Chapter 11 RONAN
Ronan
Frank calls at six because I told him to.
I picked the time for one reason. My nurse has opinions about work, and at six in the morning my nurse is nowhere in sight. So I’ve wheeled myself out onto the terrace with a coffee and the phone, and the sky’s still doing its slow burn off the water when Frank starts in.
“Valence wants faces in a room, Ronan. They’re old money. Old money doesn’t renew a nine-figure contract over a speakerphone.”
“Then give them a face. You have one.”
“They want yours. Petra’s flying in from Zurich the last week of August to close it, and Valence made it clear she doesn’t cut it—old money wants the man whose name is on the building in the room.”
“Then they’ll wait until the man whose name is on the building can get up a flight of stairs.
” The morning air is cool coming off the Atlantic, even in July, and the shoulder doesn’t love it, and I don’t care.
I’m outside, at my own table, running my own call.
“Send me the exposure numbers. All of it, not the version you sand down for the board.”
“You’re supposed to be resting.”
“I’m sitting in a chair looking at the ocean. If I rest any harder I’ll be legally dead.”
He’s mid-sentence about the Singapore accounts when the water moves at the bottom of the property.
I know it’s her before she’s up. Yesterday I got the after—my nurse coming up the back path wet, a sweater dragged on over whatever she’d worn into the sea, salt on her legs—and I poured her coffee and said nothing and let her think the glass only runs one way. This is the part I didn’t get.
Frank keeps talking. I stop hearing him.
She comes up the shallows with the water letting go of her an inch at a time, and I lose three full seconds to the plain fact that the woman coming out of my ocean is not wearing scrubs.
She’s wearing a black two-piece, and she has no idea anyone is looking.
I’m looking.
Her hair is heavy with the sea, gone dark gold and slicked down her back, and the rest of her is nothing but skin and morning light.
Black fabric clinging where it had no business clinging.
The dip of her waist—my palm knows that spot, and it has been criminally underinformed.
Water runs off her in ropes. She wrings her hair over one shoulder, and every drop coming off her is a personal attack.
Fuck.
Three weeks this woman has had her hands on me. Clinical as a thermometer. And the whole time I’ve been telling myself the problem was her mouth, that beauty mark, that maddening almost-smile—like a man admiring the cover of a book while the whole story sat underneath a sweater.
Since the accident, my body has been a list of things that don’t work. Women text and I feel nothing. Brielle called four times last week and I felt nothing. And now every nerve I own comes back online at once, at the sight of my nurse, barefoot in the sand, a hundred feet away.
She doesn’t look up. She towels off on the bottom step, pulls a sweater on over the wet, and takes the back path toward the house—the same walk-up I got yesterday—and the dune grass swallows her.
“Ronan.” Frank’s voice, tinny and far away. “Did you hear a word of that?”
“No,” I say, honestly. “Send the numbers. I’ll call you back.”
I sit there with cold coffee while the sun finishes coming up.
I knew better than to want her the first morning she planted herself in my doorway and refused to be fired. I’ve known better every day since.
I’m going to do it anyway.
* * *
By noon she’s in the kitchen and I’m pretending this is a day like any other day.
She hums while she works. She’s done it all week—under her breath, barely a sound, some old tune that isn’t from any radio station I know, the same handful of notes circling while she chops or pours or writes on that chart.
I don’t think she knows she does it. I’ve never asked what the song is. I find myself listening for it anyway.
She sets my plate down, and her hair’s still damp at the ends from this morning.
“Walk at two,” she says.
“Make it one. I have a call at two-thirty.”
“Fine. One.” She sets her own plate down across from me and sits. “Half an hour, Ronan. Not the whole afternoon.”
“It’s one call.”
“Mm.”
At one, the walk is a new kind of problem.
Same hold as every day. Her shoulder under my arm, her fist in the belt, my hand at the small of her waist. Twelve steps down, twelve back, her counting under her breath, warm against my whole right side, and all I can think about is wet black fabric.
I recite Valence’s exposure numbers in my head and it doesn’t help.
“Good,” she says at the end, easing me back down. “You didn’t fight me today.”
I didn’t trust myself to.
By two-thirty I’ve got the study door shut and Valence on the line, and at first it’s almost a relief. Numbers behave. It doesn’t last.
The call is Valence’s people wanting reassurance, then wanting projections, then wanting Petra’s aide patched in from Zurich, and I’m good at this.
