by Mindy Klasky
“Hey there, sweetheart.”
She couldn’t remember another person who’d ever called her by an endearment. Not her mother, and definitely not Warren. None of the guys she’d dated along the way—she’d been lucky if they’d bothered to drop her name into conversation every once in a while. Maybe that’s why she felt like she was basking in a hot ray of sunshine as his words melted through the phone in her hand.
“What’s up?” she asked. Because endearment or not, it was unusual for Kyle to call her during the day.
“They just released the schedule for the division series. I wanted you to know as soon as possible, so you can clear your schedule.”
Clear her schedule. A sliver of foreboding cut through the sunny joy in her belly. “What do you mean?” she asked. Even though she knew exactly what he meant.
“There are two day games in the first series. There might be one more, in the championship series. But all the World Series games will be at night.”
She licked her lips. Maybe this wasn’t a problem. Maybe the dates would line up. “When are they?”
“The first is Thursday. One o’clock.” She exhaled a little. So far, so good.
“And the second?”
“Friday. Four in the afternoon.”
Impossible. She couldn’t shift her meeting with Antoine Phillips—the doctor had no flexibility in his schedule. And he was far too valuable a witness for her to ignore. No baseball game—post-season or not—was going to get in her way.
“Amanda?” Kyle’s voice cut through her thoughts.
“I’m here,” she said, putting on her best lawyerly voice. She had to explain why she would head to DC, make him understand that her entire case turned on the trip. Before she could say anything else, though, the phone on her desk rang. She hated the wave of relief that washed over her. “I need to get that.”
“Amanda!”
“Let’s talk tonight,” she said as the phone rang again.
“Fine,” he said, but she heard wariness in his voice. “Come to my place after work.”
“I might be late.” One more ring.
“I’ll be here.”
She grabbed the other line just before it rolled over to voicemail. “Carter,” she snapped.
“Mandy.” Her mother, sounding worried. “I’m sorry to bother you at the office, but I’m afraid this couldn’t wait.”
“What’s wrong?”
Silence, just long enough for Amanda to grit her teeth as a gigantic slug of dread oozed across her belly. Then her mother’s usual matter-of-fact speech, the way she’d always delivered bad news, shooting words out like shells from a Gatling gun. “I just got back from the doctor. I finally have the second opinion about my back, and it’s just as bad as the first.”
Amanda grabbed for a pad of paper and started scribbling down prime numbers. She’d known her mother was going in for this consultation; it was long overdue. But Amanda had let herself ignore the details, had let herself forget the specific dates and times because there was nothing she could do to control the situation, nothing she could do to make everything better.
2. 3. 5. “What did the doctor say?” Amanda asked, letting the flow of numbers even her tone.
Her mother took a deep breath and then started delivering her diagnosis, clearly reading from some written material. Sacral curvature. L3. L5. Spinal degeneration. Spinal stenosis.
7. 11. 13. Amanda wrote the numbers across the top of the page, even as she recorded all the medical terms.
“Bottom line,” her mother said. “It’s surgery now or a wheelchair within three months.”
17. 19. “What type of surgery?”
She heard pages rustle, and then the medical recitation began again. Invasive. Unique presentation. Uncertain results. Potentially incapacitating.
23. 29. 31. 27. 41. The primes weren’t helping. Nothing could help. Amanda floated on familiar waves of guilt. The diagnosis might have been different if her mother had gone to the doctor years ago, when the pain first started. Surgery might have been simpler then, more likely to succeed. Less likely to leave Laura in agony for days, weeks, months, as she attempted complete rehabilitation.
But Laura hadn’t dared try anything earlier. She couldn’t risk the cost.
Swallowing bitter self-condemnation, Amanda asked, “And there’s no other option?”
“There is another procedure.”
Amanda sat up straighter. “Yes?”
“Dr. Greer would refer me to a specialist, someone connected with the university.”
Something was wrong here. Something made her mother uneasy, afraid. And through the years, no matter what had happened, no matter what disasters Warren brought on the family, what crises the credit bureaus and the banks had presented, Laura Carter had never been afraid.
“What is it, Mom? What aren’t you telling me?”
“The procedure is non-invasive. Recovery would be measured in weeks instead of months. But it’s experimental. Not covered by insurance. And the hospital requires payment up front.”
Amanda blinked hard at her string of primes, at the perfect, pure numbers. They couldn’t be reduced. They couldn’t be broken into component parts. They were strong and stable and steady, no matter how they were manipulated.
Her mouth was too dry for her to swallow, but she forced herself to ask, “How much?”
“Thirty-two thousand dollars.”
“What?” Amanda’s throat choked closed on the number.
“That covers the anesthesiologist, and all the lab tests, the operating theater, and follow-up scans.”
It should cover gold-plated scalpels. But Amanda couldn’t say that to her mother. She understood the complex tangle of Carter pride and privacy. Laura would never have called if she’d seen any other way to take care of herself, if there’d been any other option at all.
Amanda sighed. “When do they need it?”
“The surgeon had a cancellation in his schedule. He can fit me in for surgery next Wednesday.”
