19. Vince
VINCE
Morning light came through the window and turned everything the color of old paper.
I woke up sore, every breath pulling at the stitches, and alive.
The hospital bed smelled like disinfectant and something underneath it I didn't want to name.
My side ached where they'd gone in. The painkillers were wearing off.
I was alive. That was more than I'd expected yesterday.
The phone started up before I'd been awake five minutes.
Emails first, then texts, one after another like dominoes falling.
The firm. The permits. Kevin from the mayor's office, then the mayor himself demanding a meeting, all caps in the subject line like that would make me care.
I watched the screen light up over and over.
The notifications stacked on top of each other until they ran off the edge.
Frozen permits, contractors threatening to walk, investors asking questions I didn't have answers for.
I silenced the whole thing and set it face down on the tray.
For nine years that phone had run my life.
Every deal, every meeting, every decision that couldn't wait had come through that screen.
Dinners interrupted. Weekends cut short.
Nights I'd told Josie I was coming home and then called from the office at midnight to say I couldn't. The phone had always been there, always louder than anything else.
Gideon's voice had been in my head since yesterday. What did she fall in love with, the man or the money?
He'd said it standing in my office with his arms crossed, waiting for an answer I didn't have.
I'd built an entire empire and couldn't answer a question that simple.
The work had been everything for nine years.
Every development, every permit, every late night at the office while she went home alone to a penthouse I'd bought her like that was what she wanted.
I'd thought I was building something for us. I'd thought the money would be enough.
It wasn't.
She'd asked me for one thing in nine years, and it hadn't cost a dime. Walk the old streets with her. The corner we grew up on, the paths we used to know. I'd never done it. Not once. I'd been too busy turning other people's corners into something worth more than memories.
The nurses came in and out, checking the IV, taking my blood pressure, asking if I needed anything.
I said no every time. What I needed wasn't something they could bring me on a tray.
I didn't know if she was coming back. She'd said she would, last night, standing beside this same bed with her hand in mine before she pulled away.
But she'd also said she was afraid this was temporary, and I'd told her she was right to be afraid.
I didn't blame her for doubting me. I'd given her nine years of reasons.
I waited. The clock on the wall ticked forward. Eight thirty became eight forty-five, then nine. My chest felt tight every time I heard footsteps in the hallway that weren't hers.
The door opened a little after nine and my heart kicked hard enough that I felt it in my ribs.
Josie stepped inside, careful, like she wasn't sure she belonged there.
She had a paper cup of coffee in one hand and her bag over her shoulder.
She looked tired. Beautiful and tired, dark circles under her eyes and her hair pulled back, and when she saw I was awake something in her face shifted.
Relief, maybe. I didn't deserve it.
"Hey," she said.
"Hey."
She came closer, set the coffee down on the tray beside the phone, and stood there looking at me like she was trying to figure out what to do with her hands.
My pulse kicked up just from having her in the room.
Two months of not seeing her, and now she was here.
Close enough that I could smell the faint scent of the soap she used.
Neither of us knew what we were. Not married, not exactly. Not divorced, not yet. She'd filed the papers and I hadn't contested them. We were something in between, something without a name.
"How do you feel?" she asked.
"Sore." I tried to sit up a little and winced. She moved like she was going to help, then stopped herself. "I'm okay."
"You got stabbed, Vince."
"I noticed."
The corner of her mouth twitched. Not quite a smile, but close.
She pulled the chair over and sat down, her bag in her lap like she might leave any second.
We didn't say anything for a minute. I could hear the machines beeping, the nurses talking in the hallway, someone's television two rooms down. Normal sounds.
"Did you eat?" I asked.
"What?"
"Breakfast. Did you eat anything?"
She blinked at me. "I had toast."
"That's not eating."
"It's food, Vince."
"It's bread."
She laughed, and Jesus, I'd forgotten what that sounded like. Not the polite laugh she used at charity dinners or the flat one she gave when I said I'd be home and wasn't. A real one. It loosened something in my chest that had been tight since the moment she walked out two months ago.
"You got stabbed and you're lecturing me about toast," she said.
"Someone has to."
She shook her head, still smiling a little, and settled back in the chair. "Rosa wanted to come up with me. I told her you were probably sleeping."
"Rosa sent flowers?"
"Rosa sent half a garden. They're downstairs in the lobby because apparently hospital rooms aren't supposed to have that many arrangements in them at once." She folded her hands in her lap. "Omar sent something too. And the family from the shop."
"They didn't have to do that."
"They wanted to."
I didn't know what to say to that. People from the corner, people I'd spent nine years avoiding, sending flowers because I'd gotten stabbed keeping Mercer's from burning down.
"The nurses been okay?" Josie asked.
"They keep coming in every twenty minutes like they think I'm going to try to escape."
"Would you?"
"Probably."
She smiled again, and God, I wanted to reach for her hand. I didn't. "They're just doing their job, Vince."
"I know."
