THE BILLIONAIRE'S SURGEON BRIDE

Chapter Five: Nine Days

I moved into my husband's house with two boxes and a garment bag.

That's the whole inventory. Everything I owned that wasn't furniture Julian had paid for or textbooks I could replace fit into the trunk of a car, and the man who carried them in — one of the dark suits, whose name turned out to be Bekele — did it in a single trip and then looked embarrassed on my behalf.

The house was on the North Shore. Long, low, glass on the water side, the kind of architecture that costs a great deal specifically in order not to announce itself. There were eleven rooms I never once entered in the year I lived there.

And there was Clara everywhere.

Not photographs. That would have been easier. It was subtler and much worse: a woman's handwriting on the spines of the cookbooks. A pair of gardening gloves, stiff with four-year-old dirt, hanging on a hook by the terrace door that nobody had been able to take down. Two mugs in the cabinet that didn't match the set.

And beyond the glass, sloping down to the water, the garden.

I stood in the kitchen of a house I had been married into for nine days and had never seen, and I understood that Damian Vale had not moved a single object since the Tuesday his wife died in that garden, and that some part of him was going to have to be dragged out of this building or he would die in it too.

* * *

They discharged him on day nine.

Uncomplicated sternotomy, chest tube out on five, ambulating, digoxin level down to 0.9 and falling — because for nine days, every single thing that went into his body had gone past me first.

Home care was a nurse named Priya three hours a day, a cardiology attending on call, and me.

"You understand I'm not your physician anymore," I said, on the first evening, laying out the dressing tray on the bed in the guest suite we'd converted. "Legally I can't be. I'm your spouse. It's a conflict, it's an ethics violation, and if anyone finds out I've been managing your care I lose my license."

"Then don't manage my care."

"I'm going to manage your care."

"Yes," he said. "I know."

He was sitting on the edge of the bed in a t-shirt, and he pulled it off with the slow, careful, hard-won choreography of a man nine days out from having his sternum sawn open, and I stopped hearing whatever he said next.

I have seen several hundred chests. I have seen this one. I opened it.

But there is an enormous difference between a draped surgical field under lights and a man sitting on a bed in the evening with the water going grey outside, and the difference is this: in the operating room the body is a problem. Here it was a person. The incision ran the length of his sternum, clean, healing, the closure line still angry pink. Around it, the map of everything else — the chest tube site, the drain scars, the four days of bruising going yellow at the edges from being restarted twice.

I had done all of it to him. Every single mark on him was mine.

"Dr. Reyes."

"Elena," I said, without deciding to.

Something crossed his face.

"Elena," he said.

I got the gloves on. My hands, which have never once shaken over a chest, were not steady.

I cleaned the incision line from top to bottom. He held absolutely still. I could feel his breathing under my fingers, shallow because deep hurt, and I could feel his heart — of course I could, there was nothing between my hand and it but eleven days of healing and a wire I had twisted closed myself — and neither of us said anything for a long time.

"Does it hurt?" I said.

"Constantly."

"Are you taking the—"

"No."

"Damian."

"They make me stupid." He said it flatly. "I need to be able to tell whether a thing is happening or whether I'm imagining it. That's the whole of my situation. I'll take the pain."

I put the last strip of tape down and smoothed it with two fingers, and I did not take my hand away as quickly as I should have.

Under my palm his heart went a little faster.

I looked up.

He was watching me with an expression I had no defence against at all — not hunger, which I could have managed, but something much more careful. A man doing arithmetic about whether he was allowed to want something.

"Six weeks," I said. My voice came out low and wrong.

"I'm sorry?"

"Sternal precautions. No lifting, no pushing, no pulling, nothing that loads the chest wall." I pulled the gloves off and dropped them in the bin without looking at him. "For six to eight weeks."

"Doctor, is that a general statement or a specific one?"

"It's very specific."

"Ah."

"Your sternum is currently held together by wire," I said. "It's not a suggestion, it's mechanics."

"Elena." He was almost, almost laughing, and it clearly cost him. "I've been married to you for nine days. I've kissed you once, in front of a county clerk and a woman named Denise. I promise you I am not making plans."

"Good."

"I'm making a timeline."

I picked up the tray and left the room, and I stood in the corridor with my back against the wall and my eyes shut, and I thought, with total clarity: you are in enormous trouble.

* * *

I woke at two in the morning because the house was making a sound.

Not an alarming one. A chair, moving, somewhere below. I went down in scrub bottoms and one of the two sweatshirts I owned, and I found him in the low room by the water glass, sitting upright in an armchair with a blanket he hadn't bothered to pull up.

"You can't sleep flat," I said.

"No."

"You're supposed to be using the wedge."

"The wedge is for people who intend to sleep."

I sat down on the ottoman opposite him. The water outside was black and moving and there was one light on the far shore.

"Nine days ago you had two cardiac arrests," I said. "Your body needs—"

"Elena." Quietly. "I know what my body needs. I need you to let me be awake."

So I let him be awake. I sat there in the dark with my husband of nine days and neither of us said anything for a while, and I found that it was not uncomfortable, which frightened me more than anything that had happened yet.

"She planted all of it," he said eventually.

I didn't ask what.

"Every bed out there. She had a plan for the whole slope, it was supposed to take eleven years." He was looking out at nothing. "It's four years in. It's still doing it. Things keep coming up on a schedule set by a person who isn't here."

"Damian."

"I'm not going to tell you about her tonight," he said. "I want to. I'm aware that I owe you that and I'm aware of the shape of what I'm asking you to sit inside. But if I start on Clara at two in the morning I will not stop, and I have a cardiology appointment at nine, and I'd like to survive both."

"All right."

"Thank you."

The far light on the water went out. Someone over there had also been awake and had decided to stop.

"Elena," he said. "Would you sleep in the room."

I went very still.

"Not—" He made a sound, frustrated, ruined. "God. Not for that. I've just told you I've got a wire in my chest."

"Then what."

He was silent for a moment. When he spoke it was without any of the control he wore like a suit.

"Because somebody has been putting something into my body for eleven months," he said, "and the only hours I can't check are the ones I'm unconscious. And I have not slept — actually slept — since March."

Something in me came apart quietly.

"Okay," I said.

* * *

I lay down on the far side of a bed the size of a small country, on top of the covers, in my clothes, three feet of empty linen between us.

He was asleep in under four minutes. I listened to it happen — the breathing lengthening, the small catch as his chest let go of something it had been holding for eleven months — and I lay there in the dark with my heart going much too fast and thought, I did that. Not the surgery. This.

And then, because I am who I am, and because at two in the morning the brain finishes the sentences you spend the day avoiding, the other thought arrived.

His labs are drawn by me. His medications are counted by me. Everything he eats and drinks in this house passes through my hands, and there is no longer a single person on this earth with better access to Damian Vale's bloodstream than his wife.

If he died tonight, I thought, staring at the ceiling of a dead woman's house.

If he died tonight, there is exactly one person they would look at.