Chapter 7
Series 1 Chapter 7
Blair’s wineglass stopped halfway to her mouth.
“I don’t remember.”
No one at the table moved.
Then she laughed, soft and disbelieving.
“You can’t seriously expect me to remember a name from years ago.”
“I remember the name of the nurse who held my hand before my last dental surgery,” Claire said.
Dean shifted beside her. “Come on. This is getting weird.”
Blair lowered her glass. The new bracelet struck its rim with a quiet metallic click.
“I was terrified,” she said. “I wasn’t memorizing names.”
Rhys stepped closer to her chair.
“She doesn’t owe anyone her medical history.”
“Tonight’s entire dinner is about her medical history.”
The words silenced the room again.
Dean looked down at his plate. Claire’s attention remained on Blair, whose fingers had closed around the bracelet Rhys had given her.
“This is jealousy, not concern,” Rhys said.
“Then one answer should end it.”
“She already answered you.”
I looked at Blair.
“No. She avoided me.”
Rhys’s hand settled on the back of her chair. The gesture was protective, instinctive. He had never once stood behind me like that when his friends called me a gold digger.
Blair gave me a wounded smile.
“What exactly do you want to know, Mara?”
“Which hospital performed the surgery?”
“Boston.”
The answer came too quickly.
“Which hospital in Boston?”
Her smile tightened. “Why does that matter?”
Because hospitals had names. Surgeons had faces. A transplant did not happen in a blank white room that disappeared the moment the recipient woke up.
I remembered forms being placed beneath my shaking hand. A woman with red glasses asking me three times whether I understood that I could still change my mind.
“Where is your scar?” I asked.
Blair went still.
Rhys’s fingers tightened against the chair.
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
Blair let out a breathless laugh.
“You want me to lift my dress at dinner?”
“I want one detail that belongs to you rather than Rhys.”
The color drained from her face.
Claire placed her wineglass on the table.
“Blair, which hospital was it?”
Blair looked at her as if the question were a betrayal.
“I told you. It was in Boston.”
“There are several transplant centers in Boston,” I said.
Rhys moved between us.
“That’s enough.”
No one was smiling now. Even Dean had stopped trying to turn the evening into a joke.
Rhys looked at me as though I were the one who had deceived everyone at his table.
“Blair gave me part of her body. You don’t get to punish her because you’re insecure about what she means to me.”
Pain tightened beneath my ribs.
For one fractured second, I felt the hospital bed beneath me again. I remembered trying to sit up and discovering that pain could have weight, heat and teeth.
My nails pressed into my palm.
“You’re right about one thing,” I said. “Someone gave you part of her body.”
Rhys heard agreement.
Blair heard the warning.
Her hand jerked, knocking her glass sideways. Red wine spread across the white tablecloth and dripped onto her dress.
“Oh God.” She pushed back her chair. “I’m sorry.”
A server hurried forward with a towel, but Blair snatched it first.
“I’ll clean it.”
Her gaze locked on mine.
“Mara, could you help me? Please?”
Her voice trembled just enough to make the request sound vulnerable. Around the table, everyone watched me to see whether I would refuse her again.
I followed her into the small butler’s pantry beside the kitchen.
The moment the door swung shut behind us, Blair’s expression changed.
“What are you doing?”
“Asking you to remember a surgery you built your life around.”
“You’re humiliating Rhys in front of his friends.”
I placed the stained napkins beside the sink. Through the closed door came the muted scrape of chairs and low voices.
“No. I’m asking why you can’t name one person who treated you.”
Blair set her wineglass on the stone counter too hard.
“You’ve kept quiet for three years. Why start now?”
“Because you came into my home and called my marriage your gift.”
Her mouth twisted.
“It practically was.”
The sweetness she wore around Rhys had vanished. There was no apology in her eyes now.
“You knew he loved me when you married him,” she continued. “You knew exactly what you were accepting.”
“I knew what I promised.”
“And you were paid well for it.”
The words struck the same bruise Rhys and his friends had pressed all week.
Blair stepped closer.
“Did you really think telling him would change anything? Rhys never loved you. He’ll feel guilty for a month, maybe two. Then he’ll look at you and see a debt.”
“I’m not trying to make him love me.”
That stopped her.
For years, everyone had mistaken my silence for a strategy. Blair believed I had guarded the truth because I hoped one day it would buy Rhys’s heart.
She had never considered that I might no longer want it.
“Then what do you want?” she asked.
“The truth to stop belonging to you.”
Blair’s hand closed around the stem of her glass.
“You don’t get to decide that now.”
“It was never yours to decide.”
Her grip tightened. The glass slipped against the edge of the counter.
It shattered on the floor.
The sound cracked through the pantry. Wine splashed across the pale tile, running between shards of crystal like blood.
Neither of us bent to clean it.
Blair stared at the broken glass, breathing too quickly.
“You took the money,” she whispered. “You made your choice.”
“You have no idea what that money was for.”
“I know it kept you here.”
She raised her eyes to mine. Fear had stripped away the last of her careful softness.
“You promised Evelyn you wouldn’t tell him.”
A shadow moved across the broken glass.
I looked up.
Rhys stood in the doorway.
His face had gone completely still.
“What,” he asked, “does this have to do with my mother?”