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11 P.M., FRIDAY, JAN. 14, 2022, Portland Heights house — Ryan’s phone buzzed. There were only a few people whose numbers sounded when he had the sound turned off. He frowned. He and Teresa were seated on the deck with other members of their household. All the kids were asleep. It was just Cage and Em, Maddie, Joe and Kari. Cage and Joe had beers. The women had wine. He had some sparkling cider that was pretty good. And he really didn’t want to think about work. It had been a long, hard week. A successful one, however, and they were celebrating it.
Will’s meltdown in the middle of it hadn’t helped.
Cage reached for his own phone and glanced at it. He frowned.
“What?” Ryan said wearily.
“Corey says Blair’s in the Crow’s Nest,” Cage said. “He thinks someone should know, and he’s getting ready to leave.”
“Alone?” Ryan said with a frown.
“Apparently.”
Ryan thought if there was anything he should do about that info. He shrugged. “Tell him, thanks for the heads up, I guess.”
Cage tapped out a reply and set his phone back down.
“You’re not worried about it?” Kari asked.
“I’ve been worried about it all week,” he said. “But I can’t make Will go back to the doctor. The doctor is concerned, but that’s all she’s allowed to tell me. Will thinks I’m out to get him, thinks Blair is out to get him. I don’t blame her for sleeping in the Crow’s Nest.”
“I don’t blame her,” Cage said. “But is she safe?”
“I thought the Crow’s Nest was safe!” Joe said with surprise.
“Not if the person you’re afraid of has a key,” Ryan said grimly. “Suggestions?”
“Emily and I could go get her,” Cage said. “Bring her to stay with us for the night. They’re doing a spa day in the morning anyway. Gives her some space.”
Ryan grimaced and looked at Teresa. “Help?”
“Do you really think she’s in danger from Will?” Teresa asked. She sounded troubled. Teresa liked Will. Will babysat for them. Rafael called him Tio Will. Was that man a danger? No. But was this the same Will?
Ryan considered that. “He’s not himself,” he conceded. “He’s irritable. He’s been having these outbursts. He swung at me the other night. I’ll make it worse if I do anything, but yes it worries me.”
“Do we really know what happened that night?” Cage asked with a frown. “I mean I saw him go down, and I went to help. And the guy was kicking him. I remember that. It was dark and pretty chaotic. And there must have been a nail, because his forehead had a puncture wound and it was bleeding. But just how hard did he get hit in the head?”
Ryan shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said tiredly. “And Dr. Clarke can’t tell me what the MRI says, and she said Will’s not returning her calls. She’s worried.”
“Can a bad concussion change a person? Make them dangerous?” Kari asked. “Because he was pretty scary the other night when they had to block him into his office.”
“It can,” Teresa said slowly. “There was a man in Yakima. A blow to the head and he became a different person. Killed a....” She trailed off, troubled, as if she didn’t like the memory.
“Go,” Joe said suddenly. “We’ll never forgive ourselves if something happens and we don’t. Or I can go down and sleep on the newsroom couch.”
Ryan smiled at his newest housemate. Joe’s mother had lived with an abusive man for decades. Joe saw it in that light, and he wasn’t wrong. Cage took that as permission. He and Emily emptied the rest of their drinks in the kitchen sink and headed out.
Maddie said goodnight, and Joe went to take Kari home. Then it was just Ryan and Teresa. She moved to sit in his lap. Teresa was a small woman; one of the advantages of that was being able to share a chair. It was one of his favorite things.
One of his many favorite things with this woman. He stroked her hair as she snuggled against him. He was so fortunate. Blessed, the Rev. Washington would have said.
They sat like that until they heard the elevator come down. Joe stuck his head out of the patio door, and said, “I’m back, and so are they, and with Blair. Good night, all.”
“Good night,” Ryan murmured. Teresa made a sleepy sound, and he laughed. “Bedtime, beloved. Let’s get some sleep.”
“Really?” she teased. “Sleep? That’s how you want to celebrate a successful week like this?”
He grinned. “Well, if you put it like that,” he began, and ended the sentence by kissing her. He could feel her laughter as he pressed her close. “You’re laughing,” he accused.
“I am,” she said. “I’m happy.”
After all they’d been through, that was a miracle. But then Teresa brought happiness to him as this wondrous gift she wasn’t even aware she gave him. He held her tight.
Teresa, however, had other ideas. She was working to remove his clothes and he obligingly kicked off his shoes and socks, then bent his head so she could pull of his T-shirt. She paused there to kiss her way down his chest, to tongue the nipple ring she’d made him get — the dragon needs his gold, and I want you to remember you’re mine, she had said. It did that all right, among other things. He arched with pleasure as she explored his body with her mouth. Pressing his palms to her head, he guided her lower, but she pulled back and shook her head.
