20. Josie
JOSIE
The hospital room smelled like bleach and something else I couldn't place, probably medicine.
Vince slept in the narrow bed with the rails up on both sides, an IV taped to the back of his left hand and monitors counting out his pulse in green numbers on the screen beside him.
They had him on his back with a pillow wedged under his ribs to keep pressure off the wound.
The blanket rose and fell with his breathing, slow and even.
I sat in the chair they had pulled up for me and watched him. The bruising along his jaw looked worse today, dark purple spreading down into his neck. His mouth was slightly open and his hair needed washing. A day and a half out of surgery and he still looked like someone had taken him apart.
I had not sat and watched him sleep in years.
Maybe not since the first year we were married, when I used to wake up before he did and lie there looking at him in the early light coming through the bedroom window.
Back then I would trace the line of his shoulder with my eyes and think about how I had gotten to keep him, how I was the one who woke up next to him every single day.
That felt like someone else's memory now, like a story I had heard about two different people.
His hand lay on top of the blanket, fingers curled loosely against his palm.
The iron ring sat on my own hand where I had put it this morning, a plain dark band that caught no light at all.
He had not mentioned it. I had not mentioned it.
It was just there, the same way the diamond was still sitting on the nightstand at home.
The door opened quietly and I looked up.
Gideon Duvall stopped in the doorway, one hand still on the frame. He looked at me, then at Vince, then back at me. His mouth twitched, not quite a smile. "Mrs. Ardito."
"Gideon."
He came in and let the door swing shut behind him. He was still wearing a suit even though it was the middle of the afternoon on a Saturday, tie knotted tight and jacket buttoned. He looked like he had come straight from the office, which he probably had. "I didn't know if you would still be here."
"Where else would I be?"
"I don't know." He crossed to the foot of the bed and looked down at Vince, his face smoothing out into something I couldn't read. "How is he?"
"Tired. They said he needs to sleep."
Gideon nodded once, his gaze moving over the monitors, the IV line, the rails on the bed. He stood very still, hands at his sides. Then he pulled his attention back to me. "And you?"
"I'm fine."
He didn't argue with that, which I appreciated.
He just looked at me for another moment and then moved to the window, putting himself out of the direct line between me and Vince.
Giving me space, maybe, or just finding somewhere to stand that didn't feel like he was hovering.
The light from outside was flat and gray, the kind of November afternoon that never really gets bright.
We were quiet for a while. The monitors beeped softly and Vince's breathing stayed steady and the hospital went on around us, footsteps in the hall and a voice on the intercom calling for someone two floors up.
"He doesn't know you're here, does he," Gideon said finally. It wasn't a question.
"He's been asleep since this morning."
"I meant before that."
I looked down at my hands, at the iron ring. "He knows I stayed last night."
Gideon made a small sound that might have been agreement. He kept his voice low, barely more than a murmur, the way you do when someone is sleeping three feet away and you don't want to wake them. "He'll be glad. When he wakes up and finds you."
I didn't know what to say to that, so I said nothing.
He was quiet again, his eyes on the window. Then he said, "You know what he's been doing. On your corner."
My chest tightened. "Rosa told me some of it."
"Not all of it." Gideon turned to look at me, his face calm and his voice still that same low steady murmur.
"He's been there himself, Mrs. Ardito. Every day for two months.
Cleaning the streets, fixing the lights, carrying groceries for the old man on the third floor above the dry cleaner.
He paid to have the whole block resurfaced and he was out there with the crew at six in the morning making sure they did it right.
He replaced every broken window on that corner and half the doors, too.
Painted over the graffiti on Rosa's back wall four times because they kept coming back to tag it again. "
I stared at him. My throat had gone tight and I couldn't seem to get enough air. "I didn't know that. I knew he was helping, but I didn't?—"
"Nobody there knows who he is," Gideon said. "He didn't tell them. He just showed up and did the work."
God. I pressed my hand to my mouth, trying to hold something back that I didn't have a name for.
It was too much and I didn't know where to put it.
Nobody there knows who he is. He had spent two months on that corner, my corner, the one he swore he would never go back to, and he hadn't told a single person his name.
"It cost him," Gideon said quietly.
I dropped my hand. "What do you mean?"
"The mayor pulled every permit we had. Every project, frozen.
We've been carrying the firm on contracts we signed six months ago, and those are running out.
" His voice didn't change. He wasn't complaining.
He was just telling me what was true. "Vince hasn't been to the office at all.
Not once since he started working your street. I've been running it."
