Page 39 of The Naughty Ex

"How did you fall?"

He didn't answer.

"Esteban."

"It was slippery," he muttered. A rivulet of blood came down his forehead toward his eye and I wiped it away with my sleeve.

Blaine looked at him for a long moment.

He did not ask again.

That was when I understood we were going to have a problem later.

* * *

The ambulance took him at eleven-forty. Rhoda came down the lawn in a dressing gown, crying. Harold stood at the edge of the water with both hands on top of his head, looking at the blood on the rocks like a man who’d never once considered that his property might be capable of hurting somebody.

Blaine was gone before the ambulance pulled out. He came back four minutes later in dry clothes with his keys, a coat over his arm, and a second coat, which he threw at me.

"Get in. You're soaked."

"I can change—"

"Get in. Now."

Steven was standing on the gravel with the phone still in his hand.

"Do you want me to—" he started.

"No," said Blaine.

And that was all he said. Blaine got in the car. I got in the car. Starting down the driveway I looked in the side mirror, and Steven Ellis Bland was standing exactly where we had left him, staring at his phone.

* * *

Blaine drives the way he does everything. Both hands, no music, four miles an hour over the limit the entire way, because that is the margin at which nobody stops you.

We didn't talk for the first ten minutes.

Then he said, "Open the glovebox."

"What am I looking for?"

"There's a folder. Property insurance card and the workers' compensation policy. Third sleeve."

Of course there was a folder in his glovebox. Of course the policy was in it. Of course he knew the sleeve.

"Got it."

"Read me the carrier and the policy number."

I read him the carrier and the policy number. He repeated both back once.

"Esteban's a household employee, which puts him under the homeowner's rider, which means my father almost certainly never told the carrier that Esteban operates machinery on that property. Because my father does not believe in categories."

"Is that a problem?"

"It's a problem in about four weeks. It’s not a problem tonight." He checked the mirror. "The only thing that matters today is that the hospital doesn't ask him for a card he doesn't have, and that he doesn't sign anything. Because Esteban will sign anything. He'll be frightened, and frightened people sign things."