Fractured (Not Quite a Billionaire #2) (46 page)

He shot me another hard look, but he did it.

I’d canceled Saturday, and it had been a mistake, because I’d needed this, so much so that I’d left work at five-thirty to get it. I’d been useless anyway. And for the next hour, I threw myself into exercise, trying to drive out the anger and the frustration, or at least to exhaust myself enough for sleep to come, as it hadn’t since Friday.

I needed to hold her, that was all. I could barely sleep without her. Karen kept me company during my brief hours at home, as much as her important work and social schedule permitted, but eventually, I had to go to bed.

I lay in the dark night after night, staring at the ceiling after another day of working to keep the ship afloat, with nobody to wrap my arm around. Nobody’s flower-scented hair against my cheek, nobody’s soft skin under my arm. Nobody’s head pillowed on my chest, and nobody to listen to the beating of my heart. Because she hadn’t come home, and in the dark hours, at two and three and four in the morning, I was afraid she never would. She called Karen, she didn’t call me, and I missed her with an ache that was physical. The pain of a phantom limb, something that had been part of me and was gone.

I was angry—still, always—and I was as confused as a bull in a field of rocks. If she loved me, she’d be with me. She seemed to be trying to teach me a lesson, but if she was, I wasn’t learning it. She wanted me to love her less, to need her less? She said she loved me, but she’d left me when I most needed her?

Of course she left you,
the evil voice whispered. The voice I heard at two and three and four o’clock and was hearing again now, because there was no work and no exercise and no music that could drown it out.
They always leave you. You’re too hard to love.

“Whoa,” Eugene said after I’d pummeled the living hell out of the punching bag and was standing, head down, arms dropping, breathing hard and my sweat dripping onto the floor. “It ain’t the bag’s fault. That ex causing trouble between the two of you? That why Hope’s not here? That sounds like a big ol’ mess.”

“Oh,” I said, accepting his help in stripping off the gloves, hoping he wouldn’t notice that my arm muscles were trembling with fatigue and knowing he did. “You heard about that.”

“If you’re going to be a big shot, everybody’s going to pay attention. Guess that’s the downside. But you think Hope’s believing you did something wrong, or worried about the money? ‘Cause I got to tell you, man…”

“No. Of course not.” I didn’t ask what Eugene believed. I didn’t want to know. Instead, I reached for the towel and rubbed my head down. “I’m ready.”

“Well, don’t start thinking it,” Eugene said. “Got to be obvious by now that she ain’t in it for the money. And I notice you didn’t ask me if I believed it, which shows me you ain’t quite as dumb as you sometimes act. So I got to ask myself—where is she, and what’s got you so twisted up?”

I just stared at him, and he said, “No? Give me twenty pushups, then, to finish off. Twenty regular, that is. And then ten one hand, ten the other. You need to work it out? Work it out.”

He was pushing me, but I wanted to be pushed. By the last two reps on my weaker left side, my entire arm was shaking, and when I got to my feet, Eugene shook his head.

“Adrenaline running the show again,” he said. “Get on the bike and take one more shot at letting it go, and we’re done.”

When I climbed on, he pulled out his stopwatch, pressed it, and kept his eye on it. Finally, I said, “She left.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, still not looking up. “How come?”

I shrugged and kept pedaling, and he waited without speaking until I said, “Because she doesn’t want to work at the company, doesn’t want my help. Says I’m…”

I stopped, but Eugene had no trouble filling in the sentence. “Taking away her air. Holding her so tight she can’t breathe.”

I glared at him. “If you know, why are you asking?”

“Man, I’m not the one brought this up.”

“Ha.” He was
exactly
the one.

He looked at the watch some more. “You ever think she might be pregnant?”

My feet stopped pedaling, and then I did the math and started up again. “No. That’s not it. She had a period, what, a few weeks ago. Three, four, somewhere like that, so she couldn’t be having any…what? Effects yet.”

He snorted. “Got a lot of experience with pregnant women, do you? She ain’t been progressing in here one bit the way she ought to’ve been. She’s trying, but her heart rate shoots up there right away, and then it stays up there like it shouldn’t. Gets tired too fast, too, ever since we started, and it’s not getting better like it ought to do.”

“But I told you,” I said. “Even if she were…” I had to work to get the word out, “pregnant, it’d be, what? A week? Two weeks? Barely a…an egg. And this started before then.”

“Uh-huh. It’s like I thought. You don’t know nothing. A woman gets pregnant, she’s got all this extra work going on right away. She’s making extra blood, heart’s pumping harder to move it around, lungs got to work more, too. And them hormones…I got three kids, two of ‘em daughters. Got two grandkids, too. You know how a guy takes ‘roids and gets all ragey? That’s male hormones, what they do to you. So what do you think happens when a woman’s got all them
female
hormones going wild in there, not giving her a moment’s peace? She ain’t never felt that way before, thinks she’s losing her mind, that’s what. Laughing one minute, crying the next, so tired she can’t hardly get out of bed, and trying to go on like normal. You think she’s bad when she’s having her period? That ain’t
nothin’
compared to pregnancy. A pregnant woman—you got to cut her some slack. Anything hard you think you’ve done in your life, you better believe she’s working harder than that making your baby for you, and it starts way,
way
before she’s showing.”

Making your baby for you.

I’d long since stopped pedaling, because what he’d described—it sounded exactly like Hope. “She’s had a dodgy stomach,” I said slowly. “Ever since we came back from En Zed. Tired. Crying some, too, and that’s not usual. That’s not
ever.
But that’s not…that can’t…it’s what I said. The timing’s wrong. And anyway, she’d have told me.”

