Page 167 of Lady and the Hitman

Trevor noticed him noticing. He straightened, protective. “And what about you?” he asked, chin up in a way I recognized from campus protests and bad dinner parties. “You heard what’s happening.”

33

Ronan took Trevor in—one glance, no spike in heart rate. “I heard.”

“You’re with Zara,” Trevor said, and there was an accusation hidden in the preposition. “You care about her?”

The slightest tilt of Ronan’s head. “Yes.”

“Then help,” Trevor snapped, relief braided with challenge. “We need everything. We need—” He gestured wildly. “Access. Pressure. Money. Whatever it takes to get Greg on that table in Cleveland tomorrow instead of next month. Because letters and op-eds and petitions are not going to restart his heart.”

The silence after that sentence was a black hole.

My dad’s eyelids fluttered. A whisper of a sound left him, not words, more like the suggestion of them. My mother rose, leaned in, stroked his hair back. “Shh, honey,” she murmured. “We’re here.”

Trevor’s breath was loud in the quiet he’d made. He seemed to realize it and reeled himself in by inches. “Sorry,” he muttered, softer. “I didn’tmean—I’m just?—”

Ronan stepped forward with a calm that made everything else feel like static. He didn’t answer Trevor. He looked at my mother. “Hope,” he said, and her name came out like a promise, not a question. “May I use the hallway for a moment? I’ll be right outside.”

She glanced at me, as if I were the authority here. I nodded. Ronan slipped out, already pulling a phone from his jacket, already somewhere else in his mind.

“Where’s he going?” Trevor asked, defensive trying to reassemble itself.

“To do something,” I said before I could stop it.

He bristled. “So am I.”

“I know,” I said, and I did. “Yours just takes … time.”

He shifted, smarting. “You don’t have time.”

I didn’t answer. Because I wasn’t talking to him anymore—I was listening to the echo Ronan left behind.

Things he’d said without saying them. The way he moved through rooms like they were puzzles he’d solved already. Miami and the blindfold. The private road, the jet waiting with its engines humming like a heart that didn’t know how to quit. The way he’d told meYou’ll sleep better not knowingand I’d hated it because I’d slept.

I pressed my thumb into the pad of my palm until bone found bone. The memory unspooled without permission. Ronan on the plane, eyes steady.Don’t confuse outrage with leverage. He hadn’t said those exact words, but I knew that’s what he meant when he looked at me like he could feel the way I lived—always turning heat into arguments, arguments into angles.Outcomes, not opinions. Another sentence he hadn’t needed to speak.

He made things happen. Quietly. Absolutely. Like gravity.

I looked at my father, and my throat tried to closearound itself. My mind offered me every reason I should tell Ronan no if he came back with something wild: pride, politics, power, the optics of letting a man like him underwrite my father’s life. The story it would write about me. The way women like me were supposed to solve problems—with committees and coalitions and consensus, with small-dollar donors and righteous persistence.

Then my father’s monitor hiccuped and I remembered that stories were a luxury for people who weren’t drowning.

Trevor had gone still, eyes on the folder in the chair like it might sprout teeth. “The termination date said May,” he murmured, mind shifting toward math. “That’s four months without coverage. Denials, pre-authorization, reinstatement penalties—we can fight those. If I frame it as a human-interest anchor to a policy explainer, I can?—”

“Trevor,” I said again, gentler this time. “Can you sit?”

He blinked like he’d been shaken awake and dropped into the vinyl chair with a deflated sigh. He ran both hands through his hair. “I hate this,” he said quietly. “I hate that it’s this for you. For your family.”

“Me, too.”

“I should have called more,” he blurted, shame firing in all directions. “I should have checked in. I didn’t because I thought—I thought you didn’t want?—”

“Trevor,” I said, and finally, finally, I put my hand on his sleeve. “This isn’t about you.”

He closed his mouth. Nodded. “Right.”

We sat like that for a few breaths that felt like years.