What He's Been Hiding

Chapter 3

The car wasn't even out of the parking garage, and the message was still open on James's phone, the screen shining a ghostly light.

From: Unknown Number - The board already knows. Monday changes everything.

James continued to read it after the car drove away from the corner. He continued to read it even after Claire's building was out of sight, until the driver interrupted him with a polite cough and asked if he was okay. He didn't respond.

He ignored her texts that weekend. Claire sent a message Saturday afternoon asking, "You okay?" and got a reply hours later with simply, "Fine." She didn't believe the reply and she didn't know what was going on, so she spent the weekend occupied, trying not to think of the broken glass, the locked drawers, and the board member who knew more than he should.

She distracted herself with her phone, trying to will it to have new notifications when it actually had no reason to. Sunday night was the worst; she almost sent a crucial message. Instead, she placed her phone away on her nightstand and turned it face down, hoping for a better Monday.

Monday was the start of launch week—and nobody expected it to become the worst week of the year.

Claire began to notice a pattern by 9 a.m. He skipped the black coffee he usually drank and went straight for something stronger before he'd eaten anything at all. He waved away the pastries Sophie had brought for the team. He said he didn't want to eat anything. By 11, he had waved away lunch while busy with slide revisions for an investor presentation. He was muttering about the font size, which was actually correct. His office door was closed the whole morning, the type of closed door that said not to come in, and Claire respected that, but her unease was building.

By noon, without quite admitting to it, she had begun to keep a tally. No breakfast. No lunch. Three cups of coffee and the number was still going up. There was an uncharacteristic edge in his voice when Daniel asked a perfectly reasonable question about seating arrangements, and he very quickly apologized, like the apology cost him something.

“You should eat something,” she told him at 1 p.m., placing a sandwich on the edge of his desk. She hadn’t asked him if he wanted her to do it.

“Later.” He still hadn’t even looked at her.

“Later” never came. By 1:30, he had cleared the sandwich out of the way to make room for his laptop. By 2 p.m., his coffee was disappearing. His hand had a slight tremor when he reached for his coffee, small enough that she almost convinced herself she'd imagined it. By 2:30, Patricia decided to give him some time to cool off and suggested moving the afternoon rehearsal. He replied that there was no time to move anything, and his voice was sharper than Claire had ever heard, and he turned away as if he regretted it. He wouldn't offer a single apology; he just kept moving.

By 3:00, while rehearsing the launch keynote in one of the smaller conference rooms, his voice caught mid-sentence on something he had rehearsed perfectly the day before.

"The... the projected capacity is...." He stopped and blinked at the screen. "Sorry. Where was I."

"Third bullet," Claire said slowly. "James, when did you last eat?"

"I had coffee."

"That's not what I asked."

He didn't respond; he rubbed his eyes. When his hand fell, it was shaking and there was no way to hide it. There was a thin layer of sweat breaking out along his hairline, even though the conference room was at a comfortable temperature.

"I'm fine," he replied. His voice sounded tight and strained, and his lips were moving slower than normal. "Just need... five minutes."

Claire's stomach fell into something cold and sharp.

For one whole second she was just frozen, standing, as her eyes ran along every part of him. She watched his hands grip the edge of the table, and his eyes begin to lose focus on her as he started to sway. Some part of her mind couldn't keep up and wasn't moving fast enough to comprehend it.

Then the puzzle pieces all came together: the protein bars being replaced before he finished the last one, the six-minute disappearances that ended with him being more put together, the granola bar he had dismissed that morning, and the locked drawer in his desk. It all finally came together in the first clear picture in days.

"James, look at me." She grabbed his face gently and made him look at her. He was pale and sweaty; something was wrong. "I think your blood sugar is crashing. You need to stay with me."

"I'm fine," he swayed and mumbled.

She ignored the 'fine' and ran out.

She opened the drawer of his desk and saw the protein bars again. The tube of glucose tablets was in the back, and she ripped the packet open so quickly that the first half-dozen fell to the floor. She handed him two.

"Chew these. Now. James, please."

Hesitantly, he chewed the two, but she could see his condition getting worse. His eyes lost focus and his head dipped. The last glucose tablet slid from his hand.

"James!" He collapsed from the chair before she could catch him. He was breathing quickly and getting more and more unresponsive.

This time, there was not a moment of hesitation. A few weeks prior, she had read the label of the emergency kit out of idle curiosity, never imagining there might come a time to actually use it. The emergency kit was in a small case in a locked drawer and contained glucagon, meant for severe low blood sugar when the person could not safely swallow. She grabbed the drawer, her hands shaking so much she had to try twice to pull it open, and yelled through the open door for Daniel with a cracked voice.

"Call 911! Now! Tell them diabetic emergency, unresponsive!"

Daniel did not ask questions and ran to get help.

