"What are you talking about?" I ask.
"Well, the thing is that right after the arrest, he had a heart attack. While in custody."
3
Aurora
I miss him more than I ever thought I would.
No, that's not entirely true. I knew that it would hurt. I just didn't realize it would hurt this much.
But we got so used to being apart.
It's not like we lived together and were with each other every single day. Still, my heart aches for Henry.
I think about him all the time, almost every minute of the day, and especially when I should be thinking about something else.
My father is in the hospital.
My father has been arrested.
My father has had a heart attack.
Yet all I can think about is Henry.
I want to see him and I want him to hold me and promise that everything is going to be alright.
When we first broke up, I waited for him to call me back. I wanted him to fix everything and to make everything better.
But he didn't.
He made me wait.
That made me angry.
When he finally called, texted, and called again, I didn't write back, not because I didn't want to but because I wanted him to suffer as much as I did.
And then something changed. After some time had passed, I couldn't bring myself to call him back even though I wanted to more than anything.
Each hour is just a blur of the one before.
I'm angry and mad and sad all at the same time.
I have no control over anything that's going on in my life.
I'm lost and anything that I try to do is not enough.
At the hospital, minutes and hours tick by at an excruciatingly slow pace. It doesn't help that my mother is omnipresent, like some sort of malevolent God who watches you all the time, waiting for you to screw up.
Nothing I have ever done has ever been good enough and that has never been clearer than it is now.
She's taking her anger out on me and there is only so much I can take. The one time that I escape for a casual walk down the street, and pop into a bookstore, to find something to take my mind off my shitty, shitty life, I run into him.
Henry has been following me.
He doesn't hide this fact.
He wants me to know.
A big part of me is happy, overjoyed even, to see him. I have missed him and just being in his presence is overwhelming.
Henry is as tall and gorgeous as ever, with his thick black curls and broad shoulders and that trustworthy Roman nose and piercing eyes.
He is one of the few guys in New York City who doesn't seem to know quite how attractive he is and the fact that he doesn't know makes him even more so.
He's humble in that way that people who are truly humble are, without pretense and without putting on airs.
When he corners me in one of the aisles, it takes everything within me not to run into his arms. I want to tell him that I forgive him and I want him to make everything better.
But I can't.
I can't do anything until I figure out what's going on with my father.
I'm not saying that on my mother's request. Her audacity in asking me to marry a man that I not only loathe but also despise is ridiculous, but I might have to play the game a little bit if I want to help my father out of whatever mess he’d gotten himself into.
I know that I don't have to do that and maybe it's not even my place, but whose place is it?
I love my father, despite all of his shortcomings, and I want to help him in any way that I can.
Getting back together with Henry at this point will only complicate things.
There's something else, too.
The other thing that I can't bring myself to say out loud is the fact that if I were to get back together with Henry, I would have to tell him about Franklin Parks.
Franklin is not only Henry's boss, but he's also the person who can help my father with his charges and help Tate Media get over this little bump in the road.
I don't know the details of any of this and I need to guard what I do know carefully. Henry does work for him and though I don't think he would betray me, the less that he knows the better.
When I think about Franklin, my chest tightens.
He is Henry's boss and he's the one who sent him away. He told me that he did it to break us up, but he framed it as a joke.
Was it, or did he just say it to make me feel bad?
Or both?
As I walk away from him down a crowded New York street, I'm surrounded by a sea of people and I feel all alone.
I turn left and head toward Central Park.
I need to go somewhere where I can clear my head.
I need some nature in my life to help some of this make sense.
A few hours later, I get back to the hospital and spot an attorney sitting next to my mother.
4
Aurora
My mother, who has always been thin and trim, now looks frail and at least twenty years older than she really is.
She has been staying at the hospital for many days on end, only going home to shower and sleep for a few hours here and there.
Her dedication to my father is unnerving and never-ending, and I know that they have always been devoted to one another.
I admire that, but it doesn't change my complicated relationship with her.
I still have flashbacks back to that day when she showed up at my apartment and blamed me for everything that has happened to my father.
According to her, Franklin is the most powerful man in New York, if not the world, and everything that is happening right now, including the arrest and the heart attack, is my fault.
I take a deep breath as I walk down that loud linoleum floor toward the waiting area with a round collection of uncomfortable pink chairs, arranged to face the television on the other side of the wall.
The sound is off and the captions are so big that they take up half the screen. They are also about two minutes behind what the people are saying.
I watch a local reporter discuss a housefire in Staten Island, glancing at it occasionally as my mother talks to me.
She talks a lot under normal circumstances, but when she gets nervous, she talks at double her regular speed.
She gives me a brief update about my father. He is stable but the doctors are still watching his condition, whatever the hell that means.
She goes into the minutia of the medical evidence and all of the information goes in one ear and out the other. I've never been particularly good with biology and I have a D from 10th grade to prove it.
Eventually, I shift my attention to the stranger next to her, with his head buried in his phone. He's an attorney in his 50s with salt and pepper hair and the slim physique of someone who likes to work out and run a mile or two multiple times a week.
Is he the type to have a protein shake every morning and forgo all processed food? I wonder as I let my mind drift.
He introduces himself as Timothy Bradza and gives me a firm shake of his warm hand. He has a quiet demeanor that puts me at ease and I can see why my mother has retained him as counsel.
"Can you please tell my daughter what we talked about earlier?" Mom asks Timothy, looking away from me, annoyed and tapping her manicured nail on the plastic chair.
"Yes, of course," he says. "Well, to be honest with you, Aurora, the situation is quite bleak. The justice department has a strong case against your father for bribery and insider trading."