Chapter 3 THE INCIDENT III
The room held that for a moment. Solène didn’t write anything down. She never took notes in the first session. She just watched the slight tightening around his eyes when he heard the number come out of his own mouth, like it surprised him.
“Do you know why you’re here, Zane? Your actual reason, not the contractual one.”
“I put a man in a hospital.”
“You fractured a jaw. He was discharged the same day.”
“That’s a technicality.”
“Yes. But you said ‘hospital,’ which is a more serious word than the reality required. Why?”
He looked at her directly for the first time. She had been looked at by athletes before in this room ,the sizing-up, the subtle condescension, the performance of cooperation over the bedrock of contempt. This was different. This was the look of a man who had just realized, three minutes in, that something was going to be more difficult than he’d planned.
“You’re going to be annoying, aren’t you.”
She almost smiled.
“Deeply. What did DeShawn Briggs say to you?”
“That’s in the report.”
“The report says ‘a comment regarding a deceased family member.’ I want to know what he actually said.”
“I’m not repeating it.”
“That’s okay. You don’t have to repeat it today.”
“But you’ll ask again.”
“I’ll ask again.”
He nodded slowly, like he was filing something away.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“What does Drayden Cole actually want from these sessions?”
Solène held very still. Held it long enough that the question got to breathe.
“What makes you ask that?”
“Because he called you ‘exceptional’ and told me you’d worked with Olympic programs. Drayden Cole doesn’t compliment service providers unless he’s invested in the outcome. So I want to know what outcome he’s invested in.”
She looked at him. This sharp, exhausted, magnificent wreck of a man across from her with his four-hours-a-night eyes and his seven-year grief and his jaw that was set like a fist and she told him the truth, because the truth was the only thing she had ever found that could actually hold someone like this.
“He wants a favorable compliance report so your contract holds value through the franchise’s upcoming sale. He is not primarily interested in your wellbeing.”
The silence was absolute.
“And you? What are you interested in?”
She held his gaze.
“Finding out why a man who has controlled himself for thirty-two years lost control the moment someone said his brother’s name.”
Zane Ashford’s expression changed. It lasted half a second before he buried it again but she saw it. She always noticed changes in expressions.
“Session’s almost up.”
“We have twenty minutes.”
“I know. I’m just telling you how I’ll be spending them.”
He looked away. She let him. They sat in the particular silence of two people who have already begun a war and are taking a moment to respect the scale of what they’ve started.
She was walking to her car at quarter past four when her phone rang. It was an unknown number with Phoenix area code. She almost didn’t answer then she picked.
“Is this Dr. Solène Voss?”
The voice was an old female carrying the particular weight of someone accustomed to saying difficult things without cushioning them.
“It is. Who’s calling?”
“My name is Josephine Ashford. Zane’s grandmother.”
Solène stopped walking.
“I know you saw him today. I know what Drayden Cole told you this job was. I need you to understand something before you decide how you’re going to do it.”
“Mrs. Ashford, I can’t discuss my sessions”
“I’m not asking about your sessions, baby. I’m asking you to listen for sixty seconds to a grandmother who has watched her grandson carry a dead boy on his back for seven years.”
Solène stood in the parking garage with the keys in her hand and said nothing.
“What happened to Marcus wasn’t just grief. It was a cover-up and the man who ran that cover-up is the same man who’s paying your invoice.”
The keys fell. Solène didn’t hear them hit the ground.
“I’ve been sitting on proof for two years. I’ve been waiting for someone my grandson would actually trust enough to hear it. Today, when he came home, he didn’t look beaten. He looked”
She paused which might have been grief, or something past it.
“He looked like a man who just met the person who’s going to save him. Or destroy him. And I need to know, Dr. Voss , which one are you planning to be?”
The line was still open. The parking garage hummed around her like a held breath.
Solène Voss, who had never once in her professional life been at a loss for words, stood in the fluorescent silence and had absolutely nothing to say because the answer , the honest, terrifying answer was that she didn’t know yet and she was already afraid of what finding out would cost.
