“Not when it matters.”
“Fine. You asked for it.” She hopped up on one of the folding tables and let her legs dangle. “There was an accident. My friend and I were driving back to her place after my showing at a gallery downtown.”
“You had a showing?”
She bit her lip. “I’m gonna say this, and it’s gonna sound like I’m being funny, but I’m kind of a big deal. Or I was. Or I still might be. I don’t really know. I’ve been painting. But not as Remi Ford. To the art community, I’m Alessandra Ballard.”
“Why?”
She swung her legs. “Because Remi Ford got arrested for skinny dipping. Because she’s a troublemaking screw-up who’s always on the brink of disaster.”
“That’s not who you are.”
“That’s who people here see me as. I’m the girl who fixed the street hockey championship. Or the one who got in a bar fight when she was nineteen. I didn’t want that girl following me into the world. So I’m Alessandra Ballard who wears beautiful clothes, goes to fancy parties, and paints music.”
He didn’t much care for the idea that Remi felt she had to hide who she really was. But he decided not to derail the conversation into an argument. Yet.
“Anyway, my friend Camille was driving us back to her place. It was late. The roads were icy. We ended up going through a guardrail. I broke my arm, but Camille was really hurt. She was knocked unconscious. And there we were, stuck in the dark. I felt so…helpless. So alone. I didn’t know if the car was going to slide into the blackness. I didn’t know what was in the blackness. A ravine. A river. A gentle slope. I didn’t know.”
Not wanting to distract her from the tale, he was careful not to move a muscle. But his arms ached to hold on to her so she’d remember she wasn’t alone.
“Anyway, we were finally rescued. I didn’t realize at the time that my arm was broken. I was more worried about Camille. She still hadn’t woken up. They wouldn’t let me go to the hospital with her, and I was rightfully very upset. They had an officer drive me home.”
She bit her lip and looked to the side.
“Rajesh—that’s my agent—showed up at my place to tell me how the showing had gone, but I ruined his fun with an asthma attack. The cold, the adrenaline. Being upset. Anyway, he called an ambulance, which, for the record, I still think was overreacting.”
“And that’s when they noticed your arm?” Brick guessed.
She nodded.
“And that’s why you’re afraid of the dark.” Because she thought her friend was dying next to her in the dark and there was nothing she could do. Her pain, her fear was agony for him.
She nodded again, eyes closed.
“Breathe.”
He closed the distance between them and took her hands, hating the feel of the cast. She opened her eyes and looked up at him, then took a slow, deep breath. She kept on breathing until her shoulders lowered.
“You look like you could use a breath or two,” she observed.
“You could have been killed.”
“But I wasn’t.”
“You broke your arm. That’s still too much for me.”
“Before you go all big brothery, you might as well hear the rest.”
“There’s more?”
“Camille is still in the hospital. I don’t know how badly she was hurt. I don’t even know if she regained consciousness. She hasn’t answered any of my calls or emails. So it’s hard not to imagine the worst.”
“Why can’t her family give you an update?”
“Well, that’s the other problem. Camille is kind of well-known in Chicago, and so is Alessandra. Together, we got a lot of attention. So there’s been some…speculation.”
He wasn’t going to like this part. He could already tell.
“What kind of speculation?”
“Do a search for Alessandra Ballard online, and you’ll find a few dozen articles hinting that maybe I was driving. That maybe I had too much to drink at the gallery and that maybe the accident was my fault. That maybe I put my friend in the hospital.”
Brick swore under his breath. He wanted to get on a plane, fly to Chicago and purposely knock the teeth out of every blogger and journalist who dared write lies about her.
“I swear. It isn’t true. I didn’t cause the accident.”
“You think I don’t fucking know that?” He reeled it back in. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to say it like that.”
Her eyebrows were high on her forehead. “How did you mean to say it?”
“You take your lumps. When you screw up or get caught, you apologize and take your punishment. If you had been driving, you would have already apologized publicly and privately about a hundred times.”
She heaved a sigh, her fingers tightening their grip on his. “I wish someone would tell her family that. They’re inclined to believe the gossip. When I tried to visit her, they had security escort me out of the hospital.”
“What about the police report? It would prove Camille was behind the wheel.”
“It would say that, if I hadn’t pulled her out before they got there. The car was sliding, and I thought we were about to plummet off the side of a cliff.” She shrugged her shoulders. “It’s just my word against a bunch of people speculating about a sexier story.”
“So you came home.”
“Yeah. I came home. I figured it might be nice to be Remi Ford again.” Her eyes filled with tears, and she immediately looked away. “I just wish I knew if she were okay. The news just keeps saying the same thing. Condition unknown. And no one will give me any answers. So I just sit here waiting for her to call, to say she’s okay.”
He couldn’t stand it anymore. Brick pulled her against his chest and held on tight. The muffled sob that escaped damn near broke his heart.
He didn’t tell her that everything was okay. Because it sure as hell wasn’t. But he’d find a way to make it okay. He’d find a way to reassure her.
“You know another stupid thing?” she asked, sniffling against his chest.
“What, baby?”
“I haven’t painted since the accident.”
“You broke your arm,” he pointed out.
“Yeah, that should just mean I can’t paint well. But there’s this block. Every time I pick up a brush, I just relive it over and over again. The impact. The horrific sound of metal scraping. And then the drop.” She shivered against him. “It’s like there’s no room for music in my head anymore.”
“You’re healing. Cut yourself some slack. You went through a trauma. You can’t just bounce back from it physically or emotionally.”
“What if I never bounce back? What if I never paint again? Or what if I do paint again, and it’s terrible?”
He cupped her face in his hands, hating the tears he saw there. “You’re Remington Honeysuckle Ford—you will fucking bounce back.”
Her laugh was half-hearted. “Is that an order?”