Unfinished Business

childish.” He rose, and would have gone to her, but she was already backing away. “If you hated performing, why did you keep going on? Of course,” he said, before she could answer.
    “It was important to him.” She sat on the arm of a chair, then stood again, unable to settle. “He didn’t understand. He’d put his whole life into my career. The idea that I couldn’t perform, that it frightened me—”
    “That it made you ill.”
    “I was never ill. I never missed one performance because of health.”
    “No, you performed despite your health. Damn it, Van, he had no right.”
    “He was my father. I know he was a difficult man, but I owed him something.”
    He was a selfish son of a bitch, Brady thought. But he kept his silence. “Did you ever consider therapy?”
    Vanessa lifted her hands. “He opposed it. He was very intolerant of weakness. I suppose that was his weakness.” She closed her eyes a moment. “You have to understand him, Brady. He was the kind of man who would refuse to believe what was inconvenient for him. And, as far as he was concerned, it just ceased to exist.” Like my mother, she thought with a weary sigh. “I could never find the way to make him accept or even understand the degree of the phobia.”
    “I’d like to understand.”
    She cupped her hands over her mouth a moment, then let them fall. “Every time I would go to the theater, I would tell myself that this time, this time, it wouldn’t happen. This time I wouldn’t be afraid. Then I would stand in the wings, shaking and sick and miserable. My skin would be clammy, and the nausea would make me dizzy. Once I started playing, it would ease off. By the end I’d be fine, so I would tell myself that the next time…” She shrugged.
    He understood, too well. And he hated the idea of her, of anyone, suffering time after time, year after year. “Did you ever stop to think that he was living his life through you?”
    “Yes.” Her voice was dull. “He was all I had left. And, right or wrong, I was all he had. The last year, he was so ill, but he never let me stop, never let me care for him. In the end, because he had refused to listen, refused the treatments, he was in monstrous pain. You’re a doctor—you know how horrible terminal cancer is. Those last weeks in the hospital were the worst. There was nothing they could do for him that time. So he died a little every day. I went on performing, because he insisted, then flying back to the hospital in Geneva every chance I had. I wasn’t there when he died. I was in Madrid. I got a standing ovation.”
    “Can you blame yourself for that?”
    “No. But I can regret.” Her eyes were awash with it.
    “What do you intend to do now?”
    She looked down at her hands, spread her fingers, curled them into her palms. “When I came back here, I was tired. Just worn out, Brady. I needed time—I still do—to understand what I feel, what I want, where I’m going.” She stepped toward him and lifted her hands to his face. “I didn’t want to become involved with you, because I knew you’d be one more huge complication.” Her lip curved a little. “And I was right. But when I woke up this morning in your bed, I was happy. I don’t want to lose that.”
    He took her wrists. “I love you, Vanessa.”
    “Then let me work through this.” She went easily into his arms. “And just be with me.”
    He pressed a kiss to her hair. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Chapter 10
    “T hat was the last patient, Dr. Tucker.”
    Distracted, Brady looked up from the file on his desk and focused on his nurse. “What?”
    “That was the last patient.” She was already swinging her purse over her shoulder and thinking about putting her feet up. “Do you want me to lock up?”
    “Yeah. Thanks. See you tomorrow.” He listened with half an ear to the clink of locks and the rattle of file drawers. The twelve-hour day was almost at an end. The fourth twelve-hour day of the week. Hyattown was a long way from New York, but as far as time served was concerned, Brady had found practicing general medicine in a small town as demanding as being chief resident in a major hospital. Along with the usual stream of patients, hospital rounds and paperwork, an outbreak of chicken pox and strep throat had kept him tied to his stethoscope for over a week.
    Half the town was either scratching or croaking, he thought as he settled down to his paperwork. The waiting room had been packed since the