He stilled. “You’re mine,” she said fiercely.
“Beloved,” he said, and he let her take control of the pace of things, control of their lovemaking, control of him.
There was no end of the pleasure he found with this woman. Passion in all of its forms.
Lovemaking indeed.
Breakfast was often a communal event especially on Saturdays. Ryan woke to the smell of bacon cooking. He glanced at the clock, 8 a.m.? He’d slept in. Usually Rafael was awake at 6 a.m. and he believed with all of his squirrelly little heart that everyone wanted to be up with him. And just like that Ryan had become a morning person.
Teresa must have steered Rafael away and let him sleep.
But bacon? He got up, took a shower, pulled on sweats and a T-shirt and went upstairs to the kitchen. People were already gathering. Emily had her hands wrapped tightly around a coffee mug. He laughed and went to find his own cup. Joe and his 15-year-old brother Carl were in the kitchen helping Teresa cook. He kissed her good morning and nodded to the two younger men.
He was up for his son, but that didn’t mean he was speaking this early in the morning. Not before coffee. He joined Emily at the dining room table with his own mug. Cage came down carrying sliced melon. Blair was with him.
“Coffee in the kitchen,” Ryan said, smiling at her.
She was pale, dark circles under her eyes, and way too quiet. She nodded and disappeared into the kitchen. He frowned.
He heard his phone ring and went to find it. He wondered if anyone had done a tally about how much time people wasted finding their phones. Maybe having them attached to a wall had its merits. He missed the call. He saw he had also missed a text from Will: You fucker. You undermined my plans with Blair. You knew I was going to ask her to marry me, to go with me. You knew! And you suggested she apply for EIC anyway. You fucking bastard. I thought you were my friend.
A second text: Where is she? I can’t find her. Is she with you? Does Teresa know you lust after my girl? Fucker. I thought you were my friend.
He clenched his jaw and closed his eyes briefly. I thought we were friends too. Then he looked at the call he’d just missed. A number not in his directory? He listened to the voicemail. It was from Dr. Clarke: Ryan, Will is up at OHSU. He came by ambulance a few hours ago. He was found unconscious on the sidewalk; I think he was outside the EWN building. Can you come?
Ryan swallowed hard and went to find Blair. “Will is up at OHSU,” he said quietly. Everyone quieted down to listen. “He was found unconscious outside the EWN building a few hours ago. Dr. Clarke called. Do you want to go with me?”
“Of course, I do!” she exclaimed. “A coma?”
“Not sure,” he said, which wasn’t quite true. He went to find his shoes.
Blair was quiet — too quiet — in the car. He glanced at her worriedly. “You cut your hair,” Ryan said finally. “I like it.”
She smiled briefly. “Celebrating adulthood,” she said. “An impulse.”
“Suits you better than the ponytail,” he said. “You’d outgrown that.”
“Will liked the ponytail better, he said,” she whispered. “Do you think he will be all right?”
“OHSU is one of the finest hospitals on the West Coast,” he assured her. “They’ll take good care of him.”
He parked by the clinic and they went in to find Dr. Clarke. She was waiting for them. “He’s over in ICU,” she said, and guided them through parking lots to the main building. “They’re going to want to do surgery. But the university doesn’t have a directive on file for him. My husband was on ER duty this morning. He recognized the name when he came in and called me. I came up, and then I called you.”
“What can you tell us?” Ryan said.
“Not much,” she said. “We don’t know much. I’m going to treat you as next of kin.” She looked doubtfully at the silent blonde.
Ryan introduced her.
“I’m his fiancé,” Blair said.
Dr. Clarke looked relieved at that. “The MRI showed a small bleed,” she said. “Not in a particularly dangerous place, but... he didn’t call back. I left repeated voicemails. Best guess is he was still taking Tylenol with codeine — although we took his away from him when he was here and gave him regular Tylenol.”
“Last night, he said he’d gotten the prescription refilled,” Blair said. “That worried me.”
Dr. Clarke looked furious, and then cleared her expression, and nodded. “Not good with a bleed,” she said as neutrally as she could. “So, at some point during the night, he apparently went to the EWN building and the bleed ruptured. He passed out. Campus security found him and called an ambulance. In some ways he was fortunate to be outside the building. Inside, it might have been much longer before someone found him.”
Blair nodded.
They wandered through the maze of halls that made up the hospital. Dr. Clarke introduced them to the neurosurgeon as Will’s fiancé and his faculty advisor. His face lightened. “Good,” he said. “Can you speak on his behalf to authorize surgery?”
“I can,” Blair said steadily. Ryan admired the hell out of the young woman. He always had, but he wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d been a weeping mess right now. Instead she was stepping up to advocate for the man who had driven her from her home the night before. He thought of the texts he had gotten from Will. If that was what he said to him, what had he said to Blair?
