There’s a vine with a needle inserted into my hand, stemming from a bag with liquid on a pole that looks like a tree. For a second, I imagine seeing my mother beside Sarah, and an odd sense of peace and happiness washes over me. She has a wide smile on her face, nothing like I remember her. Is it really her? Am I dead? Whatever drugs are being administered through my veins must have hallucinatory effects. That must be why everything’s so foggy.
I shut my eyes for a moment—at least I think it’s a moment—and when I open them, Oliver is the only person in the room and he’s sitting on the bedside. I have no sense of time. He’s reading a book to me. I can’t make out its title, but his voice is soothing.
He reads. “It was the time when they both loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other moral trials, of course, but that no longer mattered—”
“They were on the other shore.” I croakily finish the passage from Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
A faint smile adorns his face. “Sophie.” Oliver grabs my hand and holds it up against his cheek. I’m quickly struck with how much I missed him, with how much I love him.
“Hi,” I say.
His hair looks long and unkempt, his face is covered with a two-or three-day beard, and the faintest of bags sit below his baby blues. He bends over me and folds me into his arms, careful not to hurt me.
We pull apart and immediately after, he says, “How are you feeling?”
“Like shit.”
“Well, at least you’re honest.”
“How long have I been here?”
“A couple of days. You had surgery done on the broken ribs. They have to keep an eye on you until you are stable enough to leave. The doctor says he doesn’t know how you’re breathing.”
My chest heaves under what feels like a heavy hospital robe. “John,” I say after several seconds of complete silence. “He gave me...drugs for the pain. I don’t know what kind. Where is he?”
“I don’t know, Sophie.”
I stare at him wild-eyed, blink a couple of times, and tilt my head to the side. “You don’t know?”
“Try not to worry. They’ll catch him. It’s only a matter of time.”
A wave of nausea passes over me. I look around, shocked. “You don’t understand. We have to find him now.” I frantically try to sit up. “He has to be locked up. We have to end this.” There’s a lot of beeping coming from the robots that are monitoring my heart. “He’s going to come looking for me again.”
“Try to take things easy, Sophie. You’re tired.” He gently pushes my shoulders back. “Lie down. You need to rest.”
“I can’t just rest with things like this, Oliver. I can’t,” I whisper. Then louder, “I can’t.”
“Yes, yes you can.”
“I want to...it’s just I can’t pretend this time.” A tear rolls slowly down my cheek. I’m mad, angry, riled up. “Oliver, I can’t pretend this time.”
“You don’t have to,” he says calmingly. “Just focus on getting better.” He kisses my forehead. Then, with caution in his voice, he says, “Sophie, I know you probably don’t want to talk about it, and the doctor ruled it out, but I need to hear it from you. I need to know if... if... he...” He doesn’t know how to ask me.
“Raped me? No,” I say, answering his silent question.
He exhales a long deep breathe at the news.
“He didn’t do anything to me. Not after...” I pause, remembering.
“Not after what?”
“Sarah. Where’s Sarah? He took her away! I don’t know where she is!”
“It’s okay. It’s okay. I found her too. She’s doing fine. Your aunt is taking care of her. You don’t need to stress yourself.”
I have a wave of emotions going through my body, mind, and soul and don’t know how to deal with them. “I don’t need to stress myself?” I repeat quietly. “I just figured out that I have a sister, Oliver. Things have changed. I’ve hurt Sarah enough, and she’s gone through so much. I can’t imagine how hard everything has been for her. She needs me now more than ever.”
“That’s it, isn’t it? What’s really bothering you. Guilt.”
I roll my head on the pillow and look at the window. Soon, it begins sprinkling. The sprinkling then turns into a tremendous pouring of rain.
“Sophie, we’re past this,” he says calmly. “Talk to me. Don’t shut me out anymore.”
This isn’t how I pictured the conversation going at all. “It’s not that I don’t want to talk to you. I just...you know it’s hard for me to express myself sometimes.”
“Well, you need to try.”
“I try.”
“Try harder.”
“Okay, I will,” I say. “And Oliver, you need to stop being so possessive of me. It just ruins things.” His eyes hold mine. They glow blue, yellow, and green in the hospital lights. “Respect me and trust me enough to know that I’m trying to work things out by myself. I don’t need you to fight my battles for me, but with me.”
With his fierce conviction and a look that says he will stand by me and we will pull through together, he takes my hand and kisses my wrist. “I’m just glad you’re safe.” A little smile plays on his lips as he says it. Then, it disappears. “I thought I lost you. I thought the worst. You don’t know what it did to me. I’d have given everything to have you back.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” I let out a breath. “So what now?” I ask, not sure I want to know the answer.
His hand lies on mine, and he caresses my wrist lightly. “How do you feel about Ontario?”
“You mean Canada?”
“Yes. We can go if you want to.”
“Now?”
“When the doctor says you’re fit to leave.” Frowning a little, eyes solemn, he exhales a breath and says, “Sophie, the media is crawling everywhere. I can’t leave this room without a reporter breathing down my neck.”
I stare at him, in perplexity as well as nervousness, at the very distinct bottled-up dread and anxiety gurgling underneath his body.
