The Ice Between Us

There are exactly two kinds of people who take a job without asking what it is. Idiots and people who owe forty-one thousand dollars to a man named Marcus Reyes. I'm not an i***t. So when the email said private contract, three months, full discretion, full salary up front and the salary had enough zeros to make Reyes stop parking outside my building like a low-budget ghost, I said yes before I finished reading the sentence. I didn't ask who the patient was. I didn't ask why a man rich enough to buy a hospital wanted a physiotherapist whose name, if you typed it into any search bar in this country, would come back attached to the word "disgraced". I should have asked. I figure that out at 8:54 on a Monday morning, standing in a hallway that costs more than I will earn in my life, holding a coffee handed to me by a doctor who already knew I take it black with two sugars and lied about how he knew, when the frosted door slides open and I see who's sitting on the table inside. And my whole body goes, very quietly, oh no. Because I know him. Not from the building outside, where his face is four stories tall on a banner that says BELIEVE in letters you can read from the highway. Not from the magazines. I know him from a Saturday eight months ago that I have spent every day since pretending into the ground, and the worst part, the part that makes my stomach drop straight through the two-thousand-dollar floor, is this: He doesn't know me at all. Eight months ago, I was a woman in a borrowed dress and a black feather mask, pouring other people's champagne for cash, and a man I'd never met leaned against a coat-check wall like it had personally wronged him and looked at me the way you look at someone when you don't know they're radioactive. I have replayed it enough to hate myself. We never traded names. He tried, I stopped him twice, because a name meant he could find me and finding me meant finding out, and the whole point of that night was being, for six hours, a person nobody knew anything about. No scandal. No dead brother. No debt. Just a woman, a beautiful stranger..... I thought it was interesting. When I left before sunrise, he caught my wrist and pressed something into my hand. A pin. Brass, warm from his pocket, a little crest worn smooth. For luck, he said. You look like you need some. I still have it. It's in the zip pocket of the coat I'm wearing right now, which I'd find funny if I weren't actively trying not to throw up. "You're the new one," he says. Aleksander Volkov. In shorts and a grey shirt, one leg braced out straight on the table, looking at me like I'm a piece of equipment that's running late. "I'm the new one." My voice comes out flat and bored, which is a miracle, because internally I am a car alarm. Behind me, Dr Cho Daniel does the introductions in the smooth voice of a man who has spent years standing between this guy and the consequences of his personality. "Aleksander, this is Eleanor Quinn. She's the best soft-tissue rehab specialist I've ever worked with. You'll listen to her." "Will I?" Sasha, the world calls him Sasha, gives me a slow once-over that is not even slightly about my qualifications. "She doesn't look impressed." "That's because she isn't," Daniel says. "It's a feature." I set my coffee down so neither of them can see my hand. "Can I see the imaging?" "You can see," Sasha says, "but I'll tell you right now what it says, and then I'll tell you why it's wrong." "It's a torn—" "Labrum, partial, with secondary groin involvement, yes." He says it the way you'd recite a grudge. "Three surgeons. The Swiss one wanted to fly in this week. I told him no. The Toronto one wanted to retire me on the spot, on television, like it would be poetic." He shrugs, and even the shrug favors the bad side; I see it before he hides it, the tiny load shift, the body protecting itself faster than the ego can stop it. "So now I have you instead." "Lucky me." "That's the spirit." He grins, and the grin is the problem, the grin is the exact grin from a dark coat-check eight months ago, and I have to look at the wall. Daniel's pager goes off. He glances at it, then at me, and there's something almost apologetic in it. "I have to take this. Eleanor, you've got him. Aleksander, behave." "I never behave." "I know. I said it for her benefit." And he's gone, the door sighing shut, and it's just me and the worst decision I've ever been paid to make. I make him lie back. I keep it clinical. I keep my hands light and my voice lighter, and I do the assessment by the book, range of motion, the slow, careful flexion that makes his jaw tighten, and he watches my face the whole time with an expression I can't read and don't want to. "You're good," he says, when I find the spot, the deep one, the one that makes him hiss through his teeth. "You found it fast." "I'm expensive for a reason." "How expensive?" "Don't worry. You can afford me." "I can afford anyone." That's never been the problem. And then, while my thumb is pressed into the meat of his hip and his guard is down because pain does that, he frowns. A small frown. The frown of a man hearing two notes of a song he can't name. "Have we met?" My thumb stops. I make it start again. "No." "You sure?" He's looking at me harder now, and I can see him reaching for it, reaching down into wherever the body files the things the brain throws out, and I am four inches and one bad second from the end of everything. "You feel familiar." "I have one of those faces." "No," Sasha says slowly, "you really don't." I am saved by his phone. It lights up on the side table, face up, and I glance down before I can stop myself, the way you do. It's a private investigator's report. I know what one looks like; I had to read three of them after Tom died. The header has a name and a license number, and the subject line, in plain bold type I can read upside down from a foot away, says: GALA- FEMALE GUEST IDENTIFICATION. UPDATE. He's been looking for me. For eight months, the man whose hip is currently under my hands has been paying someone to find me, and his phone is telling him the search just got a result, and his hand is already reaching for it.