Chapter 263: Chapter 265: Harold Asked For More Money
VICTORIA’S POV
The physiotherapist’s name was Dr. Okafor and she had kind eyes and absolutely no patience for self-pity, which Victoria had come to appreciate.
"Left hand," Dr. Okafor said. "From the top."
Victoria opened her hand. Closed it. Flexed. Rotated, carefully, until she felt the pull in her middle fingers that meant she was at the edge of what the tendons would currently allow.
"Good," Dr. Okafor said, making a note. "Better than last week."
"You say that every week."
"Because every week it’s true." She looked up from her clipboard. "The progress is real, Victoria. I need you to let yourself see it."
Victoria looked at her hand instead of answering.
The scars had faded to white. That was something. Three surgeries and eight months and they had faded from the angry red she’d woken up to in a private clinic in Sydney....confused, medicated, her father’s lawyer sitting in the corner with the particular expression of a man delivering news he had been paid to deliver without emotion.
You’re in Australia, he’d said. You’ll be staying here for the foreseeable future. These are the terms.
She hadn’t fully understood the terms until later. Until the medication wore off enough for her to piece together what had happened after the warehouse. What her father had agreed to. What the alternative had been.
She closed her hand again.
Open. Close. Flex. Rotate.
"Same time Thursday," Dr. Okafor said.
"Same time Thursday," Victoria agreed.
The apartment was on the fourteenth floor of a building in Pyrmont with floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over Darling Harbour. Her mother had chosen it. Patricia Ashford approached displacement the way she approached everything....practically, with attention to quality, refusing to let circumstance dictate standards.
The apartment was beautiful.
Victoria hated it.
Not because it wasn’t nice. It was objectively nice. She hated it because it was a beautiful cage and they both knew it and neither of them said so, and that silence sat in every room like a third person who had moved in without being invited.
She made tea when she got home. Set it on the coffee table. Sat down in front of her laptop.
She told herself she wasn’t going to look.
She looked.
Damien Blackwood and Aria Chen photographed arriving at Mont Senai. Damien Blackwood maintains vigil at girlfriend’s bedside. Sources close to the Blackwood family confirm he did not leave the hospital for the first seventy-two hours. A blurred image taken through a car window, him helping her into a vehicle, her head slightly bowed, his hand at her back.
She stared at that last one for longer than she meant to.
His hand at her back. The particular way he was angled toward her, not looking at the camera, not performing anything for anyone. Just.....there. Completely and only there.
She had spent three years trying to get Damien Blackwood to look at her like that.
She shut the laptop.
Picked up her tea. Set it back down without drinking it. Stood up and went to the window and looked at the harbour because at least the harbour didn’t have opinions about her.
Eight months.
Eight months of this city that was too bright and too warm and too cheerful for what she was carrying. Eight months of her mother making careful conversation over careful meals and both of them pretending this was a life and not an exile. Eight months of physiotherapy appointments and surgeries and lying in recovery rooms staring at ceilings and thinking about the warehouse....not all of it, she’d learned not to think about all of it, but pieces. Fragments.
Damien Blackwood’s face. The warehouse. The cold.
Aria Chen crouching in front of her in the dark with steady hands, doing things that kept her alive that Victoria had not asked for and could not stop thinking about.
She pressed her palm flat against the cool glass.
The harbour sparkled indifferently below.
Her phone rang at eleven that night.
Her mother was asleep. The apartment was dark except for the city light coming through the windows, and Victoria was sitting at the kitchen counter with a glass of water she wasn’t drinking and the particular stillness of someone who had been awake for too many hours and had stopped pretending sleep was coming.
She looked at the screen.
Unknown number. Australian code.
She answered.
"Victoria." Her father’s voice. Rougher than she remembered. The voice of a man who had been running for long enough that it was starting to show.
"Dad."
She didn’t say where are you or are you okay or any of the other things that were technically the right things to say. She had learned, in the months since this had all collapsed, to save her words for things that mattered.
"How are your hands?" he asked.
"Getting better." She paused. "That’s not why you’re calling."
"No," he said. "It’s not."
She already knew what it was going to be. She didn’t know the specifics but she knew the shape of it.....her father had a particular tone he got when he needed something and was building toward asking for it, and she’d been hearing that tone her entire life.
He asked for more money.
She listened. twenty thousand. The last time was fifty thousand to start a plan. A plan he described in the deliberate vagueness of a man who didn’t fully trust phone lines. He needed time. Resources. He was going to make this right.
She asked what right meant.
He said make them pay, which wasn’t the same thing and they both knew it.
When he finished she stood up and walked to the balcony and slid the door open and went outside. Sydney at night. The warm air. The water lit up below. She stood at the railing and thought about what she was going to say.
She thought about her hands.
She thought about three surgeries and eight months and the white scars and better than last week, every week it’s true. She thought about her mother asleep in the next room, exhausted in the way of someone holding too much for too long. She thought about the photograph...Damien’s hand at Aria Chen’s back, his whole body angled toward her like she was magnetic north.
She thought about what it had cost.
All of it. Every piece. Everything she had done and everything that had been done to her and everything in between that she still couldn’t look at directly.
"Victoria," her father said. He was still on the line. "I know I have no right to ask you for more money. But i really need it if we want this plan to work "
"You don’t really do not have the right Dad," she said.
He was quiet.
She looked at the harbour for a long moment.
"I’ll send it tomorrow," she said.
