Honor

“I’m not the one in intensive care. I’ll be fine.” She took his hand. “Let’s go see your father.”
Upstairs they found Brandon Halloran pacing the long, empty corridor outside of cardiac intensive care. Not even he could bluster his way past the restricted visiting hours posted on the door. Pale and shaken, his expression was bleak as he waited for word on his son’s condition.
Jason put an arm around his grandfather’s shoulders and steered him toward the waiting room, but Lacey held back, uncertain of Brandon’s mood.
Years ago, before she and Kevin had even married, they had been the closest thing to enemies. Brandon had blamed her for so much that was wrong with his relationship with his son. Since then they’d forged a cautious friendship, which appeared to have splintered into a million pieces because she’d abandoned his beloved and only son.
Hesitant, Lacey stood in the doorway of the waiting room until Brandon held out his hand. Then she moved quickly, anxious for news, anxious for a little of Brandon’s towering, unshakable strength. Clasping his firm but icy hand between her own, she asked, “How is he? What have they told you?”
“Not a damned thing,” he grumbled. “As much money as I give to this place, you’d think I could get a straight answer out of someone.”
“What happened?”
A shadow seemed to pass over his eyes as he remembered. “Found him at his desk, all slumped over. Thought for a minute he might be dead. The guard got the paramedics there and we brought him here.”
“Was he conscious?” Lacey asked.
“Part of the time. Said he wanted to see you. I don’t pretend to understand what’s been wrong between the two of you, but I want you to put it aside for now,” he said, giving her a warning look that Lacey recognized from a dozen different occasions.
Brandon Halloran had strong opinions on family loyalty and just about everything else. He wasn’t afraid to voice them. He had the confidence of a man who’d done well with his life and knew it. In fact, he thought the world would be a whole lot better if everyone would just accept the wisdom of his plans for them. It had galled the daylights out of him that Lacey and Kevin had dared to go their own way, at least in the beginning.
As much as she might have resented it once, Lacey found there was something almost comforting about the familiarity of his response to this crisis. That strength of purpose, that single-minded clarity of vision was welcome tonight in a way it never had been before. If there was any way in hell Brandon Halloran could buy salvation for his son, he would do it.
“I do love him,” she said gently. “That’s never been the problem.”
Brandon scowled at her. “Well, I’ll be damned if I know what is. I listened to all that double-talk you gave me months ago, chewed it over in my head every second since then and, by God, I still can’t make a bit of sense of it. You got some sort of complaint about the life-style he gave you?”
“No,” she whispered, stung by the harsh accusation. “Not the way you mean.”
“I didn’t notice you turning down the house, that fancy sports car.”
Little did he know how she had fought both, Lacey thought but refused to say. Kevin had insisted. Brandon would never believe that, though. Even at the best of times in Brandon and Lacey’s tenuous relationship, she’d been very much aware that he expected the worst of her, that he didn’t entirely understand that someone could be motivated by something other than money and status, especially someone who’d brought nothing more than the strength of her love to a marriage.
“What then?” he demanded roughly. “Make me see why a woman would walk out on a man who’s provided her with everything money could buy.”
“I only wanted my husband back,” she told him, but she could see that Brandon couldn’t fathom what she meant. He started to speak, but Jason cut him off.
“Granddad,” he said, “this isn’t the time.”
The fight seemed to drain out of Brandon as quickly as it had stirred. “No. No, it’s not.” It was the closest he was likely to come to an apology. He asked Jason, “You called Dana yet?”
Jason shook his head. “I don’t want to upset her.”
“She’d want to be here,” Lacey told him. “Go call. We’ll be okay.”
With Jason gone, the look she and Brandon exchanged was measuring. She suspected he was trying every bit as hard as she was to avoid starting another pointless argument. But the only way around it was small talk or silence. She didn’t have the stomach for small talk. Neither, she suspected, did he.
“Damn, I hate this waiting,” he said finally. “You want some coffee or something?”
Lacey shook her head. “Nothing.”
“How do you suppose he ended up in a fix like this? He’s a young man yet.”
“It’s not the first time,” she reminded him. “If anything, he took worse care of himself after the first attack.”
“And I suppose you’re blaming that on me.”
“Casting blame won’t help,” she said, repeating what Jason had said to try to comfort her. It didn’t work on Brandon, either. He took up his impatient pacing again.
If someone didn’t come out and talk to them soon, Brandon was likely to call up the hospital board’s president and demand a change in administration, she thought. He’d wave another endowment under the president’s nose for effect. Waiting was always hardest on a man who was used to making things happen.
Lacey hated it, too, because it gave her time to think, time to remember the way it had once been between her and Kevin, back at the very beginning.
It had been her first day at a new school. Worse, it was the middle of the year. Friendships had been made and she was an outsider. She was eleven years old, tall, skinny, shy and awkward.
She had been so sure that the other kids