My stomach dropped. "Gideon?—"
"It's fine."
"It's not fine. That's—" I stopped, trying to find the words. "That's your whole company."
"It's his company. I just work there." He looked at me, his gaze level and completely steady. "He wanted to be part of your life even if he wasn't in it. That mattered more."
The air went out of me all at once. I sat there in the chair with my hands in my lap and the iron ring heavy on my finger, and I thought about Vince standing in Rosa's doorway two months ago.
I had been so angry I could barely see straight.
He had looked at me with those careful eyes and told me he could fix it, that he could buy the whole block and tear it down and build it back clean, put Mercer's in a new building with new floors and new walls and air that didn't smell like rust and old plaster.
He'd said he had put a number on nine thousand shops exactly like mine and had never once been wrong.
And I had told him no.
What he did instead was go back to the streets that raised him and spend himself there, two months of his own hands on work he didn't have to do, and he'd taken nothing for it. Not money, not credit, not even his own name. Nobody there knew who he was.
Those were not the same thing. Standing at Rosa's door offering to buy me off that corner, and standing on that corner himself with a paintbrush in his hand at six in the morning, those were not the same thing at all.
I looked up at Gideon. My voice came out quieter than I meant it to. "Is it true he fired Harlow?"
Gideon's expression didn't change. "Yes."
"When?"
"Two months ago. The day after she came to your shop."
My heart kicked hard against my ribs. I made myself ask it. "Why?"
He looked at me for a long moment, and I thought he might not answer. Then he said, "She let herself into the penthouse with a key she took from the office. He put her out that night. Nothing happened, Mrs. Ardito. She lied to you."
The room tilted. I grabbed the arm of the chair, my fingers digging into the vinyl, and tried to make sense of what he had just said. Nothing happened. She lied to you.
"What?" It came out barely louder than a breath.
"Harlow took a key from the office and let herself in," Gideon said again, his voice perfectly level, like he was telling me the temperature outside or the time of day. "Vince sent her away and fired her the next morning. That's what happened."
I couldn't breathe. The air in the room had gone thin and strange and I couldn't get it into my lungs.
She lied. Harlow had stood in my shop with her perfect suit and her perfect hair and told me she had been in my bed, in my home, and Vince hadn't stopped her.
She'd looked me right in the eyes and said it, and I had believed her.
I had asked him for a divorce over it.
"Josie." Gideon's voice cut through the ringing in my ears. I looked up and found him watching me, his face creased with something that might have been concern. "Are you all right?"
"I didn't know," I said. My voice sounded wrong, too high and too thin. "I didn't—she told me?—"
"I know what she told you."
"Why didn't he say anything?" The question came out raw and I hated the sound of it, hated that I was asking Gideon instead of Vince, hated all of it. "Why didn't he tell me it wasn't true?"
Gideon shook his head slowly. "I don't know. That's a question for him."
I pressed both hands to my face and tried to think.
Vince lying in the hospital bed three feet away, asleep and still and bruised all to hell because he had stepped in front of a man with a knife to keep him from burning down my father's shop.
Vince who had not touched Harlow, who had sent her away and fired her and never said a word about it to me.
Vince who had spent two months on the corner we grew up on, working with his own hands, and nobody there even knew his name.
I lowered my hands and looked at Gideon. He was watching me quietly, waiting.
"He's different," I said. It wasn't a question.
"Yes." Gideon's mouth pulled into something that wasn't quite a smile. "He's remembering the man you fell in love with."
The words settled over me, soft and sure, and I didn't have an answer for them.
I turned to look at Vince instead, at the shape of him under the thin hospital blanket, at his bruised face and his hand lying open on the covers.
The iron ring on my finger felt warm, like it was pulling heat from my own skin.
He had made that ring himself when he had nothing.
Bent the metal with his own hands and shaped it into something plain and strong and real, and he had given it to me on the corner where we both grew up.
I had loved him so much it felt like my chest was going to crack open.
And then he made his money and gave me the diamond and I put the iron one in a drawer and forgot what his hands could do when he wasn't holding a phone or signing a contract.
I didn't know if I could trust this. I didn't know if what I was seeing was real or if it was just another version of the same man, something that would last a month or two months or six months and then disappear back into the work and the tower and the life that didn't have room for me in it.
I had been wrong before. I had believed him before.
But he was here, and the iron ring was on my finger, and nobody on my corner knew his name.
I sat there in the chair and watched my husband sleep, and I let myself start to believe that maybe this time it was permanent.
Maybe.