17. Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Seventeen
Maddie
There is a specific kind of quiet that happens in a room where one person is working and the other is allowed to do absolutely nothing, and I have decided it's my favorite quiet in the world.
Demetrius is at the desk in his shirtsleeves, reading glasses on, making small offended noises at whatever's on his screen.
I'm in the armchair by the window in my off-duty uniform, jeans and the grey sweater that won't stay on my shoulder, with my second coffee and a paperback I haven't turned a page of in twenty minutes.
Watching him work turns out to be a better hobby than reading.
I like this. No, scratch that. I love it. Just like I love him.
"You're staring at me," he says, without looking up.
"I'm reading."
"You've been on the same page since I sat down."
"It's a dense page."
His mouth curls at the edges and the sight of it kicks something loose in my chest. He's so handsome when he smiles it short-circuits every intention I have of leaving him in peace.
Hey. I never said I was perfect.
I cross the room and kiss the top of his head, between the horns, which is about as high as I can reach. He tips his face up and catches my mouth properly, one big hand at my jaw, and whatever he's working on stops existing for a second.
Then his phone buzzes against the desk.
He glances at the screen and something in him clicks into work mode.
"I have to take this. It's Patel." He's already standing. "I've been waiting for this call all morning."
"Go be powerful."
He stops at the door to the little adjoining office, phone halfway to his ear, and turns back.
"If Gertrude calls the study line while I'm in there, pick up for me? She's locking my calendar and I told her I'd be reachable. Tell her yes on Boston. She'll know what it means."
"Yes on Boston," I say, then take another sip of coffee. "Got it."
"Thank you." Then he's gone, the door clicking shut, his voice dropping into a muffled, low register.
So now I'm the keeper of the study, which feels like being handed the keys to a small, expensive country.
I take my coffee to his chair, because it's objectively the best seat in the building and I have no pride. I drop into it, then sigh deeply and without shame.
The study is immaculate, the way it always is.
The only thing out of order is the paperwork on the floor, a fan of folders and loose pages where they slid last night when he swept the whole surface clear to make room for, well.
Me. A small smug warmth settles in at the memory of what we did last night and I make no effort to stop it.
Still, I should make myself useful and clean up the mess.
I lean down to gather the files up and begin stacking them into a neat pile. Then my eyes land on a folder with my name on it.
I frown, hesitate, put it on the bottom of the pile, then continue collecting the paperwork.
About thirty seconds later, my stubborn brain pesters me again and I bite my lips, guilt gnawing a hole clean through me, then my fingers retrieve the folder from under the pile.
I stare at the name. Mine. Berwick, Madison R., on a neat printed label. I open it and read.
It's an offer of employment from Meridian Pacific Medical Center, Los Angeles. ICU. My name sits on the top line like it grew there. The smug warmth drains straight out of me, like somebody pulled a plug at the base of my spine.
The study phone rings.
I pick it up on pure reflex, folder still open in my other hand, because my body's faster than my brain right now.
"Thornwood residence." My voice comes out almost normal. A small miracle. "Madison Berwick speaking."
"Oh!" A woman, warm and bright. "This is Gertrude, dear, I'm Mr. Thornwood's assistant. It is so lovely to finally hear your voice."
"Hi, Gertrude." I'm looking at my name on the folder. "Demetrius is on another call. He said to tell you yes on Boston and that you would understand."
"Wonderful, I'll put it in his calendar." Gertrude lets out a pleased little breath. "I'm so glad it's you who picked up."
There's a little voice at the back of my head that whispers I should thank her and hang up. That's the move. Just keep being happy and ignore that folder. But I don't. I stay on the line.
"Honestly, it's all come together so beautifully," Gertrude goes on, the smile right there in her voice, the easy warmth of a woman sharing good news.
"I've sent the lease on the penthouse to the realtor just a few minutes ago.
Oh, dear, it's a lovely place. I'm sure you'll love it.
It's also a convenient thirty-minute commute to Meridian Pacific, so this will work out beautifully for you.
I just want to square the Long Beach move dates with the building, and the moment you sign the Meridian Pacific offer we can confirm your start date.
They're only waiting on a few details from you, your license number, that sort of thing.
I told them you'd have it across by the end of the day. "
The warm, oblivious stream of words keeps coming, and one word snags and stops everything. Move. The Long Beach move.
He's leaving? Demetrius is moving to the other side of the country?
The folder is very heavy in my hand for a piece of paper.
"And I'll just say." Her voice softens, confiding, like she's saving the best part for me.
"I've worked for that man ten years. Ten years.
I have never once seen him like this. When he told me he's relocating and arranging it all for the two of you, he sounded as happy as a little boy.
I haven't heard him this giddy the whole time I've known him.
" A small, warm laugh. "Whatever you've done to him, keep doing it. "
There's a roaring in my ears and I talk over it.
"Right," I say. "Of course."
"Anything else you need, dear?"
"No. That's everything. Thank you, Gertrude. It was nice meeting you."
I set the phone back in its cradle like it might go off.
