The Billionaire's Heart (The Silver Cross Club Book 4) (10 page)

Three months after Ben was first admitted, Dr. Mukherjee told us there was nothing more he could do.

“Well,” Ben said, by then too sick to muster much enthusiasm for anything, even the news of his own impending death. “Thanks for trying.”

We fought about that, after the doctor left. I wanted Ben to rage against the proverbial dying of the light, and he just wanted it to be over: the suffering, the chemo, his life. “I hurt,” he told me. “Everywhere. All the time. It never gets better. I want it to end.”

“You can’t just give up and
die
,” I told him, so angry I was shaking. “You
promised
me.”

He sighed, weary, and closed his eyes, his head falling back against the pillow. “I know. I shouldn’t have done that.”

My anger vanished, like someone had cut the strings holding me up. I sank to the floor, kneeling there on the cold linoleum, and rested my forehead against the metal frame of his hospital bed. A maelstrom churned inside me: grief, self-pity, love.

He was everything to me. My entire world.

“Ben, you can’t leave me,” I said.

He didn’t respond. When I looked up, I saw that he had fallen asleep.

By the end, I slept in his hospital room every night after work, curled on the vinyl-covered recliner in the corner, going back to our apartment every so often to shower and pick up clean clothes. It took two grim, horrible weeks after the doctors said there was nothing else they could do. I wanted hospice; I wanted to take him home with me so that he could die in peace, in his own bed, but his mother refused. No hospice. She wasn’t going to give up on him, unlike
some people
, said with a dark glare in my direction.

What was I supposed to do?

We weren’t married. There was nothing I could do.

He slept, most of the time, but sometimes he woke and had brief moments of lucidity. I was there for one of them, a few days before he died: shoving greasy takeout in my face, trying to catch up on work, and he turned his head toward me and said, “Sadie.”

I went to his side, crouched down on the floor and stroked his face, gently, not wanting to cause him any further pain. “I’m here,” I said.

“I’ll miss you,” he said. “Do you think there’s an afterlife?”

“Yeah, baby,” I said, throat closing up. “I do.”

“I don’t want to go if you’re not there,” he said. He frowned at me. “Sadie, will you be happy?”

“I don’t know, baby,” I said. “I guess I’ll have to try.”

“Promise me,” he said. “Don’t mourn. I love you. Be happy.”

I would have wept, if I could, if I had any tears left in me. Instead I squeezed his hand and said, “Try to sleep.”

Those were the last words he spoke to me. He died while I was at work, on a Thursday afternoon, and I didn’t find out until I went to the hospital that evening and found his room already empty, his things waiting in a cardboard box.

I took the subway home that night and stayed awake until dawn, sitting on our sofa with one of his flannel shirts wrapped around my shoulders, gazing out the window and feeling a great emptiness opening inside me, my chest like a cage with no bird in it.

At dawn, I got in the shower and went to work.

His mother didn’t invite me to the funeral.

I only found out because I went by the hospital to tie up some loose ends and one of the nurses commented on the touching obituary. I looked it up when I went home: beloved son, brother, nephew, cousin, laid to rest, private ceremony—two days prior.

I cried, then, for the first time in weeks. Cried until my eyes hurt and my face felt swollen and bruised. He was gone from me, dug deep into the earth, and that was all. That was the end of it, the end of our story.

Life after love was a pallid country, seasonless. Weeks passed without my notice. I worked and went home to an empty apartment, fed myself, showered, slept alone, woke in the morning and did it all over again, mechanically, unthinking. Friends came by at first, with casseroles and wine, but they were uncomfortable with my grief. They didn’t know what to say, or how to comfort me.

Nothing could have comforted me, probably.

