“Yes, I’ll watch your things. Go, go,” he said.
Josh laughed. “Oh, no, sir. I’m actually leaving. It’s just that I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation. Your friend is ill and needs a specialist? I’m a doctor here at Vanderbilt. Fourth-year medical student. I know most everyone on staff. If you tell me what’s troubling your friend, I could give you a recommendation.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Josh Hamilton, by the way.”
The man studied him with his right brow raised ever so slightly. As if making a decision, he finally smiled, politely, and said, “Well, isn’t this just serendipity.” He accepted Josh’s hand in his. “Derek Allen. Your offer intrigues me. Would you like to grab dinner and discuss things? Perhaps my colleague could be talked into joining us, and he can hear your suggestions firsthand.”
Josh glanced at his watch.
“I should really be getting home.”
“Oh, surely you have a few minutes. At least let me buy you another cup of coffee. You may be just what the doctor ordered, pun intended.”
Josh had a feeling about the man. Something told him to call Aubrey and tell her he was going to be late.
“All right, Mr. Allen, let’s go get some dinner. I’ll just let my wife know I’m going to be gone a while.”
CHAPTER 39
Aubrey
Today
The sun was high in the sky when Aubrey reached Dragon Park. Sweat ran between her breasts and down the small of her back, but she pushed on, passing the mosaic dragon, until she reached the oak. She stopped short about one hundred feet from the tree and looked around.
Would he be here, waiting? Would he know that she’d figured it out?
She didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, just the usual accumulation of parents and kids, dogs and plaid blankets and Frisbees, spread out across the grass. Still, she approached cautiously.
Two feet away, she could tell something was different.
She shoved her hand into the darkness and instead of feeling the note she’d secreted inside, she felt nothing. Emptiness. Something compelled her to reach in farther, and this time, she did feel something. It was soft, and square, and attached to a hard piece of parchment. She eased it out gently.
The parchment was an envelope, good Crane stationery, the old-fashioned kind.
And the soft square was a blue velvet box.
She closed her eyes. Recorded every movement, every sound, every smell. Honeysuckle on the wind, jasmine, mud, sweat, blueberries, the crying of a child, the bark of a dog.
When she felt like she would be able to remember the moment forever, she opened the box.
In it was a large diamond. Loose. The pointed end was pushed into the velvet liner. She was afraid to take it out, but having seen some of the sparklers her friends sported, she knew this had to be in the three-or four-carat range.
Her heart beat mercilessly. She slid the box closed and opened the note.
It had two handwritten words, handwriting she more than recognized.
Josh’s handwriting.
I’m sorry.
She looked at the stone again, and suddenly it wasn’t perfect. A large crack began, running across the surface, and with a rending creak, the diamond split in half and inside was the photograph of Josh, wound around a stranger, and the photo began to move, bucking and thrusting in her hand, and his face came from the black-and-white and said, “I’m sorry, I had to, I didn’t have a choice.”
Let no man tear them asunder.
Oh, God. She knew what this meant. She knew . . .
? ? ?
Aubrey woke, sweating, crying. Betrayed. Five years of hell, five years of worry, and he was alive, out there. Letting her suffer. Letting them all suffer.
Aubrey didn’t remember her dreams often. It was something she’d turned off when she was a child, effectively muting her brain when she woke in the mornings. She had enough nightmares that she needed something for self-preservation, something to protect her and keep her whole. So she’d trained herself to forget.
It worked 90 percent of the time. So long as her life was on an even keel, the bad dreams stayed at bay. But things were on anything but an even keel now, and Aubrey had been dreaming extensively for the past few days, and they were staying with her long after she turned back the sheets.
The morning after seeing the email, she woke exhausted, like she’d been running for hours. As she thought about it, she realized she had: that was a whopper of a dream.
Winston must have heard her crying in her sleep because he was wedged firmly against her side. When she woke and shifted, he moved with her, a low woof questioning if she was okay.
She wasn’t.
When she’d cried herself out, she rose and washed her face. The clock said 6:40 a.m.
Tyler.