“She can’t dress herself, or walk around freely. She can’t feed herself. When did Buster ever sit still? She was always busy. This can’t be how she wants to live.”
“But there are new—”
“Dude.”
Mace dropped his head into his hands. Fuck.
“Maybe it’s best this way.”
He wasn’t ready to lose her, not now, not when he wanted her to see he could be successful after indulging him so long on his various crusades to teach himself, to follow a dream. But that wasn’t going to happen either unless Anderson Abbott was a decent guy. “Let’s just get through this.”
“Here’s the thing. I spoke to Anderson already. Monday morning is a hard deadline. The Summers-Denby investment committee is making a selection of potential ventures. If we don’t have our stuff done, it won’t go in the investment pack.”
“What does that mean? That’s just admin. We can print it off ourselves and drive it around to their freaking homes if we have to.”
“No, we can’t.”
“So that’s it.”
Dillon stabbed the chopstick through a foam coffee cup. “That’s it.”
“That committee must meet again. It can’t be the only time.”
“I don’t know.” He stabbed a second chopstick through it. “We’d have to be invited to resubmit.”
“You couldn’t tell me this before.”
“Mace, you haven’t slept for days, you look like a corpse they should put back in a drawer in the morgue. Buster is dying. I didn’t know what the fuck to tell you.”
“I’m not giving her up.”
“If we give them less than the best, that’ll screw us just as surely, maybe worse.”
“I’m not giving this up.”
Dillon stabbed a third chopstick through the cup. He kept his eyes down. “We got lucky. We can get lucky again.” He didn’t believe that for one minute and neither did Mace.
“I’m going home to have a shower, change. I’ll work from here tonight. Come back in the morning and see what I’ve got. If you don’t think it’s good enough, well, I don’t know. I can try to sleep with someone who lives next door to another venture capitalist.”
“Or maybe just this same woman again.”
That didn’t seem likely. It was already another lifetime ago. “Will you stay with Buster till I get back?”
Dillon stood the cup on its tripod legs. “Modern art. Buster would approve. Of course I will.”
Mace went home. He showered and shaved. He put the washing machine on to wash Buster’s underwear, her nighties and blouses, the things she’d need when she got back to St Ags. He drove back to the hospital where Buster looked brighter. She was watching an old episode of Mad Men with Dillon. She was going to be all right. Even the doctor was pleased.
When she slept that night her breathing was steadier. He worked from a chair outside her room where there was light and he couldn’t disturb her, but could still see her chest rise and fall.
He was still on the chair when Dillon woke him. Dillon looked in on Buster, grabbed Mace’s USB and took off. Mace relocated to the chair in Buster’s room and settled in to doze the day away. At lunchtime he helped her eat and remembered to call Nolan. Got lucky and got his voicemail. Told him he had a family emergency. He left a message for Dillon too, wondering if he’d submitted to Anderson Abbott or not, trying not to care.
In the afternoon he read to Buster. Something he often did, but usually it was magazines or the newspaper. She wanted him to read one of the skinny books that regularly came in the mail and were jammed in their hundreds into the bookshelves at home.
They should probably be talking about the future, about what he wanted to do and how he needed her to be careful not to get sick again, not to scare him so badly. Plus the book looked cringe-worthy.
“We should talk, you know about...”
“You talk.”