Chapter 7
The weeks that followed were quieter than anything Damian had known in years.
Elise’s chelation treatments ran twice weekly at a private clinic Dr. Reyes had personally vetted, and Damian insisted on being there for every single one, sitting in a chair too small for him in a waiting room that smelled of antiseptic and stale coffee, reading contracts he had no intention of finishing while he waited for her to finish an IV drip and walk back out to him under her own power.
Slowly, the tremor left her hands. Slowly, the color came back to her face, the way spring color returns to a tree that has spent a winter looking half-dead. Priya restructured the entire executive floor’s security protocols so that no single person, not even Damian himself, held unsupervised access to anything Elise touched or consumed. Ricardo took over Gerald’s old post without ceremony, without a single word about the man who had held it before him, though everyone in the organization understood exactly why the transition had happened so fast.
Damian, for his part, learned something he had spent thirty-five years actively avoiding — how to sit still beside another person’s fear without trying to solve it by force.
“You don’t have to come to every appointment,” Elise told him one evening, three weeks into her treatment, her voice teasing but her eyes soft. “I promise I won’t vanish the second you look away.”
May you like
“I know,” Damian said, and meant it as an apology for every night he hadn’t looked closely enough before. “I’m not coming because I think you will. I’m coming because I want to.”
She studied his face for a long moment, searching for the old distance that had always lived behind his eyes, the wall he kept between himself and anyone who might one day be used against him. She didn’t find it. Somewhere in the last month, without either of them quite noticing the exact hour it happened, that wall had simply come down.
