lights, and she lay there for a while with her eyes closed, and then half an hour later, she got up and joined him at her desk. She looked a little rumpled and her hair was mussed, and her voice was hoarse, but she was ready to go back to work, and neither of them mentioned what had happened.
He remembered to unlock the door, and Liz came in with tea and coffee and a snack, and no one was any the wiser. And at five o'clock Brock walked her to the elevator, and carried her briefcase.
“I'll catch a cab for you, and then come back up,” he said matter-of-factly.
“Don't you have anything else to do than help old ladies across the street?” she teased, but they had become friends that afternoon, and she knew she wouldn't forget it for a lifetime. She didn't know what she had done to deserve that kind of friendship from him, but it had made an enormous impression. “You must have been a Boy Scout.”
“Matter of fact, I was. There was nothing else to do in Illinois. Besides, I've always had a soft spot for old ladies.”
“Apparently,” she grinned at him. She felt about a thousand years old at that moment, but he thought she was remarkable.
It took him a few minutes to catch a cab, and he told her to wait inside while he did. She was about to argue with him, but he didn't hang around to discuss it with her, and he was very firm in his directions. He had already paid the taxi for her, so no one else would hijack it, when he came back inside to get her.
“All set.” He put her in and waved as she drove off, still amazed at all he'd done for her. She wondered how she would ever thank him. And by the time she got home to Annabelle, she felt like a dishrag. She would have liked to have a warm bath with her, but Annabelle still hadn't seen her scar, and she had no intention of letting her see it. So she had a bath by herself with her bathroom door locked, and sat at dinner with Annabelle, but ate nothing. She said she was going to eat later, with Daddy.
He came home at seven o'clock just before Annabelle went to bed, and read her a story. And then he and Alex sat down to the dinner Carmen had left them. But Alex only picked at her food. In spite of making an effort to eat it, she just couldn't.
“Did things get better today?” he asked, as solicitously as he could, although Alex clearly had the feeling he didn't really want to discuss it.
“I was fine,” she said, eliminating totally the report that she had spent an hour on the bathroom floor of her office, and another half hour on the couch, with Brock Stevens holding her ice pack. “I have a lot of new cases.” It was what he wanted to hear, even if it was only part of the story.
“So do we,” he smiled, trying to forget their argument of the night before and all the ugly things they had said to each other. “We have an awful lot of new clients, thanks to Simon.”
“You don't suppose there's any hanky-panky there, do you, Sam?” she said suspiciously, a lot of new clients of that magnitude almost made her a little nervous.
“Stop looking for problems in everything. Don't be such an attorney,” he chided her, none too gently.
“Occupational hazard.” She smiled weakly at him, feeling nauseous again, just from the smell of his dinner.
She cleaned up alone afterwards, but by the time she was through the little she had eaten had come back to haunt her. She wound up on her bathroom floor again, retching horribly, and this time there was no Brock Stevens with a pillow and an ice pack.
“What's wrong with you?” Sam finally asked as he came to look at her. He had to admit, she looked awful. “Maybe it's not just the chemotherapy. Maybe you have appendicitis or something.” It was hard for him to believe the chemo would actually do that.
“It's the chemo,” she said, sounding like the voice out of The Exorcist, and vomiting instantly again, and he left, unable to watch it.
Eventually, she made it to their bed, and collapsed exhausted, while he glanced over at her in annoyance. “I know this is unsympathetic of me, but why is it that you were fine