“How wonderful. I hadn’t realized you were seeing someone special, Eleanor.”
Eleanor felt heat flood her cheeks.
“My father had something similar happen to him two years ago,” Trey said to her mom. “I know what a shock it was for me when I heard. I didn’t think Eleanor should be driving unless it was completely necessary.”
“How kind of you,” her mom said approvingly, finally releasing Trey’s hand.
“He did? Your father, I mean?” Eleanor asked Trey, concerned. “How is he doing now?”
“He’s doing fine. He complains nonstop about his low-fat, low-cholesterol diet, but he hasn’t been as fit as he is today since I was a kid.”
“Everyone focuses on diet and exercises in these cases almost exclusively,” her mom told Trey, her manner confidential, as if Eleanor weren’t even standing there. “What they don’t dwell on in the ER is the psychological aspect of things. Eleanor’s father has always been healthy as an ox. We lost Eleanor’s sister this year. I’m sure Eleanor has mentioned it. David has taken it very hard. We all have, of course. But grief,” her mother said with a shrewd glance at Trey, “is likely the main culprit here, not my beef pirog. Mark my words. David’s heart was broken when we lost Eleanor’s sister, Caddy.”
“Mom,” Eleanor muttered, mortified. A roar had started up in her ears. She noticed Trey’s sideways glance at her. What was he thinking? Suddenly, it all seemed unbearable, having Trey exposed to her mother’s irrepressible smugness . . . her family’s vulnerability.
Hers.
“I saw a sign for a cafeteria. Could anyone use a cup of coffee?” Trey asked, putting his hand on Eleanor’s back. She glanced up at him, startled by his calm suggestion. At his supportive touch. As her mother replied enthusiastically to the affirmative, Eleanor searched his expression.
She didn’t know what she’d done to deserve it, but something in Trey’s warm, steady gaze said it was true.
On this difficult, anxiety-ridden night, he was going to stand by her.
—
It was past one in the morning when Trey pulled his car into a spot in his parking garage and turned off the ignition. Eleanor just sat there in the passenger seat, feeling wrung out by the events of the night, yet strangely alert too. Despite her exhaustion, she’d been hyperaware of her close proximity to Trey on the drive back into the city. Tonight had begun to teach her a lesson.
Trey Riordan was indeed her fantasy man. He just wasn’t the fantasy she’d pegged him as being. Or at least he wasn’t solely that. He was so much more.
She’d been humbled by his attentiveness and kindness, not only to herself, but to her mother. They’d made sure that her father was settled in his new hospital room. Just before midnight, her aunt Joan had arrived. Joan said she’d be staying at the house in Evanston with her mother, a detail that had relieved Eleanor hugely.
When it became clear that her dad would sleep through the night, Eleanor agreed to leave. She promised her mom to return to the hospital early in the morning. Only then had Trey driven her home, despite the fact that Eleanor had assured him he could go at least a dozen times during the interminable night.
Presently, he put his hands on the wheel and looked over at her, his expression solemn.
“You look exhausted,” he said.
“I am. Also wired, strangely enough.”
“It’s the adrenaline. It does weird things to you.”
A wave of emotion went through her, somehow brought on by his low, intimate tone in the close confines of the car. She swallowed it back thickly.
“I like your mom. She’s a riot. I see why you guys call her Catherine the Great.”
“I love her like crazy, but there’s no denying she’s a handful,” Eleanor laughed wearily.
“The very definition of family. They know our buttons, and are experts at pushing them.”
“She liked you too. Adored you, in fact. I’m sorry if she embarrassed you, with some of the assumptions she was making about us,” she said, wincing slightly in memory at some of those assumptions, like how she’d proudly introduced Trey to her aunt Joan as Eleanor’s boyfriend. At the time, Eleanor had suppressed a wicked urge to blurt out that she and Trey were just screwing each other.
“I wasn’t embarrassed once.”
She blinked at his firm tone. Slowly, she unfastened her seatbelt, finding it difficult to meet his stare in that moment. An uncomfortable pressure had started to expand in her chest. “It helped a lot, having you there. You were very sweet, to act as a buffer. We usually cover for each other in handling my mom, but with Dad out of commission, and—” She stopped herself abruptly and stared at her entwined fingers resting on her thighs.
“Why didn’t you tell me about your sister?”
His quiet question seemed to hang in the air between them, replaying again and again in her head. It’d seemed to hover between them at the hospital too. He hadn’t had a chance to ask her about it all night, with either her mom or Joan being near them.