Chapter 491: Need You Upstairs

Three months in, the calls from overseas had settled into a rhythm Arianne could predict almost to the hour — Franz’s voice thin and half-asleep on a call scheduled around a night shoot, a photo of a sunset over a coastline she’d now seen in person twice, a running joke about the hotel’s terrible coffee that had outlasted every other joke between them that quarter. She was in a board meeting, halfway through a slide on Q3 projections, when her phone lit up once against the table, a single line from Gio. Need you upstairs. Now. Nothing else attached to it.

She excused herself and told the room to take ten minutes, and didn’t explain why. Gio never pulled her out of a meeting for anything that could wait for the end of it.

He was standing outside her office when she got there, and the moment he stepped in ahead of her and pulled the door shut behind them, a break from his usual habit of leaving it open, she understood something had already gone wrong.

"There’s been an accident on set," he said. "Anton Kessler’s team called it in an hour ago."

Arianne’s hand found the edge of her desk before she’d decided to reach for it, the only part of her that moved for a full second while the rest of her stayed upright through sheer refusal. The office went silent around her, no one left to see it but the one person she didn’t have to perform composure for.

"How bad?"

"They don’t know yet. A rig failure during a stunt sequence. Franz was on set when it happened." Gio’s voice stayed level, steady in the specific register it only found when the ground was moving under both of them and someone had to sound like it wasn’t. "I’ve already got the plane being prepped."

Arianne didn’t sit down. She picked up her desk phone, told her assistant to clear the rest of the day without saying why, and set it back in its cradle before she’d even finished the sentence in her head. "How fast can I be in the air?"

"Ninety minutes."

"Make it sixty."

This would have been her third trip out. The first two had been visits, five days each, wedged between her own board calendar and his shooting schedule, a visitor badge from the studio still clipped inside the outer pocket of the bag she hadn’t fully unpacked from the last one. She’d learned the terminal at the other end well enough to walk it without looking up, learned which gate the studio’s driver waited at, learned the specific hush of his trailer at the end of a long shooting day. She’d never bothered booking a room of her own either trip, just kept a drawer’s worth of her own clothes in his hotel room like it was any other closet in any other house they shared, the two of them making up for whatever the distance had cost that month in whatever time they could steal before he had to be back on set at dawn. She’d been more tired than usual since she got back from the second one, chalked it up to the travel and three back-to-back board meetings she hadn’t had the sense to reschedule.

This trip had nothing scheduled about it at all.

Gio had the car waiting by the time she reached the lobby, already running through logistics on the phone with someone at the airfield. "Lucas is pulling everything Rochefort Group has on the ground near the production — hospitals, translators, security. Gilbert’s coming with you."

"I need him with the twins more than I need him on a plane."

"He already told me you’d say that. He’s coming anyway." Gio didn’t argue the point further, and Arianne didn’t have the room left in her to fight it.

Lucas called before the car had cleared the parking structure, no greeting, already three steps into whatever he’d already arranged. "I’ve got a translator meeting you at the gate on the other end and a car straight to the hospital, no press route, no stops. Anything that comes up here waits until you’re back."

"Thank you, Lucas."

"Go." He said it like the rest of the sentence went without saying, which from him counted as reassurance.

She hung up before she could thank him a second time, and let herself believe once had been enough.

Aunt Estella was already at the house when Arianne got there, twenty minutes ahead of any call that could have summoned her, because someone in the house had already reached her before Arianne had thought to. She had Lexx on her hip, and the twins were on the bottom stair in a state that stopped Arianne cold before she’d even set her bag down — Lily gasping for breath between sobs, Leo’s arms locked around her shaking almost as hard as his sister’s, his own face streaked and pale.

"Is Uncle Franz going to die?" Lily got the words out in pieces, panic breaking them apart before they’d finished forming.

Arianne crossed the room and got down on the floor with both of them, pulling them in before she let herself feel any of what was climbing up her own throat. Her hands were shaking too, and she pressed them flat against the twins’ backs until the shaking had somewhere else to go besides showing. "I don’t know yet. Nobody knows yet."

"You said that’s what happened to Mommy and Daddy." Leo’s voice cracked on it, panic breaking through whatever composure he’d been trying to hold for his sister’s sake. "Nobody knew, and then they were gone."