As she followed the instructions of the kit, Claire's hands continued to shake. Kneeling next to James where he had slid down to the ground, she kept saying his name over and over by pure instinct, as if the sheer repetition could keep him anchored to her. The sirens coming closer eventually broke the spell. Within minutes, the room filled with people. Sophie stood in the doorway with her hands over her mouth, while Daniel led the paramedics inside. Patricia was already issuing orders to everyone else, clearing the room of anyone who didn't need to be there.

Professional, quick, and unbothered by the chaos around them, the paramedics checked his pulse and breathing while firing short questions at Claire. How long? What did you give him? Does he have a medical alert? With a voice that sounded nothing like her own, she responded to their questions the best she could.

James's eyes twitched as he was placed on the stretcher. He was not quite conscious and not quite fully under, hovering in the in-between as the slow process of the glucagon began to take effect.

"James?" Claire said, staying by his side as he was wheeled away.

His eyes opened slightly, unfocused as they found her.

"....damn," he managed to get out, and that was the extent of his response.

The waiting room was filled with the smell of disinfectant and stale coffee. For two hours Claire sat with her hands pressed between her knees, phone silent, the same image looping in her head—his eyes losing focus, the weight of him sliding out of the chair. A nurse came out once to say he was stable, that he'd be kept a few hours for observation. Claire thanked her and went right back to staring at the floor.

Daniel texted a couple of times to check in, and Sophie sent a string of concerned messages that Claire didn't have the energy to answer properly. Patricia sent exactly one line—"Handled the office. Don't worry about tomorrow"—which was Patricia's version of comfort.

When they finally allowed her back to see him, James was sitting up in a hospital bed, an IV taped to the back of his hand. The color was back in his face, but he still looked completely exhausted. He didn’t say anything when she walked in. He just looked at her, and then looked away, like he couldn't hold her gaze and his own shame at the same time.

She sat down beside him and didn't say anything. It didn't feel like a moment that needed a voice.

They sent him home for the night with a folder of instructions and paperwork that he barely looked at. The ride home was silent, city lights sliding past the windows just like they had on Friday night, except nothing about tonight felt the same. James stared out the window, his jaw tight, and Claire let James have the silence, because it was the only way he'd eventually talk.

It was almost at her building when he finally spoke.

"I've had Type 1 since I was eleven. Diagnosed the year my father died. My mom used to say it was the worst year of her life, delivering the second-worst thing that ever happened to me."

Claire stayed quiet, letting him get there in his own time.

"For a while, my mother controlled it. Watched everything I ate, logged each dose, treated it like a project she could keep a handle on if she just monitored it closely enough.” He kept his eyes on the glass, the passing streetlights the only distraction. “Then I got older, and I didn’t want anyone controlling anything for me. I decided the best way to survive in a world where people are always looking for a reason to not trust you is to never give them one. I learned to conceal it. Over the years, I got so good at it that even the people closest to me stopped noticing, most of the time.”

“I never tell anyone.” He was still looking out the window, not facing her. “It’s not because I’m ashamed of it. But the board doesn't need much of a reason to doubt me, and Richard—" He stopped, exhaling slowly, like saying the name itself came at a cost. “...Richard has been waiting years for me to make one mistake. Anything he could use to show that I’m not fit to run this company. If the board finds out I collapsed in a conference room three days before the launch, that’s not a health story to them. That’s a liability story. That's a headline that makes us lose investors and kills the deal, putting the jobs of three hundred employees on the line.”

“That’s really not fair,” Claire said softly.

“It doesn’t have to be fair. It just has to be true,” he said. For the first time, he looked at her with an expression she hadn’t seen before, even the night the picture frame broke—something entirely raw and unguarded. “Promise me you won’t tell a single person, not even Patricia or the board. I know what I’m asking of you. I know it puts you in a bad spot if it ever comes out that you knew and said nothing.”

Claire thought about her mother, about the paycheck she couldn't afford to lose, and how easily a secret like this could break a career. But looking at him, none of that seemed to matter as much as the look on his face.

“I won’t,” she said.

The car stopped outside her building, the driver waiting with the kind of patience that came from being paid well not to rush anyone.

“Thank you,” he said quietly.

She got out without answering, because there wasn't anything left to say that wouldn't have meant more than either of them was ready for.

She locked the door to her apartment, sat down on the edge of her bed, and finally let herself shake. She hadn't cried in the hospital. Hadn't cried in the car. But sitting alone now, replaying the exact moment his eyes had lost focus and the full weight of his body slid out of the chair, she pressed both hands over her mouth and cried until her shoulders ached. In the quiet of her room, she finally faced what she had been avoiding all afternoon.

She had not been afraid of losing her job tonight.

She had been afraid of losing him.

Richard Voss called her office the next morning, his voice warm as ever. "I heard there was some excitement yesterday. Everything alright?”

Claire's grip tightened on the phone. “Just a long week. Launch stress."

A pause stretched out, just a beat too long. “Of course," Voss said. "Do give James my regards. Tell him I hope he’s taking care of himself.”

The line went dead before she could answer, and Claire sat very still at her desk, wondering exactly how much Richard Voss already knew, and how long it would be before knowing wasn't enough for him anymore.