12. Cali
CALI
It's weird to be on the other side of a life-changing event. There are plenty of movies and books that will show you exactly how to handle planning and revenge and the climactic moment of complete and total victory over your enemies.
But nobody tells you what to do the next morning.
I spent all this time pointed at a single goal like a heat-seeking missile, and now, the target's vaporized, with a mushroom cloud of atomic smoke still rising up over Whitmore Stearns.
Mission accomplished.
Job well done.
You go, girl.
And now, I'm… standing in my own kitchen at nine forty-five in my ratty pink bathrobe with a half-eaten waffle, blinking like I've just walked out of a movie theater into the afternoon and forgotten where I parked.
It's a Saturday. No therapy, not that there ever was any to begin with. Todd is gone—not gone gone, but he's not here, which is fine by me. I assume he's at a hotel. Or maybe he's at Paula's? Either way, I genuinely do not care.
That's weird, too. How can I just not care? I cared so much, and then it just vanished. I keep poking at the emotional space where I expected to care like a tongue worrying a missing tooth, half-expecting it to hurt. No matter how many times I poke, it doesn't.
Hayden is at the kitchen table reading me Wikipedia facts about how milk is pasteurized and the various technical aspects of the SR-71 Blackbird, which is apparently some kind of very fast plane, I think. Isabella is on the floor performing surgery on a stuffed narwhal with a butter knife.
I'm almost starting to relax into it when the doorbell rings.
"I'll get it!" Hayden announces, springing half out of his chair.
I put a hand on his chest and say, "You will absolutely not get it" with the instantaneous reflex of a mother who has watched too many true-crime documentaries.
I check the little window beside the door—
—and my heart jumps into my throat.
It's him.
Ronan Akov is standing on my front steps in charcoal suit pants and a white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows.
He's calm and casual, but in a poised, almost coiled kind of way.
He's like a panther asked a genie for one wish, and that wish was to be turned into a very rich and very good-looking man.
Nice work by the genie, if we're being honest.
Stomaching roiling, I open the door six inches and not one fraction more.
"How do you know where I live?" I say immediately.
"Your husband's retainer agreement," he answers, unbothered. "It had the marital address on it."
"You creeped on Todd's paperwork so you could stalk me?"
“I told you I sat on his case. I never said I didn't read the file."
"That's invasive. Do you know the meaning of the word 'boundaries'?"
Behind me, Hayden's voice floats down the hall. "Mom, who is it?"
"No one!" I call back. "Go finish telling Isabella the thing about the octopus hearts."
"Oh, ya! Guess what? They have three," he informs his sister, delighted, and I hear Isabella say "Liar" before the two of them descend into a squabble about how many buttholes each of them possess.
When I look back at Ronan, he hasn't moved. He really is obnoxiously good-looking. Jaws aren't supposed to be that razor-sharp. Feels like a safety hazard.
"You can't come in," I inform him.
"I didn't ask to."
"The kids are home."
"I assumed." He glances past me, briefly, at the frog rainboots and the pink ones lined up by the door, and then back to me. "I won't keep you. This won't take long."
"What is 'this'?"
He slides his hands into his pockets and leans against the doorjamb. "You did bad science," he says.
I blink. Of all the things I expected—another too-smooth line to get in my pants, an apology of some kind for his role in dismantling my marriage—this is not one of them.
"… Excuse me?"
"You're a data scientist," he says. "A good one. But yesterday, you messed up."
I plant a fist on my hip and scowl at him.
"Okay, let me rephrase: Ex-fucking-scuse me?
I did not 'mess up.' I gave Todd exactly what he deserved, and I'm damn sure that I did all my work correctly.
If you're going to show up at my house uninvited and start throwing around baseless accusations, then—"
He holds up a hand that shuts me up as fast as if he'd muzzled me himself. "I'm not talking about that."
"… Oh." I fall into a frown. "Then what…?"
"I'm talking about what you said to me," he clarifies. "Todd got everything he deserved and more, and I don't think there was so much as a decimal point out of place in your presentation. But yesterday, in my office, during our not-a-drink, you made a mistake."
I know when I'm being set up, and this definitely has all the hallmarks of an incoming gotcha moment. But dammit, this man has me hooked against my better judgement.
So, even though I can tell it's a bad idea, I bite.
"Alright then. Tell me about this 'mistake.'"
"You rendered your judgment of me based off a single data point.
" He doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't have to; that deep, even purr does all the work.
"All you know about me is that I met with your husband.
From that, you built a whole image of me in your head, and you consigned me to the same flaming trash heap he belongs in. "
"It's not a single—"
"It is. Everything else you have on me is hearsay. The bar. The accent. The suit. The office. Circumstantial. If you hired someone and they gave you that report, you'd fire them on the spot."
The thing is.
The thing is.
He's not wrong.
There's nothing worse than a man who knows he's right and fully intends to press his advantage. Because, in my experience, they're a very difficult group to argue with.
But whereas Todd would use gaslighting and relentless pressure to get his way, Ronan here exudes no pressure at all.
Despite the optics of the situation—a big, rich, powerful man looming on my doorstep, while I cower in his shadow in a bathrobe with my children not twenty feet away from me—I feel safe in his presence.
He's simply laying out a case. The question is…
A case for what?
"Maybe," I say with a shrug. "I don't see what it changes."
"You need more," he says firmly. "Before you can draw a real conclusion. So give me more."
"Give you more what?"
"Chances. You needed eight receipts to deem your husband a liar and a cheat. Give me eight chances to show you that I'm anything but that."
