The way he was always honest. The way a man is honest when he has decided that honesty is the one thing worth protecting. "I didn't come back every night waiting for something. I came because I didn't want you to be alone."
"The same reason anyone ought to do anything for anyone." A beat. "That's all it was." Simone sat with that.
In 35 years, 20 of them spent in rooms where everyone wanted something from her, she had never once had someone decline her money on the grounds of simply not having wanted anything to begin with. She didn't know what to do with it. So she called Sophia. Sophia Sinclair arrived the next morning on the first flight out of New York.
Nineteen years old, dark-eyed, sharp-jawed, carrying the particular self-sufficiency of a young woman who learned early that relying on people was a risk with an unpredictable return. She had grown up largely in the presence of housekeepers, tutors, and a rotating cast of her mother's assistants who were kind but temporary. She had a mother who was brilliant and driven and somewhere else. She had never blamed her mother.
Not exactly. But she had quietly, systematically learned to need very little from anyone. She had learned, the way children learn the things nobody teaches them, that when strangers appeared to care about someone with money and power, it was wise to understand why before you decided to be grateful. She got the story from Preston first.
The janitor. The wrong room. Twenty-eight nights of songs and stories. The check her mother had written.
The man who refused it. She walked into room 410 and looked directly at Richard. "Who are you?" Cold and flat as a January sidewalk.
Richard stood up from the chair. "You must be Sophia." "Answer the question." "I'm Richard Carter. I'm a janitor here."
"I accidentally walked into your mother's room four weeks ago, and I didn't want her to be alone. That's the whole story." "That is not the whole story." Her voice was controlled, and underneath it, just barely, the seams were showing.
"Nobody comes back every single night for a month for nothing. Nobody refuses half a million dollars for nothing. So tell me, what do you actually want from her?" "Nothing," he said.
"Nothing from her. Nothing from you." Her chin lifted. "I'm going to have our legal team look into your record."
"I'm going to have you removed from this hospital, and if I find one thing, one detail that doesn't match what you're telling me, I'll make sure people know it." Richard's jaw tightened. His throat moved. He looked at her, not with anger, but with something sadder than anger.