right in my face.
Maddie is standing at the counter. Correction: Maddie is standing at the kitchen counter in her nightgown.
I thank whatever God is looking over minotaurs that she hasn't heard me enter.
Her back is to the doorway, her dark hair loose around her shoulders, and she's spreading something on bread with a knife she holds like she's in a minor disagreement with it.
The nightgown is pale yellow and hits her mid-thigh and her feet are bare on the stone floor.
My gaze goes up those shapely, bare legs and something hammers inside my chest like it wants to get out and run away, screaming. All that flesh, exposed, short-circuits something in my brain and I just stand there, like an idiot.
Or like a creep, which is how I just know she would see it.
For what feels like an eternity, I stand in the doorway, my mind a blank and my heart trying its best to learn to play drums against my ribcage. Then my brain remembers how to function.
I clear my throat.
She turns to me with a small, choked-up cry of surprise. As she recognizes me, her expression goes from shock to hostility. She raises her brows as she looks me up and down, then lets out a little snort.
Which immediately annoys the heck out of me.
"What are you even wearing?" She tilts her head to one side. "It's eleven o'clock at night. Were you wearing a suit?"
I glance down at my marine blue pants and white dress shirt. "I was working."
"You dress like that to work out of your own house? Figures." She shakes her head, then turns back to her bread and resumes spreading. Aggressively. "Do you ever wear something else? Do you even own pajamas? Or is that not a thing that happens in your income bracket?"
Right. I remember that sharp tongue. I used to find it funny. It's not so funny now.
"I see you still have a habit of running your mouth," I say, crossing to the refrigerator. "Does it still cause you problems?"
She doesn't look up. "Constantly." A pause, in which I hear the knife scrape across the bread. "It's my most consistent hobby. What fun would it be if it didn't cause me trouble?"
I choose not to answer that last bit and walk up to the refrigerator, then yank the doors open.
It's impeccably stocked, because Mrs. Fairweather is a pearl.
There are things in there that require a pan and some working knowledge of how food is assembled, which I have in principle and lack the motivation for at eleven at night.
I stand in front of it for a moment, and then I close it.
"Want half?"
Maddie is looking at me over her shoulder. In front of her on the counter are two triangles of bread that she has just cut, and between them, visible in cross-section, is a generous layer of peanut butter and what appears to be strawberry jam.
She extends one hand towards me, holding the other half of her sandwich.
"I'm fine," I lie.
She keeps holding it out as my stomach lets out a grumble loud enough to rattle the foundation of the old house.
"Fine. Thanks."
I accept it, defeated, and take one small bite, because I still have the remnants of my dignity somewhere about my person. Those remnants last for about four seconds. Then I shove the rest of it in my mouth in one go and groan as I chew the sweet and sticky mess.
Ugh. It's been so long since I've eaten anything near a PB&J. I forgot how good it is.
Maddie is staring at me. Her half of the sandwich hangs forgotten, halfway to her face.
She points one finger at the empty space where the sandwich had been.
Her face opens and she laughs. The sound fills the kitchen, echoing off the copper and the stone and it is so genuine, so warm and sudden that something happens to me.
I laugh, too.
This is something I observe from a slight distance, the way you hear an unexpected sound and pause, confused about its origin. We continue like this for a while and it feels so good, I don't want it to stop.
But like all good things, the laughter gradually subsides and then dies entirely. Maddie wipes the corner of her eye. I scrape one hand back through my mane and try to look away from her without success.
"I forgot how much I love hearing you laugh," I say, and then immediately regret it, although there's no way for me to take the words back.
Something moves across her face as she swallows, then it's gone.
"I missed hearing you laugh, too. For what that's worth."
Nothing in the kitchen moves. The copper pans hold their position, the light over the island holds its warmth. But something between us just quietly rearranged the very air we breathe and made it heavy.
"Agatha told me that you were working at the Shop-N-Save before going for that interview at Elven Mercy? Aren't you an RN?"
Maddie doesn't answer right away. She bites into her half of the sandwich. Chews. I watch her decide whether the question is safe to answer, and apparently it clears some internal threshold, because she exhales and sets the sandwich back down.
"I used to work an ICU job in New York City," she says. She looks at the counter, not at me. "Then Mom got her cancer diagnosis and I quit to come back home and take care of her. That was three years ago."
The words slap me right across the face and I go very still.
I had no idea, although to be fair, it shocked me to see the formidable Grace Berwick so thin and fragile when I came to offer Maddie the job. If she's recovering from cancer, it would explain it.
Something cold moves through my chest, slow and deep. I put my hands flat on the counter because it gives them something to do.
"How is she now?"
"She's in remission," she says, and her lips quirk up in a half smile. "It will be one year in a few weeks. Dad is throwing her a party. We call it the cancerversary. It's better than his first idea, which was a Cancer-Butt-Kicking-Day."
The relief that moves through me is so out of proportion to the moment, so involuntary, that a small chuckle escapes. Of course Lenny Berwick would call his wife's one-year remission Cancer-Butt-Kicking-Day.
"Good." And I mean it completely. "That's really good. I had no idea she's been sick, but I'm glad she's better now."
Maddie is still watching me. Her expression has lost some of its caution and this time, she offers me a small but genuine smile.
