THE BILLIONAIRE'S SURGEON BRIDE

Chapter Eight: The Hour

"An hour until what?"

"Until a detective walks through that door." Damian's eyes were still closed. "Two hundred and eleven nanograms of a drug I've never been prescribed, in a patient who arrested twice nine days ago, in a hospital that has already been embarrassed once. Vivian Marsh is required to notify. She'll have done it before she called you."

"She did call me first."

"Then she likes you." He opened his eyes. "That's worth something. It won't be worth much."

I sat very still in a plastic chair beside a bed I had already watched a man nearly die in twice.

"You're pleased," I said.

"Yes."

"Damian, somebody—"

"For four years I have been trying to get a single official body in this state to look at what happened in my garden," he said. "Four years. I have paid for two private investigations, I have petitioned for exhumation and been denied twice, and I have not been able to produce one thing that a district attorney would take out of the building." He turned his head. "And this morning somebody put a tablet in a locked box and gave me a poisoning with a live patient in it. Elena, they finally made a mistake."

"They made it on you."

"That's the only kind I'm in a position to use."

And I understood then, fully, what I had married. Not a frightened man. A man who had been standing in the same room with a fire for four years waiting for it to produce enough smoke that somebody else would finally have to smell it.

"There's a cost," I said.

"Yes."

"Say it."

He looked at me for a long moment.

"You," he said. "The cost is you."

* * *

He laid it out in eleven minutes, breathing carefully between sentences, and it was worse each time I turned it over.

Nine days ago I had been an unemployed cardiothoracic fellow whose career had just been destroyed and whose fiancé had left her for her stepsister. Nine days ago I had married a man worth an amount of money I still had not looked up. In those nine days I had personally taken over every element of his medical care. I had filled the pill organizer. I knew the combination. I had opened it, alone, in an empty house, with no witnesses, and photographed the contents before calling anyone.

And this morning, when he seized, I had been thirty-one minutes away in the office of the only physician in the state who could confirm I wasn't there.

"That's not a defence," I said slowly. "That's a plan. That's what it looks like. It looks like I made sure I had an alibi."

"Yes."

"I went to see Vivian because of you. Because you told me to ask who signed—"

"I know."

"Which means the only reason I have an alibi is that you sent me there."

He didn't say anything.

I stood up so fast the chair went back into the wall.

"No," I said.

"Elena."

"No. Tell me you didn't." My voice had gone somewhere thin. "Tell me you didn't marry a cardiac surgeon nine days ago knowing exactly what she'd look like when this happened. Tell me you didn't send me to Marsh's office this morning of all mornings—"

"I didn't know it would be today." He got up onto one elbow and the monitor complained about it. "Elena. Look at me. I did not know it would be today. I have never known which day. That is the entire condition of my life, and I have lived in it for eleven months, and if I had known it would be today I would have—"

He stopped.

"You would have what," I said.

"I would have kept you in the house," he said. "Which is the thing that would have hanged you."

The bicarb ticked into his arm. Somewhere out in the corridor a phone rang twice and stopped.

"I need to say one thing," he said, "and then a detective is going to come through that door and we are not going to have any more private conversations for a while."

"Damian—"

"I have a lawyer downstairs named Ilana Weisz and she is the best in this city and she is already retained for you, not me, and you should say almost nothing until she is in the room." He was talking fast now, and it cost him, and he did it anyway. "And Elena — when they ask you why you married me, you are going to want to explain. You're going to want to be understood. Don't. Understanding is not what's happening in that conversation."

"What do I say?"

"You say your mother is in memory care and you couldn't pay for it." He held my eyes. "Because it's true, and because true is the only thing that survives four hours in a room."

I stood there with my arms around myself in a hospital room at half past midnight.

"There's another thing," he said, quieter.

"What."

"You're going to spend the next several hours listening to a very competent person build a version of you that did this." He said it without any drama at all, which is why it went through me. "So I want to have said, before it starts, that I have watched you put your hands on my chest every night for nine days, and I have never once been afraid."

I couldn't answer that.

"Elena."

"Don't," I said. "Don't be — not now, not right before—"

"Now is the only time it's worth anything," Damian said.

The door opened.

* * *

Detective Nora Bishop was about fifty, in a good coat, and she was the most dangerous person I had met in my life, and she achieved this almost entirely by being pleasant.

She let Ilana Weisz sit down. She waited while a nurse changed the bicarb bag. She asked me whether I wanted water and then actually went and got it herself, which took four minutes, which I later understood was the point.

Then she said, "Dr. Reyes, how long have you been married?"

"Nine days."

"Congratulations." She wrote it down. "And you'd known Mr. Vale for—"

"Nine days."

Bishop looked up.

"You met him on the twelfth," she said.

"I met him on the twelfth. I married him on the twelfth."

"Same day."

"Same day."

She wrote for a while.

"Dr. Reyes, who has the combination to the medication organizer?"

"My client—" Weisz began.

"It's fine," I said. "Two people. Him and me."

"And this morning you drove to the hospital at approximately seven-fifteen. Was that a scheduled meeting?"

"No."

"So an unscheduled visit, to your former department chair, on the morning your husband—"

"Yes."

"—was poisoned."

"Yes."

Bishop nodded slowly and turned a page and I could feel the shape of it closing around me and I could not think of one single thing to say that would not make it tighter.

"Dr. Reyes," she said. "I'm going to be straightforward with you, because I think you're intelligent and I don't think there's any advantage in the other approach."

"All right."

"When I catch a case like this, I look at spouses. That's not personal. It's just where the arithmetic starts." She folded her hands. "But I want you to understand that I did not start looking at you this morning."

The room changed temperature.

"I'm sorry?"

Bishop reached into the folder in her lap.

"On the ninth of this month," she said, "my department received a written communication regarding Mr. Vale's safety. Anonymous. Hand-delivered to the precinct, not mailed." She drew out a clear plastic sleeve. "It names you."

"That's — the ninth is—"

"Three days before you met him. Yes." Bishop set the sleeve on the blanket between us, and turned it, so I could read it right side up. "Dr. Reyes, does this handwriting mean anything to you?"

It was three lines. My full name. The address of my old apartment. And a date.

And the letters were narrow and upright and slightly backward-leaning, with the crossbar of the t riding high and detached, floating above the stem like it couldn't be bothered to come down.

I had been looking at that handwriting every morning for nine days.

On the spines of the cookbooks, in a kitchen, in a house on the North Shore, where a woman had written her own name inside the covers of her own books before she died in the garden four years ago.

"Dr. Reyes?" said Detective Bishop.

I couldn't speak.