“I own a summer home on Kennisis Lake, twenty minutes outside of town. Though it’s not much of summer now. It’d be just you and me. Disappear for a couple of weeks. Get some time to recover.”
“What about work?”
“It’s not a problem. What do you say?”
“Okay.”
He says “thank you” almost religiously, like he was given what he prayed to God for. His words snake through my mind, calling to me, planting doubtful thoughts inside my head. I don’t know this man all too well yet, but I know his eyes dart around when he’s not completely comfortable, his entire expression alters, his face tenses up, his fuzzy brows pull together in concern. And at times like this—my senses sharp and my instincts kicking in to help me survive—I know him a lot more. “Oliver,” I begin, a hint of distrust in my voice, “this is not just about me. This is about you too, isn’t it?” He doesn’t look me in the eye. “Isn’t it?”
His silence is revealing.
“Oliver, what happened while I was gone?”
“It’s like you can read minds or something.”
“You bet something.”
He hesitates. “I was fired.”
“What? What do you mean fired?”
“The polite term is ‘replaced’, as in, came in to work, was told to step down from my position as president, chairman, and CEO of the company I built from the ground up, advised to accept the settlement, and leave quietly.”
I blink, thinking it over. “What settlement?”
“I can still act as a special advisor to the board, come and leave whenever I like. My office is still my office; no one sets foot. My parking space is still available to me. Among other things.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. You can’t be fired.”
“Well, I was,” he says dully. “There�
�s no two ways about it.”
“What are you going to do? You have a plan, don’t you?”
“Not at the moment, I don’t.”
My face knots. No? He always has a plan. He always knows what he’s doing. That must be why he looks so calm, because he knows what’s going to happen next. “Why did they fire you in the first place?”
And then he gives me a look, a look that says so much I rapidly know the motive. The reason is me. I’m the one to blame. I did that to him; brought chaos and gossip to his life. As if reading my thoughts, Oliver says, “It’s not your fault, Sophie. It was bound to happen sooner or later. The board had been trying to overthrow me for the longest time.”
“And now they were finally able to kick you out because of me.”
“Stop,” he whispers the word quietly, tiredly, fatally.
“I’m so sorry, Oliver. I never meant for any of this to happen. You seem calm given the situation.”
He sighs. “I’m anything but calm. There’s not a calm bone in my body. I am roiling. You and I have been caught in a whirlwind of troubles, publicity...attention. I’m trying to be strong here for the both of us.” Taking a breath, he sits up and walks around the room, running a hand through his hair. “You have to focus on getting better, Sophie,” he says, getting close to the bed again. “We have a particularly tough schedule coming up. It’s not going to be pretty. In fact, it’s going to be damned ugly. I need you to be alive and kicking and ready for what’s ahead. We’ll go up to the lake, go fishing, take in the view; no one and nothing will disturb us. And when we come back, phones will ring, the media will tear us up, cameras will be shoved in our faces. We build each other up, no matter what. And we hold our heads high. That’s the only way we’re going to get out of this.”
“Okay,” I say as if he just asked me to meet him for lunch.
“Okay?”
I shift in bed, trying to get comfortable. “Yeah, okay.”
“Why do you keep saying ‘okay’?”
“Am I doing that?”
“You are.”
“I don’t know. It means I can do it. No problem. I’ll get better. I’ll be ready.”
“Is that what it means?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, then...okay.”
He kisses me this time. He draws back, grinning at me, and I smile back at him, even though a great part of me is worried about what’s to come. Some other thought crosses my mind, then another, until my mind is going in circles and I can’t focus on anything other than this moment.
Next thing I know, Oliver is lying next to me. He gently wraps his arm around me, and I relax into him, my head snuggling up to his chest. We stay like that, for I don’t know how long, body to body, hand in hand, not doing anything, just quietly breathing, just being aware. All around us is calm and orderly.
I turn my head and look up at him. “It’s going to be okay, right?”
“Yes, it’s going to be okay,” he says, this and nothing more.
To be continued...
SNEAK PEEK AT BLACK DIAMOND
TO GET AWAY from it all, Oliver and Sophie head to his waterfront home in Haliburton, Ontario’s Kennisis Lake. It’s a two-story dream cottage of pure woodland comfort with walls of windows, sitting on a private bay, ideal for swimming, fishing, and godlike sunsets. Boat, helicopter, or walking are the only ways to reach the house. Boreal forests are dressed in the colors of harvest: green, gold, and bits of red. The air, the ground, every leaf bursts with an autumnal tone, and the water is vast and placid, bordered by grasses and towering pines everywhere. Trees show us how it’s done. Allow things to change; let go of what is dead. No attachments. No pain. And above all, stand firm. Nothing lasts forever. You live. You die. Fall is a time of great transformation, as nature prepares for the harsh winter. Just the same, for the past two weeks, Sophie has been attempting to heal, look inward, and become stronger for the day she has to go back and face the world.