"I quit so I could come home," she says, quieter now. "Help Dad out. Take her to appointments, manage the schedule so he didn't have to drop clients." She pauses. "It wasn't supposed to be for long."
"But it was," I say.
"But it was." She picks up the sandwich, then puts it back down. "And then time passed and I'm still here, I guess."
A pause. "I couldn't let them down, not after all they did for me. And a part of me still can't make myself leave."
We stay like that for a moment, in silence. The weight of the years that passed settles between us, heavy with things unsaid, a whole life unshared. So much happened, it's hard to even believe we are the same two people.
"But even if we're all happy she's better, the treatments weren't cheap," she goes on and looks me dead in the eyes. "Insurance covered what it felt like covering and left the rest. Fifty-three thousand dollars in total."
I absorb that number and now I understand everything. Shit. I've been such a prick.
That oddly specific number, it was a hospital bill.
I stop myself from saying something I can't take back. Something along the lines of you should have come to me.
She shrugs and takes a bite of her sandwich.
"So now you know."
She holds my gaze like she's daring me to say something, to offer some pathetic platitude or another. I know better. The Madison Berwick I knew would rather walk on hot coals than have me pity her.
So I don't.
"You were always the most generous person I knew," I say instead.
She makes a sound, dismissive, a short exhale through her nose. "That's because your reference group is people who write off their yachts as business expenses, Demetrius. The bar is underground."
She shifts her weight, and then, out of some shift in atmosphere I can't quite track, looks at me sideways with something speculative in her expression.
"I still don't understand Arabella Syrenada. She's on the cover of every magazine. She's one of the most beautiful women in the world. How do you break up with a woman like that?"
I blink. Arabella Syrenada is one of the most famous supermodels in the world. She's also my ex-girlfriend and a spoiled brat.
So Madison Berwick has been following the gossip tabloids about my love life? I shouldn't feel the tiny prickle of warmth at that information, but I do anyway.
"Easily," I say. "We were never serious to begin with."
Maddie goes quiet. She is watching me with the kind of attention that means the question was never about Arabella Syrenada.
"She is beautiful," I say. "But she was also using me to get people talking about her. It worked, but this was more a business relationship than anything else. Believe me, she's not heartbroken over this."
She nods once, slowly. "Why not?"
I hold her gaze. "I haven't been serious about anyone since I was eighteen years old."
She goes very still and I'm suddenly very aware of how close we are to each other. The nightgown she wears is thin and I concentrate hard on not asking myself if she has anything underneath. I fail.
"What about you?" I ask, even though the last thing I want to hear about is her boyfriend.
"No." She shakes her head and her long, beautiful dark hair moves. "I've dated. I'm not pathetic. Just nothing that stuck."
"I'm surprised." And I mean it. "I thought by now you would have..." I let it hang, half-finished. I'm not about to tell her that I imagined her life all those years, obsessed about it late at night.
She tilts her head and just looks up at me with those big, dark eyes that once contained my entire world.
"So you thought about me."
"Not often," I say.
A beat of silence.
"Only about a dozen times a day."
Her expression flickers: not quite a smile, not quite grief, almost certainly both.
"Then why didn't you call?" Her voice is even. Not accusatory, just direct, the way Maddie has always been direct. "I waited for you to call for years and you never did."
"I'm sorry," I say and I never meant those words more. "I just couldn't."
I take another step towards her and she has to tilt her head all the way back to look up at me.
This way, with her neck stretched and her face upturned, it gets hard not to stare at her full, plump lips.
Lips I've dreamed of kissing over and over during all those years when Madison Berwick took up permanent residence in my skull and never once paid rent.
"I tried," I tell her and my voice is all wrong. Low and deep, more like a rumble. "More times than I can count. I picked up the phone and put it back down. That's the only answer I have."
She breathes in. Out. Her wary expression settles into something more tired and more true.
"I think." She speaks carefully, like she's building each word load-bearing.
"That we should leave the past where it is.
Everything that happened between us." She looks up at me, and I see the girl she was back when we were madly in love.
"We're not kids anymore. We're both adults here and I was hired to look after your grandmother. So. Truce?"
"Truce," I say. "We leave the past in the past."
The word settles into the space between us, and neither of us moves.
She's close. Close enough that I can see the line of her collarbone, the exact place where the nightgown's strap crosses it. She's looking up at me and her lips have parted.
My gaze drops to her mouth. She tilts her chin up, the smallest degree, and the kitchen is very quiet and I lean down towards her because apparently my self-preservation instinct amounts to nothing against a peanut butter sandwich and a nightgown.
Deadly. Irresistible.
Then, from behind a locked door in my skull that I have kept locked for years: a small blue velvet box surfaces.
I hear the sound of the lid snapping shut.
I see her hands pushing it back into mine, her beautiful, pained face as she spills words of apology, words that have no more meaning now than back then.
Even all those years later, I'm still a fool.
I straighten.
"Good night, Maddie."
My feet carry me to the doorway and through it. The hall is dark and cool, and behind me the kitchen light spills out in a warm rectangle across the stone, and from somewhere inside it, the girl who once held my heart in her palm watches me.
I keep walking.