And then I sit in Demetrius Thornwood's enormous chair, in his enormous house, and I do the math.
He's planned all of it. Weeks of arrangements, lined up and labeled and processed. All without asking me a single question.
Heck. All without asking me the only question that matters.
I sit there with the sound of my blood rushing in my ears for long moments. It could be minutes, it could be hours.
The door opens.
"That was mercifully short. Patel actually let me go early for once."
He stops two steps into the room, then stares at me, sitting in his chair with the folder open in my hand.
The understanding moves across his face like weather coming in off the water.
He doesn't reach for a lie. I'll give him that much.
He's never been a liar. He's something worse, which is a man certain he's done the right thing but definitively hasn't.
"Maddie, let me explain."
Yeah. Right.
"Explain what?" I hold the folder up so he can admire his own work.
My voice is doing something I don't recognize, flat and level and very quiet.
"That you're moving to the other side of the country, and I had to hear it from your assistant?
Or that you tried to arrange my whole life without even asking me? Take your pick. I got both."
"It's not like that." But his face says different. His face says this is exactly what he intended to do: take control, decide things for me.
Men like that own things, Maddie. They own people, too. Jazz's words hit me across the face like a lash and hot tears burn the inside of my eyelids.
It makes me infinitely angrier.
"Your assistant is lovely, by the way." I stand up out of his chair. My legs hold, which is the only thing currently cooperating properly in my body. "She congratulated me on the move I didn't know about, and the job I never applied for."
Demetrius stays quiet, the only sign of him rattled at all a hard, visible swallow.
"I was afraid," he says finally, "that you would say no if I asked you to come with me without having every detail prepared."
"And you think a fancy house and a job offer that you got me would force my hand, somehow?"
I put the folder down on the desk between us, because if I keep holding it I'm going to throw it. I am trying, with the last working part of me, to be calm about this.
All that time, Demetrius just stands there and stares at me. The pier comes back to me in a wave, that day so long ago when Demetrius walked away from me instead of compromising on what he wanted.
Maybe Jazz was right. Maybe men like him don't change.
"Walk me through it," I say. "I want to understand.
You called in a favor with somebody important.
You got me a job I never applied for. You picked an apartment.
You set a date." I count it off on my fingers, because some unhinged part of me needs him to watch the list get long.
"And nowhere in any of that did it occur to you to turn around and tell me you were leaving at all.
Let alone ask, hey, Maddie, I have to move across the country, do you want to come with me? "
"I was going to tell you. This week." His jaw is tight. "With the offer in front of you, so you'd see it was real. So you'd know I'd handled it."
How can a man so smart be so blind? I huff, lifting my hands at my sides in a gesture of both surrender and frustration.
"You handled it." I shake my head. "And there's your problem."
"It's the best ICU in the state." His voice climbs, and there's no anger in it.
Just a kind of pleading, like if he gets the numbers in front of me I'll come to my senses, which only makes me angrier.
"It's the kind of position nurses fight years for, and I took all of that away.
The waiting, the competition, the uncertainty.
I gave you back the career you put down for your mother. "
"I never asked you to clear the way for me." My voice cracks down in the middle of the sentence and I have to cough to get the rest out. "That's what you never understood. Your money doesn't give you the right to decide what's best for me."
He flinches like I slapped him.
"I want you with me." His hands have gone to fists at his sides.
"Is that the crime? I love you. I am not losing you to a zip code, so yes, I found a way to have everything.
You, the merger, your career, all of it at once.
I'm sorry I didn't wrap the conversation up in a bow first, but I do not understand how building you a better life is the thing I've done wrong. "
And there it is. The whole man, laid out in one breath. It would almost be funny if it didn't make me want to lie down on the floor of this study and stay there, curled in the fetal position.
"You never changed, did you? You're still the same guy who walked away from me when I told you no. I guess the joke's on me for not seeing it sooner."
The room goes still, and my eyes burn. A fat, solitary tear rolls down my cheek and I'm afraid that if I wipe it away, I'll break down and I won't be able to do what needs to be done.
"Fifteen years. Fifteen years later and here you are again, deciding my whole life and calling it love." My voice is shaking and I let it shake.
"Don't," he says, low. "That's not fair."
"You know why you didn't bother asking? Because asking means I could say no.
And you have never been able to survive me saying no, so you arrange it so I can't." Each word goes down like bricks on a wall I'm building between us.
I shake my head. "That isn't love, Demetrius.
It's just a nice golden cage. That's the part of me you've never understood. I don't want life handed to me."
He doesn't answer. His eyes are doing something I can't look at, so I don't, because if I look at it I'll back down and get all weak.
I take a breath, and square my shoulders.
"Maddie." Just my name, like it's the only word he has left.
"Goodbye, Demetrius."
He said the same word to me once, on a pier in the gold light, and then he turned around and left me sitting there in my new blue dress. I used to wonder what that took out of a person. How you just walk.
Turns out it takes nothing at all.
Just all the pieces of my broken heart.