I hated him. I was so unbearably angry with him for dying, for leaving me, for lying about me to his mother, for breaking every promise he ever made, for giving up. And I hated myself for my anger. I thought about moving, during those first terrible months, when everything in the apartment served as a constant reminder of Ben’s absence: the pots and pans he’d used to cook so many meals, the furnishings we’d picked out when he moved in and we decided to get an actual grown-up coffee table that wasn’t stuffed with newspaper.

But as time went on, I came to treasure those reminders. Seeing a book he had loved, a mug he had shattered and glued back together, made me feel that he wasn’t fully gone from my life. If he was a ghost, I welcomed the haunting. It reminded me that I hadn’t always been alone.

A year passed.

ELEVEN

Sadie

I went out dancing with friends that weekend. Some of them I hadn’t seen in months; they gave up on me when I kept turning down invitations after Ben died. But when I sent out a group text asking if anyone wanted to hang out, my friend Edith immediately replied,
SHE’S BACK!!!!

We went to a club in Williamsburg and I stayed on the dance floor until the lights came on and my feet were so blistered I could barely walk. Then we went to an all-night diner and crammed into a booth, eating cheese fries and laughing as the sun came up. I felt a little like my old self, the Sadie who drank and swore and stayed out all night and lived without limits.

I wasn’t that person anymore, of course. But it was nice to pretend.

I rolled into work on Monday feeling tired but happy. The little aloe plant I had bought for my desk hadn’t died over the weekend. Elliott had made a big pot of coffee and there was still enough in the carafe to get me going. I had some good ideas for the website. Things were looking up.

Elliott wandered over, holding his coffee mug. For all of his silent disapproval about my office upgrades, he sure was happy to use my coffee pot. I forced myself not to smirk at him. Smugness wasn’t attractive. “How was your weekend?” I asked.

“One Drop,” he said.

I frowned at him, but he just kept looking at me with that brand expression on his face. He was baiting me, I knew, but curiosity had killed me along with many cats. I bit. “Okay, I’ll bite,” I said. “Elucidate.”

He raised one eyebrow, an elegant arch. “I’m instituting a ten-dollar fine for every word over three syllables before 10:00.”

I made a show of counting on my fingers. “You owe me ten bucks, then, because
instituting
is definitely too long.”

“One Drop,” he said again, pretending he hadn’t heard me, “is the new name for the company. You mentioned last week that you thought Zawadi Ya Maji was too obscure and difficult to pronounce. I thought about it and decided you were right.”

Huh. I leaned back in my chair, considering. It was kind of boring, but also kind of perfect: accessible without being too obvious. “I like it,” I said.

“You do?” he asked.

I smiled at him. “I really do. I’ll make a new logo that’s a little—like, a little anthropomorphized raindrop, holding a tiny water filter—”

“That’s
five
syllables,” he said.

“I’m not give you ten dollars,” I said. “Sorry. But I’ll buy you lunch if you’re really that hard up for cash.”

He gave me a look like he was annoyed but also amused despite himself. “No smiling water droplets. Nothing with a face.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

Conversation over, but he kept standing there like he had something else he wanted to say. I waited. I’d learned that Elliott would spit it out when he was good and ready, and not a moment before. He took a sip of his coffee, scratched his forehead, and then said, “I’m going up to Boston later this week.”

“Work or fun?” I asked.

His mouth twitched. “Work. I’ve been corresponding with a grad student at MIT who’s doing some interesting work with ceramics. I’d like to talk to him about hiring him on as a product engineer once I’ve managed to acquire some funding. I’m also going to meet with a few potential investors.” He took another sip of his coffee. “I’d like you to come with me.”

Oh boy. That was a recipe for disaster. What if he expected us to share a hotel room? I would probably sleep-walk for the first time in my life and come to my senses buck-naked and straddling him in bed. Delightful, but mortifying. Just thinking about it made me want to stay in my house for the rest of time. “I don’t think that’s really necessary,” I said. “It’s not like investors want to meet the graphic designer.”

“No, I wouldn’t subject you to that,” he said. “But I’d like you to meet the MIT kid. If I hire him, it’s important that we’re all able to get along.”

