She picked up her jacket from the hook by the door. She walked to the Triumph. She rode out of the lot and on to the highway, and she didn't let herself look in the mirror. She took a room at the Hotel Jerome. She flew to Chicago.
She sat across a mahogany table from three men who collectively controlled a significant portion of her company's future, and she was, as she always was in these rooms, composed and precise and entirely in command of every variable except the ones that mattered. Noah told her afterward that she'd been brilliant. She looked at him and felt absolutely nothing. She flew back to Denver. She sat in her apartment and watched the city below her window, the lights, the grid, the orderly geometry of a place that made sense on paper.
Her phone showed three unanswered calls from Sophie's school number. Then, she remembered that Sophie's school didn't have her number. She looked more carefully. The calls were from a number she didn't recognize, Aspen area code. She called back.
The voice that answered was Daniel's, but wrong, tight, and rough in a way she'd never heard it. "Sophie fell," he said, "on the ice behind the garage, head injury. They're A" breath. "They're keeping her overnight. They want to do more imaging tomorrow. " She drove.
Four hours in the dark, snow falling again on the passes, white knuckles on the wheel. She didn't think. She didn't plan. She just drove. Aspen Valley Hospital was small and quiet at 2:00 in the morning.
The nurse at the desk directed her to the pediatric wing without asking for an explanation, which meant Daniel had put her name somewhere, which meant something, which she didn't let herself think about yet. He was in the hallway outside Sophie's room, sitting in a plastic chair with his elbows on his knees and his hands over his face. He looked up when he heard her footsteps. The expression on his face when he saw her was one she would remember for the rest of her life. "She's stable," he said, immediately giving her the information she needed before anything else.