“What exactly will you be doing?” Blair asked the surgeon.
“Essentially, I’m going to go in and cauterize the bleed,” he said.
“Like they do with kids who have bad nose bleeds,” Blair said.
“Exactly that,” the surgeon said, pleased with the analogy. “It’s not in a particularly difficult spot. It should be straightforward. But we do need to do it now. Can you authorize it? Or do you know how to reach his parents?”
“I’ll authorize it,” she said. “And we’ll call his parents.”
“He’s got the university health insurance,” the surgeon said, somewhat doubtfully. “I’m not sure how much will be covered. That doesn’t affect the decision, but just so you are aware.”
“He has a supplemental insurance plan,” Ryan interjected. “It will cover anything the university doesn’t cover.”
“Very good,” the surgeon said. “There’s no reason for you two to wait. We can call you when he’s back in ICU after surgery. We discourage waiting these days.”
Ryan nodded. “I’ll make sure the desk has our numbers,” he promised.
“Can I see him?” Blair asked. The surgeon hesitated, and then led her into the ICU unit. Ryan turned to Dr. Clarke.
“That doctor who prescribed the Tylenol with codeine,” he began.
“I will do everything in my power to see that he’s fired over this,” Dr. Clarke said grimly. She was furious. “There have been too many misdiagnoses out of there. Dangerous ones. I don’t know why he’s still on staff!”
“Is he the one who missed the infection in Cage’s wound a year ago?” Ryan asked.
“Probably,” she said. “If so, he should have been fired then!”
Ryan thought back. “There’s been so much turmoil in that division. He probably was saved by Dr. Davis’s meltdown. And then the interim VP has had a lot on his plate. Inertia. But I’m with you. Fired. A malpractice suit against the university if they don’t pay for all of Will’s surgery costs.”
Dr. Clarke smiled at him. “You’re his supplemental insurance plan, aren’t you?” she said.
Ryan nodded with a shrug. “We’ve been through a lot together,” he said. They had. Will had killed a man a year ago, saving Ryan’s life. He owed him. This current fuss seemed small in comparison.
Blair came back, still composed. “Can we stop at the apartment and let me pack a bag? Emily said I can stay with them for as long as I want. And I don’t want to be alone right now.”
“Smart,” he said. “There’s actually a bed and bath unit north of the entry way on their floor if you’d like more privacy.”
She nodded. She didn’t say anything more. Ryan parked behind the apartment building, and she let them into the building and then to the apartment. She stopped and cried out, then she turned back to Ryan. He looked in the apartment. It had been trashed.
“I heard him throw something at the door when I left,” she whispered. He held her and felt her shudder. “But I had no idea.”
Ryan swallowed hard at the rage this showed. He pulled out his phone and called Ben. “You upstairs?”
“Yes,” he said. “Bianca has my pickup. She went to pick up people for the spa day. What do you need?”
“I’m down at Blair and Will’s place,” he said. “Can you come down?”
He looked down at the woman he still held with one arm while he used the phone. “Blair? Ben’s going to help me pack you a bag,” he said gently. “I want you to wait in the car, OK?”
She took a deep breath and looked back at the apartment. “He broke my rocking chair,” she whispered. “And that’s my grandmother’s quilt and the rug she gave me. He destroyed them. Why would he do that? He knew I loved them — he loved them.”
“This wasn’t the Will you or I know,” Ryan said firmly. “Think of this as his evil twin brother, released by the brain injury. But you need to go wait in the car, OK? Let Ben and I handle this.”
She nodded and took his keys and went out the back door. Ben showed up a few minutes later and looked at the room and whistled. “Where was Blair when he did this?” he asked. “Not here, I take it.”
“Thank God for that,” Ryan said, surveying the damage. “No, she left. Went for a walk and then to EWN. Then after you all finished the show, she went upstairs. Corey was worried about her being there alone, so he called when he was ready to leave. Cage and Emily brought her home to stay with them.”
He told Ben about Will’s medical condition and that he’d been found unresponsive on the sidewalk outside the EWN building. “He must not have gotten there until after she was gone,” Ryan said numbly.
“I’ll pack a bag for her,” Ben said, and opened her bedroom closet. “Shit,” he said.
Ryan looked. Clothes had been pulled off hangers and destroyed. He took a deep breath and recognized the smell of piss. He wandered through the rooms. The rocking chair was in pieces. In their study he’d destroyed some of her books. He was looking at the EWN Avengers poster above her desk when Ben found him. Will had gouged out Ryan’s face from the poster.
“We can’t let her see all this,” Ben said, and he pulled the poster down and rolled it up.
Ryan nodded, and he called the property management company and asked for Joel. He was transferred to his cell phone. A number he had, he realized. He was shook, too, he realized.
