He didn’t much care for the idea that Remi felt she had to hide who she really was. But he decided not to derail the conversation into an argument. Yet.

“Anyway, my friend Camille was driving us back to her place. It was late. The roads were icy. We ended up going through a guardrail. I broke my arm, but Camille was really hurt. She was knocked unconscious. And there we were, stuck in the dark. I felt so…helpless. So alone. I didn’t know if the car was going to slide into the blackness. I didn’t know what was in the blackness. A ravine. A river. A gentle slope. I didn’t know.”

Not wanting to distract her from the tale, he was careful not to move a muscle. But his arms ached to hold on to her so she’d remember she wasn’t alone.

“Anyway, we were finally rescued. I didn’t realize at the time that my arm was broken. I was more worried about Camille. She still hadn’t woken up. They wouldn’t let me go to the hospital with her, and I was rightfully very upset. They had an officer drive me home.”

She bit her lip and looked to the side.

“Rajesh—that’s my agent—showed up at my place to tell me how the showing had gone, but I ruined his fun with an asthma attack. The cold, the adrenaline. Being upset. Anyway, he called an ambulance, which, for the record, I still think was overreacting.”

“And that’s when they noticed your arm?” Brick guessed.

She nodded.

“And that’s why you’re afraid of the dark.” Because she thought her friend was dying next to her in the dark and there was nothing she could do. Her pain, her fear was agony for him.

She nodded again, eyes closed.

“Breathe.”

He closed the distance between them and took her hands, hating the feel of the cast. She opened her eyes and looked up at him, then took a slow, deep breath. She kept on breathing until her shoulders lowered.

“You look like you could use a breath or two,” she observed.

“You could have been killed.”

“But I wasn’t.”

“You broke your arm. That’s still too much for me.”

“Before you go all big brothery, you might as well hear the rest.”

“There’s more?”

“Camille is still in the hospital. I don’t know how badly she was hurt. I don’t even know if she regained consciousness. She hasn’t answered any of my calls or emails. So it’s hard not to imagine the worst.”

“Why can’t her family give you an update?”

“Well, that’s the other problem. Camille is kind of well-known in Chicago, and so is Alessandra. Together, we got a lot of attention. So there’s been some…speculation.”

He wasn’t going to like this part. He could already tell.

“What kind of speculation?”

“Do a search for Alessandra Ballard online, and you’ll find a few dozen articles hinting that maybe I was driving. That maybe I had too much to drink at the gallery and that maybe the accident was my fault. That maybe I put my friend in the hospital.”