Page 3 of Devotion
“You want me to pretend I believe you’re fine?” she asked, dryly.
“That would be ideal,” I replied.
She nodded and went back to her tablet. I went back to the window.
Trisha was worried about me. I could tell. Over time, she had become more of a best friend than an assistant. But I needed to handle this alone.
The hospital appeared on the horizon, all mirrored glass and pale stone. My stomach did the thing it always did when I was about to see my brother: dropped and clenched at once, like muscle memory until I was back in the car and driving away.
The private wing carried the usual hospital air. Antiseptic, recycled, a little too clean to feel real. I walked past two nurses who recognized me instantly. The whispers started before I’d taken ten steps. “Is that…” and “Oh my God, that’s…” and the unmistakable sound of a phone camera trying to be subtle and failing completely.
I was used to it. Being recognized was the trade. The currency I’d exchanged for a childhood no one would’ve envied. At eighteen, a talent scout found me at a mall and saw something in my face that was worth money. I took that something and turned it into a career because the alternative was staying in that house, in that basement, in the dark, counting seconds until someone remembered I existed.
My acting career saved me. On set, I could be anyone—the hero, the leader. When the cameras stopped, I could get on a plane and leave. Nobody could lock me anywhere. I had money, fame, a face the world wanted. That had always been enough.
Until five weeks ago, when the phone rang at midnight and Trisha’s voice told me Dominic’s car had crashed intoa guardrail, the company’s board was panicking and my grandmother was asking for me.
I pushed open Dominic’s door without knocking.
He was by the window. Wheelchair. A blanket draped across his legs, his gaze fixed on the turquoise bay and the pastel rooftops beyond it, like a king who’d lost his throne.
The room was private, filled with flowers other people had sent and magazines he probably hadn’t read. It looked like a luxury hotel if you ignored the IV stand, the machines, and the fact that the man sitting in the center of it would never walk the same way again.
Dominic turned the chair to face me, and the resemblance hit the way it always did. Same jaw. Same blue eyes. But where I’d been honed by cameras, trainers, and a lifetime of making sure my exterior was flawless because my interior was a construction site, Dominic had softened. Pain and medication had filed down the edges of the golden boy, and what was left looked tired. Diminished. For the first time in my life, my brother looked human.
“You came.” He sounded surprised.
“Grandma threatened a public scene at my workplace. Self-preservation.”
“Ah. So it wasn’t brotherly love.”
I chuckled. “Let’s not start with fiction.”
He almost smiled. I almost let him. Then I said what I’d come to say, which was the only thing I had for him.
“Get better. Get back in the chair, because I don't want it. Never wanted it.”
Whatever softness had crossed Dominic’s face vanished. He leaned back in the wheelchair, the corners of his mouth pulling down to the flat line I’d seen my entire life. The look that said I was being difficult. Ungrateful. Selfish. The same look my father used to give me before he walked me to the basement.
“You’re still the same,” he said, voice low. “Playing the martyr.”
“Shut up, Dominic.”
“The company’s falling apart. Grandma can’t sleep. The board is circling, and you’re standing there talking about what you don’t want, like the rest of us have the luxury of choosing.”
The luxury ofchoosing. That was rich. That was genuinely rich, coming from the man who’d had every choice handed to him since birth. Who chose the best schools, the best office, the best of everything, while I got whatever was left. Who chose to stay silent while our father locked me in the dark. Who chose Seraphina.
The name surfaced before I could stop it, and once it was there, it was everywhere.
“You want to talk about choices?” My voice dropped. “Let’s talk about choices. Let’s talk about Seraphina.”
Dominic went very still. His hands gripped the armrests of his wheelchair, and for a second, for just one second, I saw it. The flinch. The guilt he’d never been man enough to own.
“That was seven years ago,” he said.
“I don’t care if it was seventy.”
“I was drunk, I didn’t pursue her. I don’t even remember much…”