We kept talking, back and forth, about nothing that mattered.
She told me about the flowers, described each arrangement.
Rosa's were lilies, white ones, and Omar's were something practical in a pot that she could take home and plant.
The family from Mercer's had sent roses, the card signed by all four of them and their kids.
I asked her if the coffee was any good. She said no. I asked her why she bought it then. She said because the hospital coffee was worse and she'd needed something to do with her hands on the walk over. I told her that didn't make sense. She said most things didn't.
The conversation drifted. She asked me if I'd slept.
I said a little. She said I looked terrible.
I said she should see the other guy. She said she had, on the camera feed, and he'd looked worse.
I asked her if Mercer's was okay. She said it was still standing. That mattered more than it should have.
"Your hands," I said, nodding at them. They were folded in her lap, the hands that made every piece in her shop. "You been working?"
"A little." She flexed her fingers like she was checking them. "I finished the commission for the anniversary set. The one I was worried about."
"The matching cuffs?"
"Yeah." Her face lit up when she talked about her work. "I wasn't sure about the clasp, but it came together. They picked them up yesterday."
"They're lucky," I said.
"Why?"
"Because you made them something that'll last."
She looked at me, and something in her expression shifted. Softer, maybe. Sadder. She didn't say anything, and I didn't push.
An hour went by like that. The best hour I'd had in years.
We talked about the weather, gray and cold outside, the kind of November that made you want to stay inside.
We talked about the hospital food, which I hadn't tried yet but she said I wasn't missing anything.
We talked about the television mounted on the wall that I hadn't turned on.
She asked if I wanted her to find the remote.
I said no. I didn't want anything except her in that chair, talking to me like I wasn't a stranger.
Neither of us touched the real things sitting between us. The divorce papers. The two months apart. The nine years before that. We just talked, ordinary and small, and it was worth more than every deal I'd ever closed.
The phone rang.
I'd forgotten it was even there. It buzzed against the tray, loud and insistent, and I watched Josie's face close up a little. That look. I knew that look. Nine years of that phone in the room, always in the room, always louder than she was.
I picked it up and silenced it without looking at who was calling.
It rang again thirty seconds later.
This time I picked it up, silenced it, and threw it. It hit the far side of the room and skidded under the radiator with a crack that probably meant the screen was done. Josie's eyes went wide.
"Vince—"
"I don't care," I said.
She stared at me. "That's your whole company calling."
"I know."
"The permits?—"
"I know, Josie." My side was aching again and I didn't care about that either. "I don't care about the permits. I don't care about the mayor or the meetings or any of it."
She didn't say anything. She looked at the radiator where the phone had landed, then back at me, and I couldn't tell what she was thinking.
"What happened with Harlow?" she asked.
There it was. I'd known it was coming. My chest tightened and I made myself look at her when I answered, because she deserved that much.
"I fired her."
"When?"
"Two months ago."
Josie went still. I watched her process that, her hands gripping the strap of her bag.
Two months. Three days after she left. She didn't ask why and I didn't explain.
The silence stretched out between us, thin and fragile, and I could see her working through it.
She wanted to ask something else. I could see the question sitting right there behind her teeth, but she didn't.
She just nodded.
I couldn't leave it there. I'd spent nine years building walls between us, and if I had any chance of tearing them down I had to start putting my hands on the bricks.
"I'm a long way from you being able to trust me," I said.
Her throat moved. "Vince?—"
"Let me finish." I took a breath and it pulled at the stitches. "There was a tracker on your car. I put it there about two years ago, after the break-ins at Mercer's. I looked at it once. The night you left, to find you at Rosa's. I had it taken off."
The words sat there between us like broken glass. I didn't justify it. Didn't tell her it was for her safety or that I'd been worried or any of the other things that were true but didn't matter. I'd put it there. I'd looked. I'd kept it from her. That was the fact and the fact was enough.
Josie didn't say anything for a long time. She looked at me, and I made myself hold her gaze even though every instinct I had was telling me to look away. Her face didn't give me anything. No anger, no relief, nothing I could read.
Finally, she nodded.
"Okay," she said.
That was all. No forgiveness, no thanks for taking it off, no absolution. Just okay. Like she'd heard me and that was as much as I was going to get. It was more than I deserved.
She reached out and took my hand.
Her fingers were warm and smaller than mine, and I felt the touch all the way up my arm into my chest where everything had been locked down tight for two months. I looked down at our hands, hers resting in mine, and that's when I saw it.
The iron ring.
It sat on her finger like it had always been there, dull gray metal against her skin, the one I'd made with my own hands when I had nothing else to give her.
She'd kept it in a drawer for four years while she wore the diamond.
I'd replaced it and thought I was being generous, thought I was giving her something better.
She'd carried the iron one in her pocket the whole time she was gone, and sometime between last night and this morning she'd put it back on.
She didn't say anything about it. Neither did I.
I held her hand and looked at the ring.