The blood goes out of my face and then comes rushing back into it, hot. I'm confused, sort of offended, sort of flattered, and completely out of sorts all at once… and I think, based on Ronan's expression, that that's exactly what he wanted.
"If the picture it paints," he continues, watching me far too closely, "is that I'm the same kind of bad man as your ex—" His jaw tightens around the word ex, and I can't tell if it's distaste for Todd or for the comparison between the two of them.
"—then the conclusion is yours to draw. You hand me this, and I'll disappear from your life without another word.
No follow-up. No chance encounter at your coffee shop dressed up as fate. Nothing. You'll never see me again."
"Hand you what?"
He takes one hand out of his pocket.
In it is a cocktail napkin.
It's small and neatly folded. There's a logo printed in the corner, plum-colored, a stylized something-or-other I half-remember, and a watermark ring where a glass once sweated through it.
I know that napkin.
I know that napkin because it was mine. A week ago, my martini was dripping condensation into the black paper while a handsome stranger chatted me up with piercing eyes that didn't smile when his mouth did.
At some point, I must have set it down on the bar and walked out without ever once looking back.
Turns out he kept it.
And now here he is, offering it back to me like some kind of token, some kind of marker, a Get Out of Jail Free card for a relationship I don't have any interest in starting.
I don't take it.
"Am I supposed to be impressed?" I say, feeling kind of bitchy but mostly just uncertain.
"It's just designed to show you I was paying attention," he says. He presses it into my hand. "Hold onto it. At the end, if the data says what you think it'll say, you give it back. If not… well, it's just a napkin, and you can do with it as you please."
A warm breeze comes up the steps and teases open the flap of my robe. I'm suddenly reminded that I'm standing in my own doorway in my pajamas, while the most dangerous, alluring man I've ever met offers eight dates to prove me wrong.
Didn't I just swear off men forever? I did.
But…
What if I am wrong?
"I bet you think this whole stunt is really clever."
"No," he says, shaking his head. "I think you are.
Because you're willing to reconsider. If you weren't, you'd already have slammed the door in my face, and this story would be over before it started.
But you didn't, because you know I'm right.
It's bothering you, just enough, and you can't stand to leave a bad dataset alone. It's not in you."
"Don't pretend you know what's in me."
"I don't," he agrees. "That's the whole point. I'm asking for the chance to find out, on the record, with a sample size big enough to mean something. Eight." He folds my fingers around the napkin in my palm. "If I'm what you think I am, you'll know by then."
I look at the napkin, then up at his face. The wind ruffles his hair and his eyes gleam, half gray and half blue.
We both know what I'm thinking.
I want the data.
I don't want him, I hurry to remind myself, just like it wasn't desire I felt at the bar when something glitched in my body the first time he called me kotyonok.
What I want is the answer. I have a hypothesis—he's the same as Todd, all of them are the same, the whole gender, every man who's ever lived—and I have exactly one data point supporting it. But there is a part of my brain that physically cannot tolerate a conclusion drawn from n=1.
"Eight dates," I say slowly, "is not a small ask."
"No. It's not."
"And I have two children. And a company to take back. And a divorce to finish, which, I'd like to point out, started in your office."
"All true," he says. "Which is why I'll work around all of it.
Your schedule. Your terms. You name the day and the time and the place, and if any of them stop feeling safe, you walk, and that counts as data, too.
" He pauses. "I'm not asking you to trust me, Calista.
I'm asking you to let the data tell you the true story. "
It's a good speech, I gotta give him that.
But I still have to say no.
I open my mouth to do exactly that. No, I'm sorry, you're very charming and persuasive and I almost kinda believe you mean what you're saying. But I can't. I've been through too much, and I need the rest of my life for some well-deserved R&R.
And then Isabella's voice rings down the hall. "Mom! Mom, Hayden says octopuses have NINE brains and I said that's TOO MANY brains and he won't take it back!"
"It's eight, Bella," Hayden corrects, scandalized at the inaccuracy. "Eight arm-brains and one big one. That's nine total, but eight little ones."
Eight.
I close my eyes.
I think I'm being haunted by a number. What are the odds that it keeps showing up, again and again, with insanely accurate timing right on the precipice of major life decisions?
Everywhere I look, it's eight, eight, eight. I wouldn't be surprised if eight separate pigeons each took a shit on my head right now.
When I open my eyes, Ronan is still there. Waiting. Patient, not pushy.
I fold my fist around the napkin before I can think better of it. "I'm not promising you eight," I tell him. "We'll start with one."
He nods. "As you wish."
"And if even one of them tells me you're another Todd—"
"You give it back," he says, nodding once at the napkin clutched in my fist. "And I'm gone. You won't have to ask twice. You won't have to ask at all."
"I'm still mad," I tell him, because it's important he understands that the science being good does not make the scientist gracious.
"I would expect nothing less, kotyonok."
"And don't call me that."
"What should I call you?"
"Ms. Meadows," I decide. "That's my maiden name.”
"Ms. Meadows," he repeats. It sounds so good when Ronan says it like that.
He takes a step back down onto the lower stair, putting more distance between us, and grins up at me. "I'll be in touch."
I shut the door before he reaches the sidewalk. Firmly.
Then I stand in my own front hall with my back against the door and my fist still closed around a two-cent napkin that has come to mean so much more.
Hayden calls over to me, "Mom, who was that?"
I look down at my hand and say, honestly, for the first time in longer than I can remember, "I have absolutely no idea."