It’s the one thing left I’m still good at, so I stay on.
The leg stiffens where it sits. The shoulder starts a low burn from the morning cold I gave it.
I ignore both, because the numbers are moving in my direction and it’s the first fight I’ve won that didn’t involve a gait belt.
It’s ten past four when the study door opens.
“Send me the redline tonight,” I say, and end the call.
Tessa is standing in the doorway with ice wrapped in a towel, and she isn’t saying anything, and that’s worse.
“The call ran long,” I say.
“You promised me half an hour.” Her voice is level in a bad way. “You’ve been in that chair since two-thirty with the leg hanging wrong and your color is terrible and you’re going to tell me it was worth it for a contract.”
“That contract pays for this house.”
“That contract has a whole company underneath it. You have one leg.” She crosses the room and sets the ice on the desk between us. “You get one recovery, Ronan. One. The leg you build this summer is the leg you keep for the next fifty years.”
“You want to know why I take the calls?” It comes out louder than I planned.
“Because it’s the only thing left that does what I tell it.
Seven weeks. My leg doesn’t listen. My shoulder doesn’t listen.
I can’t get down my own beach stairs. But I get on that phone and things move because I say move, and if I give that up—” I stop.
Then I keep going, because it’s already out of the gate.
“If I give that up, then I’m just this. A man in a chair, waiting to be walked.
And I can’t do it. I’ve tried. I can’t.”
The room goes quiet.
“I’m not trying to take it from you,” she says. “I need you to hear that. I care that—” She stops herself and starts again. “I don’t want to watch you break. I’ve watched a lot of people break. I don’t want it to be you.”
There’s nothing in me that knows what to say to that.
I put my good hand on the desk and push up out of the chair—because I want to be eye to eye with her for once, because I’m tired of every conversation happening a foot above my head—and she steps in on instinct to catch me.
But my feet are already under me. I don’t need catching.
Instead of letting her steady me, I take hold of her waist. It isn’t for balance.
I want my hand there, and I let her feel that I do.
She goes still against me, her hands stalling on my chest, breath gone shallow.
Then she leans into my hand instead of away from it.
“Ronan.” Barely a word at all.
She tips her face up. I look down at her mouth and she watches me do it, and neither of us moves away, and the whole afternoon narrows down to the last few inches between us. Her breath. The salt still on her under the soap. I lean—
Her phone goes off in her pocket.
She flinches hard, pulls it out on reflex, and I see the screen the same moment she does.
No name. Just a number with a Portland area code.
Everything in her face closes at once. Not annoyance—I know her annoyed. This is the drawbridge coming up. She silences it with her thumb, and steps back out of my hands, and just like that there’s a nurse standing in front of me where the woman was.
“You should sit down,” she says.
“Tessa.”
“Ice on for twenty. I’ll come back for it.
” And she’s gone down the hall, and the phone stays silent, and I stay where I am, on my feet in the middle of the study, staring at the empty doorway.
The ice she left sits untouched on the desk.
Every nerve I own is still busy with the two seconds her mouth was an inch from mine. That close. I had her that close.
And whoever was on that phone took her away without saying a word.
This morning, wanting her felt like the dangerous part. It isn’t. The dangerous part is standing here needing to know whose number that was.
* * *
Dinner is quiet. She answers when I talk to her and passes the salt when I ask, and the whole time she’s somewhere else.
Portland, if I had to bet. No humming tonight.
The dishes go in and the chart gets written, and I hate every quiet minute of it.
All that time with her tune under everything, and I didn’t know I was listening until she stopped.
She says goodnight from the doorway with her arms crossed over the sweater, and I lie there in the dark.
I close my eyes and I’m back in the same two seconds.
I almost kissed her today. I’d have done it.
She wasn’t pulling away. I’ve replayed that moment a hundred times tonight, letting it finish the way it didn’t.
Every time, I end up back in Portland.
A woman who came off a trauma floor to babysit a broken CEO and never says one word about the life she left behind. “No one waiting,” she told me, and I believed her. I still do. But somebody in Portland has her number, and one look at her face told me she wishes they didn’t.
Whoever that was, she’s afraid of them. Steel-spined Tessa Quinn, who stood in my study our first morning and took everything I threw at her without blinking—one phone call made her flinch, and she’d rather stand in my kitchen in silence than let me see it.
I’ve spent seven weeks fighting to get my own life back.
Tonight is the first night I lie awake wanting to fight for somebody else’s.