Was it? Okay. Elliott had some pretty strange ideas about running a company. So what if the engineer was a weird mouth-breathing neck-bearded cave-dweller? He could just sit at his own desk in the corner and be as nerdy as he wanted. We could get a lot of work done without being best friends. “I’m sure we’ll be pals,” I said. “It’s not necessary. I’ll just stay here and work on the website.”

“I insist,” he said. “We’re getting close to the conference, and I don’t want to lose any work days.”

I shrugged. As long as the company was paying for it, I wasn’t going to complain about a free vacation. Boston was a neat city. I could keep it in my pants for a couple of days. Probably. “Okay, you win. When are we leaving?”

“Wednesday,” he said. He looked pleased that I had given in so easily. I was tempted to tell him not to get used to it. “Just an overnight trip. We’ll take the train up on Wednesday. I’ll meet with the investors that evening. We’ll go to MIT on Thursday morning, and come back to New York that afternoon.”

“I’ll make sure someone waters my houseplants,” I said. It would be fine. Elliott and I were both professionals. I wasn’t going to suddenly lose my mind and try to make out with him in public.

Probably.

* * *

Boston was freezing.

There was half a foot of snow on the ground, and as we exited South Station, I turned up the collar of my coat against the chill. It was mid-afternoon, and already growing dark.

I hated winter.

Elliott glanced at me and said, “We’re staying at the Ritz-Carlton. It’s about half a mile from here. Do you mind walking? I’ll hail a cab if you’re too cold.”

“I think I can handle a mile,” I said, because I was determined to be cheerful and a good sport, even though I would have really, really liked to take a cab. As we set off, I asked, “The Ritz-Carlton?”

He grimaced. “I know. Money begets money. I’m having dinner with the investors in the hotel restaurant, and the Best Western wouldn’t have the same effect. It’s all about keeping up appearances.”

“That’s stupid,” I said. “You’re asking them for money. If you already have Ritz-Carlton money, why do you need
their
money?”

He shrugged. “We’re talking about potentially millions of dollars, Sadie. They need to have confidence in me, and part of that comes from signaling that I’m their equal. If they think I’m just like them, they’ll feel safer investing their money with me.”

“It’s just a good old boys club,” I said, a little disgusted.

“In a way,” he said. “I won’t claim it’s fair. But this is how the world works.”

“The world sucks,” I said.

He smiled at me. “I agree,” he said. “That’s why I’m trying to change it.”

I mulled that over as we walked through the narrow streets. Boston, with its dense tangle of haphazard streets, was so different from New York’s orderly grid. I liked it. It felt old, like how I imagined Europe must be. It had history.

Maybe Elliott would rustle up some investors in Brussels, and I would get a free trip to Europe.

My nose was a frozen chunk of cartilage by the time Elliott came to a stop in front of a large building and said, “We’re here.” He looked down at me and tucked his hands in his coat pockets. His nose was red, and he was wearing a slouchy blue beanie that clashed with his Important Businessman overcoat and dress shoes. “I want you to know. I reserved separate rooms.”

God, how awkward. I had been a little worried, of course, but I didn’t expect him to actually
say
anything. “Good,” I said, “because I snore.”

He pursed his lips. “I’m afraid I can’t employ anyone who snores. We’ll have to put you on the next train back to New York.”

I stared at him, feeling my eyes widen. It took me a second longer than it should have to realize that he was teasing me. “You’re a monster,” I said.

He grinned. “Shall we?”

The lobby was—well. I was too conscious of my own dignity to ever gawk like an awestruck tourist, but I definitely felt the impulse. Everything was so
shiny
. The walls were paneled in wood the same warm golden color as the floor, and it all glowed like a lantern. Elliott checked in while I loitered off to one side, trying to look inconspicuous. I wished I had worn a nicer coat. I wished I
owned
a nicer coat.