Amanda chewed on her lower lip. If she’d worked in a standard office, she might be able to raid her retirement account. She might negotiate a loan against a pension. But the law firm’s partnership didn’t give her any of those luxuries.
This was insane—another massive debt coming due in the space of two months. She should have planned better, should have managed her life with greater attention to detail.
But she did plan. The only predictable expense had been her payment into the partnership. The rest of it—Hunter’s aides, the DC office, her mother’s surgery—those were emergencies. Unpredictable. Variables she couldn’t control. She wasn’t a failure; the world just had a way of laughing at her most careful plans.
She tested her voice inside her head before she said, “Let me see what I can do, Mom.”
“It it’s too much trouble…”
Right. Like it had been too much trouble for Laura to work double shifts the entire time Amanda was growing up. Like it had been too much trouble when Amanda needed poster boards for school science fair projects. Like it had been too much trouble when Amanda needed a programmable calculator for her first college-level class, way back in her freshman year of high school.
“Of course it’s not too much trouble. I just have to shift some money around between accounts.”
And that was all Amanda could say. She couldn’t tell her mother the truth, couldn’t admit that she didn’t have two pennies to rub together. Because Carters kept their problems to themselves. Carters didn’t gossip. Carters didn’t tell tales. Privacy above all.
The only thing Amanda had to decide was whether to beg Kyle for the money before or after she told him she couldn’t attend his game on Friday.
~~~
“Go ahead,” Kyle said to the doorman over the in-house line. “Send her up.”
He tossed some ice cubes into a tumbler and added a generous pour of Ketel One. He was waiting by the elevator as the door to his penthouse opened.
God, she was gorgeous. It wasn’t just the straight black hair. It wasn’t only those huge green eyes, looking hungry and innocent at the same time. It wasn’t even her body, the curves he could picture beneath her prim and proper suit, the calves stretched into a perfect taut line by those heels she wore.
It was all of that, but it was something more. She might act like she was in charge of the entire world, like she could reduce everything to a perfect scientific equation, but he knew the way her lips parted when she’d reached the point of no return. He knew how her voice sounded when she gasped out his name while he was deep inside her.
He handed her the vodka and then he shoved his hand into his pocket so he wouldn’t crush her against his chest before she even had a chance to sip. She nodded, almost like she was distracted, and she dropped her briefcase on the couch. He expected her to kick off her shoes. He hoped she would peel off her jacket.
Instead, she crossed the room and stood in front of the picture window, staring out at the Raleigh skyline. She gulped from her glass like she needed the fortification, and then she shook her head.
“Amanda?” he asked. But she didn’t turn to face him. A fist of ice colder than anything in her glass punched his spine.
He crossed the room to stand behind her. She flinched—he couldn’t ignore that. But he slipped his hand beneath the waterfall of her hair. He bared the nape of her neck and leaned down to brush his lips against her vulnerable skin. He felt a shiver ripple across her shoulders. His cock rose in response, urging him forward, telling him to turn her around, to give her the kiss he really wanted to give, to forget about kissing altogether and just drag her off to his bed.
“Amanda?” he asked again, this time barely raising his voice to a whisper.
She tried to pull away, to slip to the side. His hands closed over her hips, and he turned her gently, not fighting when she insisted on staring into the clear liquor in her glass.
“What’s wrong, sweetheart?”
Her breath caught in her throat. He saw her glance toward her briefcase, like she was trying to take refuge in whatever files she’d carried home—numbers and charts and graphs that would force her entire world to make sense. He caught her chin gently between his thumb and forefinger and forced her to look up at him.
“Whatever you’re thinking,” he said. “It can’t be that bad.”
She licked her lips, just the tip of her tongue tracing the path he longed to follow. “It is,” she said. And then she seemed to reach some decision. She looked at him, really saw him for the first time since she’d entered his home. She raised her palm toward his face, like she was going to cup his jaw, but she pulled back from his full beard. “That was my mother calling this afternoon. When we were on the phone.”
So she did have a mother. This was the first he’d heard of her family. He waited.
And finally she said, “I can’t tell you why. But she needs thirty-two thousand dollars. She needs the money, and I can’t get it for her.”
This time, she did step away, to the very edge of the window. She tossed back the rest of her drink and folded the glass against her free wrist, like she was trying to ice her veins. She spoke to the Raleigh skyline. “My first thought, the second I hung up the phone, was to take out my file on Spring Valley.”
Against his will, his gut tightened.
He saw the way her shoulders stiffened. She clearly wanted to run across the room, to push the button for the elevator, to get the hell out of the condo forever.
Instead, she turned to face him. She looked at him steadily and said, “I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it, Kyle. Not now. Not when I know you. Not when I know how different you are from the boy who went to Spring Valley.”
He was different. He was a man now. Not just in body, but in spirit, too. He was a better person, because of the past two months with Amanda. He’d finally grown up.