Arianne heard exactly what he was asking underneath the words he’d actually said. They had already survived losing one set of parents to an accident nobody saw coming. They could not survive losing Franz to the same kind of morning, and she would not let the arithmetic of that possibility anywhere near either of them tonight.

"I know that’s what you’re scared of." She held him tighter and let herself be exactly as frightened of the same thing for as long as it took to get the next breath in, because falling apart in front of them wasn’t something she was allowed to do yet. "I can’t promise you it won’t be scary for a while. I can promise I’m going to go find out everything there is to know, and I’m going to tell you the truth every time, even when it’s hard to hear."

Lily’s crying slowed but didn’t stop, hiccuping breaths against Arianne’s collar. "Can we come?"

"Not this time." Arianne smoothed Leo’s hair back from his forehead, wet where he’d already wiped his face with his sleeve twice. "You’re going to stay here with Aunt Estella, and Nate’s coming over, and Uncle Gilbert will call every day. I need you to let them take care of you while I go take care of Uncle Franz."

Leo wiped his nose with the back of his hand, still crying but calmer now, and nodded. Lily didn’t nod so much as go limp against Arianne’s shoulder, worn out by the crying more than steadied by it.

"Will you call us?" Leo asked, hiccuping around it. "Even if it’s bad news?"

"Especially if it’s bad news." Arianne meant it, and made sure it showed on her face, because a child who’d already lost one set of parents deserved better than a comforting lie dressed up as protection. "You’ll hear it from me before you hear it from anyone else. That’s a promise."

Nate arrived as Arianne was pulling her coat on, out of breath from whatever speed he’d driven to get there, Mikaella a step behind him with a bag of groceries she set down without being asked, like she already understood this house would need feeding regardless of what the next week held.

"Go," Nate said. "We’ve got this covered. All of it. School runs, meals, whatever paperwork Gilbert’s people need signed while he’s gone."

"The twins have a project due Friday. Leo hasn’t started his half."

"Then Leo and I will start it tonight." Nate said it like it was already decided, because for him it already was. "Go be where you need to be. This part isn’t yours to carry right now."

"I know you do." Arianne kissed the top of Lexx’s head, and he grabbed a fistful of her collar on the way down, too young to understand any of it, a mercy neither of them could explain to him yet.

Gio was waiting at the airfield with a folder of documents and a phone already dialed into the studio’s emergency line, holding it out to her before she’d finished crossing the tarmac. "Passport, insurance authorization, and Kessler’s line direct, no assistant screening it. You call, they answer."

"Anything new?"

"Nothing since the last update. Stable enough to transport once you land, which is more than we knew an hour ago." Gio hesitated, which he almost never did, and it was that hesitation more than anything he’d said all afternoon that told her how frightened he actually was for both of them. "Call when you land. Doesn’t matter the hour."

"I will."

"I mean it." He said it plainly, none of his usual efficiency dressing it up as anything other than what it was. "The house needs to hear your voice tonight. So do I."

She squeezed his arm once, the closest either of them came to the kind of goodbye the moment actually deserved, and climbed the stairs into the plane before either of them had to find more words for it.

The plane was in the air before the sun had fully set, Gilbert across the aisle with his phone already full of contacts he’d need on the ground, and Arianne sat with her own phone in her lap, the screen dark, no update yet worth reading.

"He’s strong," Gilbert said, without looking up from his phone. "Whatever this is, he’s strong enough for it."

"I know that." Arianne kept her eyes on the window, on the dark nothing where the coastline would eventually appear. "I need it to be true tonight specifically."

Gilbert set the phone down for the first time since takeoff. "The hospital’s confirmed he’s stable enough to be seen. That’s all I have. It’s not nothing."

"It’s not nothing," she agreed, and let herself hold onto that much, because the alternative was holding onto nothing at all.

The last night on set kept surfacing anyway — the terrible coffee, the joke about it that had made him laugh loud enough that a crew member had knocked on the trailer door to check they were decent, how ordinary all of it had felt at the time. Neither of them had known to treasure it as anything more than a good night, one more stolen evening in a quarter that was supposed to end with him coming home in one piece and nothing more dramatic than a wrap party neither of them would attend.

Gilbert didn’t say anything else. There wasn’t an answer that would have helped, and they both knew it, and the plane carried them east through a night that felt longer than any of the ninety minutes Gio had promised her, toward whatever was waiting for her on the other side of it.