Chapter 13 #2
It was the most disgusting, physically repulsive, backbreaking chore in the entire building.
It was a job I usually saved for myself, because I couldn’t bear to ask my underpaid staff to do it.
It required kneeling in puddles of bleach and sickness, inhaling the rotting smell from inches away, and destroying your shoulders trying to pry up rusted iron.
I waited for the refusal. I waited for Hayes Easton to look at the bucket, look at the puddles of waste, and decide that this particular investment wasn’t worth the cost. I waited for him to reach into his mud-stained canvas jacket, pull out his checkbook, and offer to hire a specialized plumbing crew to handle it.
He didn’t reach for his checkbook.
He didn’t offer a single word of protest.
Hayes simply looked at the bucket, then looked at me. He nodded once, stripping off his heavy canvas jacket and dropping it onto a clean section of the counter. Underneath, his dark thermal shirt clung to his chest, damp with sweat and freezing rain.
He picked up the yellow rubber gloves, shoved his hands into them, grabbed the wrench, and walked over to the first clogged drain.
He dropped to his knees on the hard linoleum, right in the middle of a shallow puddle of bleach water.
I stood by the charting island, my arms crossed tightly over my chest, entirely stunned into silence.
I watched him wedge the heavy metal wrench under the lip of the rusted cast-iron grate.
He grunted, the muscles in his back and shoulders bunching tight beneath the thermal fabric as he applied leverage.
The grate was stubborn, sealed shut by weeks of grime.
He shifted his weight, driving his entire upper body into the tool, until the iron finally popped free with a wet, sucking sound.
Hayes grabbed the heavy grate, lifted it out of the floor, and set it aside.
Then, without a moment of hesitation, he plunged his gloved hand directly into the dark, foul-smelling trap.
I couldn’t look away. I moved to the other side of the island, pulling a stack of medical charts toward me, pretending to review the overnight medication logs, but my eyes remained entirely locked on my husband.
He pulled a massive, rotting clump of hair and sludge out of the drain, tossing it into the plastic bucket. He didn’t gag. He didn’t turn his head away from the smell. He just reached back in and scooped out another handful.
The silence in the room stretched out, heavy and complicated, broken only by the beeping of the monitors and the wet, slapping sound of the waste hitting the bottom of the bucket.
Thirty minutes passed. He finished the first drain, scrubbing the underside of the heavy iron grate with the wire brush until his elbow shook from the exertion. He lowered the grate back into the floor and crawled on his hands and knees over to the second one.
I watched the way he moved. The fluid, arrogant grace that usually defined him was completely gone. He was stiff, clearly operating through a haze of profound physical pain.
When he reached to pry up the second grate, the thick yellow rubber glove shifted, sliding down slightly on his right hand.
I caught a glimpse of his skin, and the breath hitched sharply in my throat.
His palm was an absolute massacre. The skin at the base of his fingers was completely torn away, revealing raw, weeping red tissue underneath. A massive blister covered the center of his hand, angry and inflamed from the friction of the shovel handle he had been wielding in the rain.
Every single time he gripped the wrench or drove the wire brush against the iron, he was pressing directly on open, bleeding wounds.
I gripped the edge of the charting desk, my knuckles turning white. A vicious, confusing war erupted in my chest.
Half of me—the half that remembered the cold, terrifying ultimatum he had issued in the foyer of our mansion—screamed at me to let him suffer.
He had frozen the accounts. He had threatened the lives of these animals.
He had treated me like property. A few blisters and a morning of foul labor didn’t even begin to balance the scales of the damage he had done to my soul.
But the other half of me—the half that had loved him fiercely for two years—felt a sickening jolt of panic at the sight of his torn hands.
I forced my feet to remain anchored to the floor. I would not rescue him. I would not offer him a bandage or a softer tool. If he was going to invade my sanctuary, he was going to experience the brutal reality of it without a safety net.
The hours dragged on.
At seven-thirty, the heavy swinging doors pushed open, and Brooks stepped into the ward. He carried a fresh tray of parvo medications, his eyes locked on the vials as he walked.
