CHAPTER TWENTY
Alex
Then
The restaurant was the kind of place where the lighting was dim and the portions were small and everyone at every table appeared to be conducting some variety of business.
I wore a dress I’d borrowed from my mother’s closet.
It was navy blue and it fit me well enough.
She’d seemed pleased when she saw me in it, which I noted as a small and uncomplicated victory.
My father was already seated when we arrived. He stood as we approached the table.
There was a man seated beside him.
I stopped dead in my tracks. It was a setup.
My mother touched the small of my back. “Go ahead, sweetheart.”
The man stood. He was handsome in the generic, unmemorable way.
Assembled from the correct parts but lacking the particular quality that made you want to look twice.
His suit was expensive. His hair was dark and neat.
He smiled at me with the practiced ease of someone who smiled at people for a living.
“Alex,” my father said, “This is Joshua MacAfee. His father is Robert MacAfee.”
I knew the name. The entire state knew the name. Robert MacAfee had built a hospital network that stretched across four states. He was the kind of man whose name appeared on buildings.
I looked at my father. Glared was more like it.
He looked back at me with an expression of complete serenity, as though he’d done something thoughtful rather than something unforgivable.
Joshua stood as I positioned myself near my seat. I gave him a flippant look and sat down before he could provide any assistance with my chair. I wanted nothing from him.
“It’s a pleasure,” he said. “Your father speaks very highly of you.”
“Does he,” I replied.
I reached for the wine.
One glass became two. Two became something I stopped counting.
I remember the restaurant clearly. The table.
The bread they brought that I didn’t touch.
The way Joshua laughed, which was frequent and easy and directed mostly at my father.
The two of them spoke about Robert MacAfee’s latest hospital acquisition, and about a position that was being created, and about what a remarkable opportunity it would represent for a young nurse with the right ambitions.
I remember thinking that they were making decisions for me.
I remember my glass being refilled.
After that, things became impressionistic. Warm light. The sound of a car. A hotel lobby that I have no memory of entering.
I woke up in a bed that wasn’t mine.
The ceiling was unfamiliar. The sheets were white and expensive. Morning light came through curtains I didn’t recognize, and for three or four full seconds I did not know what city I was in, let alone what room.
My heart was going before the rest of me caught up to why.
I sat up too fast. The room tilted and I had to put a hand flat against the mattress to keep from pitching sideways.
My mouth was dry in a way that felt less like wine and more like something with a name I didn’t want to look up.
I ran my hands down my own arms, my own sides, checking myself the way you check a car after you hear a sound you can’t place.
I could not have said what I was checking for except that I needed, urgently, to know the answer before I did anything else.
Joshua was asleep in the chair across the room. Fully dressed. His jacket was folded over the arm of the chair. His shoes were on.
I looked down at myself. I was still wearing my mother’s dress, still zipped, and the relief of that single fact hit me so hard and so fast that my eyes stung before I understood I was about to cry.
I did not cry. I made myself not cry, sitting in a bed in a city I hadn’t chosen, in a dress that wasn’t mine, next to a man I didn’t know, doing math on my own missing hours that refused to come out even.
For a long moment, I didn’t move.
He stirred. His eyes opened. He saw me sitting up and something crossed his face. It might have been relief.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Did we—” I stopped. I pressed my fingertips against my temple. “What happened?”
“You had too much wine,” he said. Flat tone. No expression.
“That’s not what I meant,” I replied. “What happened.”
He held my gaze a little too long before replying and then smirked. “Nothing you should be ashamed of.”
As if he were an attorney, skirting the question. There was my answer. I didn’t push it any further.
“I need to go home,” I said.
“I’ll get you a car.”
In the car, I stared out the window at the coast. The Pacific was flat and gray and enormous. I thought about the desert. About the way the light hit the mountains in the late afternoon, turning them a soft, impossible blue.
I thought about Riley, and the thinking of him was its own kind of pain, sharper than the headache, sharper than the not-knowing. He was in another state, asleep or awake, unaware that anything about his life had changed overnight.
Some part of me wanted nothing in the world so badly as to be lying in his bed instead of in the back of the car.
I wanted it with a physical ache that had nowhere to go.
Because the whole point of the last twelve hours, the thing my father had engineered it to accomplish, was to put exactly this much distance between the two of us without either of us choosing it.
I took out my phone and looked at it for a long time. I got as far as his name.
Then I put it away, because I had no idea yet what I would even be calling to say, and some cowardly, self-protective part of me already understood that the not-knowing was easier to carry alone than to hand to him unfinished.