I tried to suppress the disappointment, just as I’d tamped down a surge of excitement at Eugene’s description that had shocked me into breathlessness. Hope might not have been the only one who’d had some trouble with moods lately.

“Maybe not, then,” Eugene said, “but if it ain’t that? Then it’s
something
going on. I told her to go get checked out. She ever do that?”

“No.” I was pedaling again, because I couldn’t sit still. “Told me she was fine, that it was nothing serious.”

“Hmm,” Eugene said. “Now, Karen got real sick like that, and their mama died, right? Least that’s what Debra said.”

“Yeh. Cancer, when she was…dunno. Late thirties, I’m guessing.” My scalp was prickling, and everything had changed again. Now, it was the creeping fear that I couldn’t pedal away.

“Which means if Hope did have something wrong with her,” Eugene said, “maybe she wouldn’t want to find out. Maybe it would scare her too bad to even think about, leaving Karen like that, the same way she got left. Or maybe she
did
find out, and she didn’t want to tell you. Whatever it is, don’t you think you better ask?”

“I tried asking.”

Hope didn’t have anything wrong with her, I told myself. She couldn’t have. Not like that. Nothing but an upset stomach, a little fatigue. She’d had a new job and a new living situation, and neither of them had been easy for her. That had to be all it was. The cold dread in the pit of my stomach tried to tell me something else, and I shoved it away.

“You sure you asked?” Eugene said. “Or did it get caught up in everything else, and all you said was what she ought to do? What’d you do, tell her to stop being so stupid?” When I stopped pedaling again, he sighed and shook his head. “Don’t tell me. What was the word?”

“What word?”

He gave me a stare that compelled the truth from me. “The word you used.”

“Childish,” I admitted. “I may have said ‘irrational,’ too. Maybe a couple other things. Because she was.”

“Now, how did I know? Bet that went over
real
good. Here’s the cold, hard truth, and I’m telling it to you, even though you’re not one bit ready to listen. The point with a woman ain’t winning. The point is
keeping.
If she ain’t in your bed anymore, you ain’t winning.”

He didn’t have to explain that. I got it. “Which doesn’t help,” I informed him, “not if I don’t know what I’m meant to do to get her to come home.” And to the doctor, too. Just to check. Just in case.

“Could start with an apology. That’s generally a pretty good spot, ‘cause it’s the hardest, and women do like it when you try your hardest.” He picked up his bag from the corner. “Or you could try something else, of course, since you probably think you got a better idea, or if you can’t apologize ‘cause you know you were right. Only thing I know for sure is, ain’t no motto in the world that goes, ‘I Give Up.’”

Hope

Let’s just pass over the days between Friday and Tuesday, shall we? Suffice it to say that I’d found out what it was like to be alone, and I hated it.

I know it’s weird that I hadn’t had the experience before, but I hadn’t. Other than the occasional night when Karen had slept over at a friend’s, I’d never been alone in
bed,
let alone in a whole apartment. And it was lonesome. As hot as it was, I still missed the warmth of another body.

I missed Karen, even though I called her every night. And, oh, how I missed Hemi. How I questioned my decision, even though I knew it had been the only one possible.

I missed his touch. I missed his voice. I missed his smell. But a woman who lost her breath and nearly had a panic attack from climbing the stairs and walking into an empty apartment, who burst into tears at the sight of her single toothbrush in the rack and wept through a Katherine Hepburn movie because Spencer Tracy would never love her for her wit and her brains and her success, and neither would Hemi—that woman had no business getting married to a man that powerful and complex. A woman like that had damn well better start getting a backbone.

And, yes, I do realize that I was declaring my independence by living in an apartment on which my boyfriend had paid the rent, and that my very electric bill was being covered by said boyfriend. Which was why I needed a job, and I needed it fast. I had a few thousand dollars in my personal account from before Hemi had opened the joint one, and that was my spending limit. And as soon as I had a job…rent.

Did I get that the money wouldn’t exactly make a big dent in his wallet, and that it would infuriate him to start getting rent checks from me? Sure I did. But all I had to navigate by was my own intuition, my own judgment. Otherwise, with no job, no sister, and no Hemi, I was rudderless.

Oh, and sick, too, my lightheaded episodes exacerbated by the heat. On Sunday, I had to stop on the way home from the store to lean against the wall before I could go on. On Monday afternoon, I walked upstairs with my laundry basket and had to put my head between my knees again. On Tuesday, I gave in and called the doctor.

“It’s probably nothing,” I told Dr. Galbraith that afternoon, after I’d braved the subway to Manhattan and nearly passed out again from being in the crowd. “Probably anxiety or low iron or something. Those can cause this kind of thing, right? I hardly ever get sick.”

I didn’t say what I feared, the thought that had me waking in the middle of the night. That this was how my mother had been, before she’d gotten even sicker. Before she’d died.

I wasn’t a hypochondriac, though. I’d never been one to imagine that every headache was a brain tumor. It would be something simple and easily fixed. It had to be. I was Karen’s guardian.

Then where is she?
the nagging voice in my head whispered, even as I tried to shake it loose.
Who’s looking out for her? Who’s left her?

“Hmm,” Dr. Galbraith said, a word they must teach in medical school. She’d listened to my heart and had apparently found that it was still beating. “Well, when we hear hoofbeats, we look for horses, not for zebras. When was your last period?”