And for the first time since that horrible freshman year, he realized that he could tell the truth. In a few weeks, anyway—after the season ended. If the Rockets went all the way—and there was no reason they wouldn’t, not this year, not with his hitting streak still going strong, not with the rest of the team firing on all cylinders—that would soften the blow. The newspaper guys were already moving on to cover football anyway, and basketball would heat up in a month. There wasn’t a hell of a lot of room for a story about a world champion right fielder’s stupid mistakes on the way up.
With Amanda by his side, he could do anything. He could admit to all his stupid mistakes, tell the world he’d screwed up when he was a kid, he’d fucked up even more by keeping things secret for so many years. He could say that, because he had Amanda beside him, because she trusted him. Because he trusted her.
Because he loved her.
“Amanda,” he said, and her name turned into a laugh. “You can have the money. I’ll write you a check.”
He crossed the room to the kitchen and yanked open the drawer by the phone. There were half a dozen pens in there, menus from local restaurants, a few batteries, a charging cord for something. Toward the back, there was a plastic checkbook.
Thirty-two thousand dollars. He had enough to cover it; he didn’t even need to call his manager, tell the guy to move around funds.
Kyle knew he was lucky. There weren’t a lot of men who could write a check like that without wincing at the zeroes. But he’d fought hard to get where he was. He’d played good ball his entire professional career. And the payoff was that he could protect the people he cared for. He wrote Amanda’s name carefully before he dashed off his signature.
He ripped out the check and turned around.
“Here,” he said, and he crossed the room to put the piece of paper in her hand.
“I can’t—”
“I’m not going to argue.” He folded the slip of paper in half. When she still refused to take it, he slipped it into her breast pocket.
This time, she did step away from him. She folded her hands across her chest, and she refused to meet his eyes. “Kyle, there’s something else I have to tell you.”
One glance, and he knew this was the real reason she’d been on edge. Money was money. She’d taken his checks before.
She was here for another reason. She was here to kick him in the balls.
“The game on Friday,” she said. Maybe it was her voice, ratcheted so tight she no longer sounded like Amanda. Or maybe it was his ears, already prepared for what she was going to say, already recognizing the danger. But it sounded like she was screeching the words, like she was a chain saw carving out chunks of his heart. “I can’t be there.”
“You have—”
“I can’t!” She pulled herself to her full height then. She locked her knees and said, “I’ll be out of town, on the UPA case. I’d change things if I could, but I don’t have any flexibility. Not this time. I’m sorry.”
“This isn’t funny, Amanda.” But he knew she wasn’t joking.
“I have an expert witness, the key to my entire case. The only day we can meet is Friday. I can’t change a thing.”
He heard her explanation. Each individual word made sense. He watched her strengthen as she repeated her argument. She believed what she was saying; she didn’t think she was doing anything wrong.
He couldn’t put together the words to tell her what she was doing to him. She was the reason he’d started his hitting streak. She’d carried him—carried the team—to the best record they’d had in decades. Without her, he was back to holding his breath as he watched fly balls come up short, as line drives headed straight into opponents’ gloves.
“Move the meeting,” he said.
“Not this time.”
“Call in sick.”
“No one else can take this deposition.”
“Amanda!” He hated the panic in his voice, the raw fear that everything was about to slip away, the entire season, everything he’d accomplished, everything the Rockets had done. “I need you! The team needs you! This
is the last chance Marty Benson is ever going to have to win a championship!”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He heard the truth then. It was right there, in two simple words. She said she was sorry. She said she didn’t want to do this to him.
But the truth was she’d never understood him. She’d never understood his need for her to be at the game. She’d never truly gotten the superstition that had bound them together, that had made her the perfect woman for him. She’d never believed.
“Get out of here,” he said.
“I—”
“Go on,” he said, and he pointed toward the elevator like she was some sort of servant he was dismissing, like she was some sort of dog.
“Kyle—”
He didn’t have any words. He certainly couldn’t draw up the numbers, the diagrams, the charts that fed whatever passed for her soul. He couldn’t do anything to change her mind.
And so he turned on his heel and marched into his bedroom, slamming the door as hard as he could. He pretended he didn’t hear her soft knock after almost fifteen minutes had passed. He pretended he didn’t hear the bell of the elevator arriving. He pretended he didn’t hear his heart pounding in his ears as he realized his hitting streak was over.
The playoffs were about to start, and he was doomed.
~~~
Friday evening, Amanda’s plane landed in North Carolina, half an hour late. It seemed like she’d spent her entire day in airports, hurry up and wait.
Not the entire day, though. She’d had four hours in Link Oster’s fledgling DC office. Four glorious hours with Antoine Phillips, a court reporter, and an unhappy lawyer for the other side. Now, settling onto the back seat of a Raleigh cab, she shifted her litigation bag closer to her side, protective of the documents inside, of the thumb drive that held Dr. Phillips’ testimony, the new heart and soul of her case.
“Where to?” the cabbie asked.
Amanda thought about going home. She could spread out her notes on her kitchen table, begin to work in all the new facts Dr. Phillips had given her. She could smooth over the rough edges of her case and iron out her entire opening argument right then, while everything was fresh in her mind.
