After Prison, I Became the Apex of the Stars

CHAPTER 9

 

The regular ward on the fourth floor smelled like antiseptic and defeat, and Gwen stood in the doorway looking at the two beds and the shared bathroom and the thin curtains that separated one patient from another like she was staring into the open grave of her social aspirations.

"This is where you expect my son to recover?"

The nurse who had led them to the room didn't bother answering. She had been a nurse for twelve years, and she had learned that some questions from some people were not actually questions but performances, and the only winning move was to ignore them entirely. She adjusted Luigi's IV line, checked his vitals, and walked out without saying a word.

Gwen stood frozen in the doorway for another thirty seconds, waiting for someone to notice her suffering, but nobody did. The other patient in the room was an elderly man with a breathing tube who hadn't opened his eyes in three days, and his family had gone home hours ago. The only audience for Gwen's performance was Arya, and Arya had stopped watching.

"Sit down, Mother."

"Don't tell me to sit down like I'm the one who belongs in a common ward." Gwen's voice had dropped from its earlier shrieking register into something lower and more dangerous, the tone she used when she was calculating rather than performing. "Do you have any idea what this looks like? The Clarke family, sharing a room with some dying stranger. If anyone from the Gordon family hears about this, if Fred finds out we couldn't even secure a VIP suite for Luigi's recovery, what do you think that says about us?"

Luigi groaned from the bed, shifting his weight and immediately regretting it as pain shot up his leg. His face was pale and slick with sweat, and the painkillers they'd given him hadn't fully kicked in yet. "Mother, shut up. Just shut up for five minutes. My leg is broken."

"Watch your mouth, Luigi. I am not the one who got his leg broken by a prison rat and his whore."

"Whore?" Luigi laughed, and the laugh turned into a cough, and the cough made his leg move, and the movement made him hiss through his teeth. "That woman had four bodyguards who looked like they could bench-press a car. You called her a tramp to her face, Mother. You called her a cheap little tramp. And then you found out she's probably a Smith, and now you're standing here complaining about the quality of the curtains while that same woman could destroy our entire family with a single phone call."

The words landed on Gwen like physical blows, each one making her flinch. She opened her mouth to argue, to deflect, to blame someone else the way she had blamed everyone else for everything for her entire life, but for once nothing came out. Because Luigi was right, and they both knew it.

Arya watched the exchange from the foot of Luigi's bed with her arms crossed and her expression unreadable. The exhaustion she had been carrying since the prison parking lot had settled into her bones like cement, hardening with each passing hour until she could barely remember what it felt like to be light.

"Mother, sit down," Arya said again, and this time there was something in her voice that made Gwen obey. She lowered herself into the plastic chair beside Luigi's bed, and the surrender in that small movement was more revealing than anything she had said all day.

"Eddard needs to pay for this," Gwen said quietly, staring at the floor. "I don't care who his new friends are. I don't care if he's sleeping with a Smith. That animal broke my son's leg and he needs to pay."

Arya closed her eyes and pressed her fingers against her temples, where a headache had taken up residence and was currently redecorating. "You went to his house, Mother. You went to his parents' house, the day he got out of prison, to harass him about the villa. Did you really think that was going to end well?"

"You're defending him?"

"I'm not defending anyone. I'm trying to understand what actually happened because the story you told me in the hallway has more holes than a fishing net." Arya opened her eyes and looked at her mother with the flat, tired gaze of someone who had long ago stopped expecting honesty but couldn't quite bring herself to stop hoping for it. "You said you went to thank him. You and I both know you've never thanked anyone for anything in your life unless there was a camera present."

Gwen's jaw tightened, but she said nothing.

"The villa was never ours to take," Arya continued. "I told you that before you left. I told you that house belonged to Eddard's parents, that it was left to him in their will, that I had no legal right to offer it in the divorce settlement. But you went anyway, didn't you? You went to try to take it from him because Luigi wanted it and because you've never been able to stand the idea of that man having anything that you don't control."

"Fine," Gwen snapped, her composure cracking. "Fine, we went there to talk to him about the villa. But that doesn't justify what he did. That doesn't justify him having his thugs beat us and break Luigi's leg."

"And the woman? The one you called a tramp and an insect and told to rot in hell? Who was she?"

Gwen's face went pale again at the memory, and her voice dropped to something barely above a whisper. "I don't know. But if she's a Smith, if she's really connected to that family, then we have bigger problems than Eddard Collins."

Arya looked at her mother for a long moment, and then she pulled out her phone and walked to the window at the far end of the room, putting as much distance between herself and the bed as the small space would allow. She stared out at the city skyline, at the buildings that represented everything she had spent three years building, and she thought about the man she had divorced that morning.

She didn't know what she believed anymore. Her mother's story was obviously edited, polished in the places where the truth was inconvenient, but the bones of it felt real enough. Eddard had been with another woman. That part, at least, Gwen wouldn't have invented because it didn't serve her narrative. If anything, it made Gwen look worse, storming into a man's house to find him already moved on, but she had told the story anyway because she was too blinded by rage to realize how it reflected on her.