Sophie keeps it to herself that her mind has been playing tricks on her. Every chance it has, her head wreaks havoc, showing her images of the past, John Henry Bridges’s face. And all she does about it is shake her head, as if the action can dispel the memory. It’s misery, gloom, and wretchedness robbing her of clarity. She knows she’s not in control of her own thinking. Every morning she runs like a gazelle fleeing from a lion through the woods, moving until her body aches and all she can feel is the pull of her muscles. She’s been exercising, not for strength and endurance, but to run as fast and as far as her body will allow.
Oliver says nothing, but he’s noted a difference in her personality. On the surface, she’s the same girl he fell head-over-heels with, and yet she’s become someone else completely, a woman of incredible grit. She’s there in body, but she’s changed inside. Oliver helps her through the change, and that is more than Sophie lets anyone else do. She’s withdrawn into her head, and he knows this because he’s seen her go through enough disasters to recognize her patterns. Each day she tells him a little bit more, about what it felt like to be caged in a room without sunlight for days, about her nightmares and fears. Some nights, Oliver refuses to sleep, wanting to just look at her and make sure she’s there in bed with him, and not really still locked up in that goddamn storage unit. He caves in eventually when exhaustion gets in the way, but when his own nightmares wake him up, he’s relieved to see her resting, curled up on her side with the blanket pulled up to her nose, and he manages to get back to sleep.
Late at night, once again sleep escaping them both, Oliver suggests they go for a walk. They set out to the floating dock leading to the lake, lounge in Adirondack chairs overlooking the soundless water, and tilt their heads back to the radiant white loop in the sky. Sitting under a canopy of stars so bright, and seemingly near, it feels like you can reach out and grab them. Oliver muses about stellar evolution. He turns to his side and looks at Sophie. The glow of the moon half illuminates her face.
“You know how stars die?” he says, pensive.
Sophie doesn’t realize he’s looking at her until he speaks. “What?” His question comes in the middle of her haze.
“Supernova,” he explains.
Sophie is so far removed from her own everyday personality that Oliver thinks she’s using up all her willpower to not tumble to the ground or show any indication of weakness. Whatever it is, whatever happens, Sophie is calm. She’s stubborn like that—gloriously, delightfully stubborn—and can keep up the act until the end of things if she wants to. Even though Sophie is determined to make the best of it, Oliver is certain she’ll explode like a radiator cap under pressure at some point, fears for the day that he’ll hear of it.
“Massive stars die when they have exhausted their burning fuel,” he points out, “and the result is a stellar blast that briefly outshines an entire galaxy.”
“You’ve been watching too much Discovery Channel,” she jokes, returning her gaze to the sky.
“Actually, it was Cosmos on Fox. But give it some thought, stars give out large amounts of energy and burn and gleam with their diamond brilliance and then…then nothing.”
Sophie has no clue what hocus-pocus this man says most of the time or how his mind operates. But it’s wonderful, the way he gets her thinking about the universe.
“When a star dies, it shoots out cosmic dust across the universe, and the remains are scattered all over, creating new stars, new solar systems. We are all formed from this rich elemental material. This is our life. This chair. This lake. You. Me.”
“Stardust,” she says, voice low.
“Exactly.”
“So a star died and gave me life, is that what you’re saying?” She glances at him, her eyebrows raised in disbelief. “How tragic.”
“Well, yes. You live because stars died; it’s that simple. It’s not tragic, it’s science. And I wouldn’t just look at it that way. There’s always a different way to see things.”
“How would you look at it then?”
“There are almost seven billion billion billion atoms inside the human body, yes?”
“Uh…huh…” Who even knows the answer to that? Not her, that’s for sure.
“And almost all atoms are formed in atom forges. Otherwise known as stars.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is, Sophie, the stars of long ago are physically a part of us. So, perhaps, a millennia ago someone may have wished upon a star that you are made of.”
Sophie looks at him, his face silhouetted under the radiance of the moon, his eyes the palest blue, and even though the night partially dims his features, she still sees him in a positive light. She gets up and goes to sit on his lap, her back against his chest, his chin on her shoulder, his arms around her.
That night, they sit and talk for hours about nothing and everything until the sun comes up.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To Him who is my universal life force. You saved me. You landed that plane in one piece even though the engine was gone. You gave me another chance at life, another chance to get it right. Nothing ever quite made sense to me, until now. You are all that’s good in me.
Debra L Hartmann, my editor, you are a machine. Huge, huge, thank you for being wonderful and patient with this rookie! A lot of respect to Sue Toth, Amy Eye, and Evona York—this book would not be what it is without your incredible help. A special thanks to all my beta readers. You rock! Omar Ramirez, my amazingly talented creative director, thank you for believing in this project and for being so attentive to details. You better start working on a soundtrack.
My dear wonderful parents: I guess all those years in school I spent daydreaming finally paid off. This really good thing happened because of it. Thank you, mom and dad, for everything you have done for me, for teaching me to be my own woman, to be free, and follow my dreams. Your support means everything to me. I love you with all my heart.
To my co-mother (get it?) and soulmate, Joanna. You liked the book back when it was an atrocious disaster. That right there says you’re a true friend! Thank you just doesn’t cut it. You and little Sofia are in my heart.
A Diamond in the Rough Page 34