“I need you,” he said.
And bless the man, even on a Saturday he was there in no time. Ben had managed to find enough clothes to pack an overnight bag, and Ryan added toiletries from the bathroom. Joel looked around the apartment as Ryan explained. He too took a deep breath and wrinkled his nose.
“There’s a cleaning company I use,” Joel said. “I’ll call them.”
“Thank you,” Ryan said. “I don’t want Blair to have to deal with it. But some things? Like the rocker, the quilt and the rug? Those are irreplaceable. Have them set those things aside, and we’ll see what can be done.”
Joel nodded, he pulled out his phone, took some pictures and made some notes. “Is she staying with someone?”
Ryan nodded. “She’ll be up at the house.” He smiled at the man. “We’ve got room.”
Joel laughed. He’d overseen all the remodeling up there. “I hear the contractor starts the next remodel project on Tuesday?”
Ryan nodded. They were reconfiguring Joe’s rooms to make it more apartment-like for him and the younger kids.
“All right, I’ll take care of this,” he said. “It will probably exceed their cleaning deposit however.”
“Bill to me personally,” Ryan said, resigned. And Joel nodded.
Ben was waiting in the hall with Blair’s overnight bag and her backpack. “Now what?”
“Now we figure out EWN leadership,” Ryan said grimly. “The girls’ spa day just went co-ed.”
Ben stowed the bag in the trunk, and hopped in the far back of Ryan’s Subaru, behind the child seats. Ryan drove silently back to Portland Heights. Blair asked no questions, said nothing.
“OK,” Ryan said when everyone was gathered around the dining table. They were so silent, and he was reminded once again how young they were. Most of them had just celebrated their 21st birthdays. It seemed impossible for EWN, which had long been a place of ‘non-traditional students’ as the university termed them. They’d gone from an average age of 27 to barely 21 in a year. “The doctors are doing what needs to be done for Will. Our next task is to figure out what needs to be done with EWN. I’d like to propose to the Media Board that they appoint Blair and Ben as interim editors-in-chief.”
“Do we need to do that?” Ben asked. “Is he going to be out that long?”
Ryan shrugged. “No one knows how long,” he replied. “But even if it were just this weekend, and we all know it will be longer than that, we need an EIC. For legal reasons if nothing else. There has to be someone — a student — who makes the final decisions.”
Ben nodded.
“Blair?” Ryan said gently. He wasn’t sure how well she was actually tracking this. But she nodded.
“That works,” she said. “And I think Bianca and Joe should cover the news desk.”
People thought about that, and although Joe looked startled, everyone nodded.
“That leaves a need for a lead anchor,” Bianca said. “I can sit in on rotation, but I can’t do the news desk and be lead anchor. Ellison Lee?”
That too got nods. “OK,” Ryan said. “I’ll call Michelle Stewart. Cage? Could you call Corey and bring him up to speed? I don’t think this can wait until the 4 p.m. Zoom meeting. Better we do it now.”
Blair nodded her agreement.
“Good. Blair? You’re in charge of the meeting?” he asked.
“I’ve got this,” she said. “You talk to Dr. Stewart.”
Dr. Stewart listened to his update. “I’m so sorry for Will,” she said sincerely. “But yes, I think the management plan is a good one, and I’ll put the interim names out to the Board. We can have an emergency online meeting to approve it. I’ll call you to add you in. They’ll all need an update.”
“Thank you,” he said.
Ryan glanced over to the table where his leadership team seemed to be holding court, and he went out on the deck. He needed to make a list of everything that needed to be done. And one of the things he wanted to do as soon as the crisis was over was have a closed-door meeting with the Media Board about what he should do — what could he do — in the future in a crisis like this.
He looked up as Teresa joined him. She smiled. “A list?” she said.
He nodded. “I realized this week when Will had his meltdown in the newsroom, that he was actually right. The charter doesn’t allow me to intervene. I could take him to the Board, of course, but what about right then, right now? I need better instructions.”
She smiled at him. “You will do what needs to be done,” she said. “And I have confidence that you will do the right thing. And if the board reprimands you later? So be it. If they fire you? It’s not like you’re doing it for the money.”
Ryan laughed. No, an adjunct like him made less than the EWN ad reps did — and they were students. On top of that, he was only half-time. Half-time pay, on call 24/7. Hell of a deal.
“Besides,” she teased. “Who else would they find to do it?”
Ryan laughed.
“Ryan!” Ben called. “We’re ready to start.”
Ryan went inside to join them, tugging Teresa with him. She might not play a role in EWN, but he needed her. She gave him stability. She gave him love. And just as important, she let him love her.
OK, he told himself. Stop with the mushy shit. Your students need their advisor, not a love-sick fool. He grinned.