“Hey, Del, the overnight charts show a slight temp spike in kennel four, so I’m going to push a?—“
Brooks stopped dead.
He stared at the floor. Hayes was currently kneeling over the fourth drain, entirely covered in a fine mist of dirty water and bleach, aggressively scrubbing a rusted grate with the wire brush.
Brooks’s dark eyebrows shot up toward his hairline. He looked at Hayes, then looked across the room at me, his expression a mixture of profound confusion and deep concern. He took a step toward me, lowering his voice to a whisper.
“What is he doing here?” Brooks asked, shooting a wary glance at the man who had verbally attacked him in the yard just yesterday.
“He’s unclogging the drains,” I said, my voice deliberately loud enough to carry across the room.
Brooks frowned, clearly sensing the volatile, highly charged tension vibrating in the stifling air. He looked at Hayes’s raw, blistered hands, the exhaustion radiating from his shoulders, and the bucket of foul waste sitting beside him.
“Do you want me to have him removed?” Brooks asked quietly, offering me an immediate, unconditional out.
I looked at Hayes. He hadn’t stopped scrubbing. He hadn’t even looked up to acknowledge the veterinarian’s presence. He was entirely, singularly focused on the task I had given him, completely ignoring the massive blow to his ego that came from performing menial labor in front of a man he despised.
The defense mechanism I had been holding onto all morning—the absolute certainty that this was just a manipulative, short-lived stunt—cracked violently down the center.
A man pulling a PR stunt would have stopped the second an audience arrived. A man trying to buy his way out of a mistake would have thrown the wrench down and demanded credit.
Hayes was just working.
“No,” I told Brooks, my voice strangely hollow. “Let him work.”
Brooks hesitated for a fraction of a second, his protective instincts warring with his respect for my authority. Finally, he gave a tight nod, moved to the fourth kennel, administered the medication, and left the ward, leaving me alone with my husband once again.
It took Hayes another hour and a half to finish the final two drains.
When he finally scrubbed the last piece of cast iron clean and lowered it perfectly into the slot, the floor of the ward was completely clear of standing water. The foul smell had dissipated, replaced by the sharp, clean scent of the bleach he had used to flush the pipes.
Hayes sat back on his heels. He didn’t try to stand up immediately. He just rested his forearms across his thighs, his head bowed, his chest heaving with slow, exhausted breaths.
I walked around the edge of the charting island, stopping a few feet away from him.
He didn’t look up. He slowly pulled the heavy yellow rubber gloves off his hands. The friction caused him to wince, a sharp, involuntary sound that he immediately tried to swallow. He dropped the gloves onto the floor next to the bucket.
His hands were trembling so violently he couldn’t close his fingers.
I stared at the raw, bloody skin, the thick wall of ice around my heart struggling desperately to remain intact.
“The traps are clear,” Hayes said. His voice was a destroyed, gravelly rasp. He kept his eyes fixed firmly on the linoleum.
He didn’t ask for a thank you. He didn’t ask for water. He didn’t look up at me and demand to know if his debt was paid.
He slowly pushed himself to his feet. His knees popped, his entire frame radiating a bone-deep stiffness. He walked over to the counter, picked up his mud-stained canvas jacket, and draped it over his forearm.
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said softly, walking past me toward the swinging doors.
“Hayes.”
The name slipped out of my mouth before my brain could stop it.
He paused, his hand resting on the metal push-plate of the door. He finally turned his head, his exhausted, bloodshot gray eyes meeting mine. The sheer depth of the remorse and the quiet, unvarnished devotion I saw there terrified me.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper, desperate to find the hidden angle, the corporate hook I was so certain had to exist.
Hayes looked at me for a long time, the noise of the ward humming between us.
“Because I finally realized that my money can’t buy a sanctuary,” he said quietly. “It has to be built by hand.”
He pushed the door open and walked out, leaving me standing alone in the sterile heat of the ward, my skepticism deeply shaken, and my heart pounding a frantic, terrifying rhythm against my ribs.