hadn’t wrenched it doing fieldwork—
I’d been attacked.
The memories came rushing back to me, and I realized just how good it had been to be asleep, undreaming, unremembering.
I flexed my wrist, testing it, and the pain came again, just as sharply as it had before. Nothing broken, as far as I could tell, and it would be fine in just a few days. I should have put the ice on it last night, but it wasn’t bothering me then. I hadn’t noticed it through the adrenaline and endorphins.
Not so different from how I often felt after a tough bout with Nolan. Even then, I realized, I had wraps and boxing gloves, and so did he. This was for real, and truth be told, I’d done okay.
I hauled myself out of bed, and stretched; my ankle hurt, and I realized that I must have aggravated the earlier wrench when I slid on the carpet last night. Apart from that, and my hand, I didn’t feel too bad. My cheek was tender, but I’d blocked a much worse blow, and the ice and sleep had done most of the work of bringing the lump down. The other little scratch was already healing, nothing more to remind me of what had happened. I applied a little concealer, and looked almost normal.
I showered, stretched out, and dressed—now in my dried dress pants and my still-damp boots, as my ankle wasn’t up to heels—then hustled downstairs. It wasn’t until I was actually in the elevator that I understood that I was ridiculously cheerful for the hour and my battered state. I finally identified the sense of accomplishment that buoyed me along.
Not many people were up yet, being as late as it was in the course of the conference, and I myself wouldn’t have been up except for my hand. And I also needed coffee above and beyond what was in that smelly little sachet in the room that had so ineffectually darkened the hot water.
There was Scott, sitting in the lobby with his coffee. I got some from the urn, and he nodded coolly when I sat down with him. He looked like he’d never been to bed at all. He looked worse than he should have, and I thought about the message I’d taken from his wife, and wondered just how much of this he hid on a regular basis, and how okay he really was. Denial could be a good thing, once you were over a rough patch in your life, but not if it kept you from really dealing with what happened.
“I’ve got to talk with you, Em,” he said gruffly. “It’s important.”
“Okay. Shoot.” Please, I thought, don’t let this be what I think it is. Please don’t let this be about—
He stared at the carpet, just a minute, then looked me straight in the eye. “It’s about Duncan.”
“What is it?” Crap, I knew it, I knew it, I knew it…
“You’ve got to leave him alone. One way or the other.”
I felt my mouth drop open with the surprise. “What!”
“Em, I know…I’ve heard…that you probably have reason not to be…Duncan’s best friend. But you’ve got to let the past stay dead. You’ve got to leave him alone.”
“Leave him alone? Scott, I guess you didn’t get the memo, but Duncan’s already spoken to me about everything! He’s trying the suck-up approach, so now I think it would be a good idea for you to back off playing the heavy. And a little advice from a friend? Let him clean up after himself. He’s not worth you taking his part.”
“I didn’t know you could be like this,” Scott said. I’d never seen him really angry before, and it changed his whole face into something unrecognizable. It was dreamlike, the way that someone you know, you think you know, metamorphoses into someone you’ve never seen before. I’d never seen Scott use his size to intimidate me before. “I didn’t know you could be so vindictive,” he said. “So ugly.”
“Whoa, hold on here! Just what is it you think I’m being ugly about?”
He gave me a look of such pure impatience and disgust that I was more convinced than ever that I was dreaming. I pinched the skin on the back of my hand, felt the sharp pain of fingernails.
He took a deep breath, he couldn’t get enough oxygen. He opened his mouth to try, then failed, tried again. “It’s about the Haslett farm material,” he finally said.
“What about it?”
“Leave him alone about it,” Scott said. “It