24. Ronan
RONAN
FIFTEEN MINUTES EARLIER
I shepherd Todd through the side doors and into a service hallway. It's utilitarian back here. Bare walls, a rack of folded chairs, the hum of a big fridge. The noise of the party drops away when the doors close.
Todd yanks his shoulder out from under my hand. "Don't touch me," he snarls.
That's a mistake, but I let him have it. I take a step back and put my hands in my pockets and I look at him. He's sweating. His collar's damp. The tux fits him wrong across the middle, like it was cut for the man he was two years ago.
"What would you like to say to me?" I ask him.
"This is a setup." He points a finger at me. "You and her, you're together now, is that it? You took my case, you sat on it, and now, you're—what, screwing my wife?"
"Ex-wife," I correct. "And no. That's not what this is."
"Then what is it?"
I don't answer him right away. I look at him and I let the silence do some work. He can't stand it. Men like Todd never can. He fills it himself.
"She's crazy, you know that?" he blurts. "Messed-up in the head. What she did at the bank, that wasn't normal. A normal person doesn't do that. She humiliated me in front of my whole firm. My whole industry. Do you know what that costs a man?"
"I do, actually," I say. "I watched it happen."
"So you know." He's nodding now, fast, like he's found an ally. "You saw. That's not a stable person. That's a woman who needs help. And she's got my kids. My kids, man. She's poisoning them against me. I can't even see them!"
"You could see them," I say. "You chose to stay in a hotel and stew instead."
He blinks at me.
"I read your file, Todd. All of it. I know what you asked me for the day you sat in my office and threw money on my desk.
You wanted everything. The house. The cars.
The accounts. The company she built. And the children.
You wanted a court to hand you two kids you couldn't be bothered to pick up from school unless it got you closer to their teacher. "
His face goes gray. It's even better than I anticipated.
"That was privileged," he says weakly. "That conversation. You can't—"
"I can do whatever I want," I say. "It's my party."
He takes a step back. His shoulder hits the chair rack and it rattles enough to spook him.
I don't move toward him. I don't need to. I just let him understand, slowly, that there is no one in this hallway who is going to help him.
"Here's what's going to happen," I tell him.
"You're going to leave. Tonight. You're going to take your lady friend in the gold dress and you're going to walk out the front.
The front, mind you, because I want witnesses who see you leave under your own willpower.
And then you're going to sign the papers when they come to you, exactly as they're written, and you're going to stop texting her at four in the morning telling her she has no idea who she's dealing with. "
His head snaps up at that. "How do you—?"
"I know a lot of things, Todd. It's how I've stayed alive as long as I have." I eye him warily. "So let me give you some advice: You made a threat you can't back up. To a woman under my protection. I'd advise you not to do that again."
"Under your—" He laughs deliriously. "Do you hear yourself? You sound like a mob movie."
I smile at him. I let it reach my eyes this time, the whole thing, everything under the suit.
Todd stops laughing.
"Go home," I suggest. "While you still have legs that can get you there."
His jaw drops in horror. Then, stumbling over his own feet, he goes. He trips past me, keeping as much distance as the hallway allows, and he doesn't dare say another word. I watch him push out through the doors into the noise and the light.
I count to ten, and then I follow him out.
He's already gone by the time I hit the floor. So is Paula. I don't have to ask to understand that the women must have spoken. I can read it off Cali the second I see her, standing at the edge of the dance floor with the gold octopus on her wrist and a look on her face I haven't seen before.
She handled it herself.
Fucking hell, she's a marvel.
I have never wanted anything the way I want to give this woman the entire world.
We dance the last song. Then I get her out through a side exit so the cameras don't get another go at her. Paolo brings the car around, and we're on the bridge before either of us says much.
She's quiet. Not the good quiet from the dance floor. This one concerns me.
I watch her out of the corner of my eye. She's got her hands folded in her lap, very still, her chin's up, and she keeps her eyes forward through sheer force of will.
"You did well tonight," I say. "That couldn't have been easy."
"It was fine," she answers. "I'm fine."
"I didn't ask if you were fine, kotyonok. I know you are."
That gets a small breath out of her, almost a laugh. She looks down at her hands.
"He looked so small," she says after a minute. "Todd. I keep thinking about it. For ten years, I made myself small so he could be big, and tonight, he was just… small. On his own. Without me holding him up." She shakes her head. "I don't know why that's the thing that's getting to me."
"Because you gave him something for ten years," I say, "and now, you can see exactly what it was worth. Which was not much."
She turns and looks at me. Her eyes are bright, wet at the edges, and I can tell she's furious about it.
"I'm not going to cry over Todd Bradshaw," she declares.
"No one's asking you to."
"I don't cry. I didn't cry at any point in this whole process, and I'm not starting now." She glares at me. "I mean it."
"I believe you, Calista."
She squints at me a second longer, waiting for the argument, but when it doesn't come, the tension in her shoulders lets go a quarter inch.
The car pulls up in front of her brownstone. The windows are dark. She doesn't reach for the handle.
"You don't have to come in," she says.
"I wasn't going to."
She frowns.
"I'll walk you up," I add. "That's all. Unless you tell me otherwise."
We end up sitting on the stoop.
She lowers herself down beside me on the summer-warmed stone. Then, just as suddenly, she stands back up.
"Stay there," she orders. "Don't move."
She goes inside. I hear her feet on the stairs, then a cabinet opening, then closing. When she comes back out, she's got a bottle in her hand. She sits down again and holds it up so I can read the label in the streetlight.
"This is Todd's," she says. "His favorite. I figured now's as good a time as any to waste it for no real reason."
I laugh as she unscrews it and pours the first shot out on the steps. "To cheating bastards," she mutters, a toast for her and her alone. Then she throws back a slug of the stuff herself, coughs, and passes it to me.
The streets are motionless. It's late enough that the city has mostly tucked itself into bed. This part of the city, at least. It's nice to sit in the silence, among the trees and the buildings, with just me in my suit and Cali in her green silk.
"This is a very confusing date," she says. It's the same thing she said at the aquarium, half asleep against my shoulder. I don't think she remembers saying it.
But I do. I remember all of it.
"It's the second one that's ended on a stoop," I say. "I'm sensing a theme."
"You broke into my house last time."
"That was between dates. Technically."
"Everything's technically with you."
"To technicalities," I say, then take a sip and pass the bottle to her.
She drinks. She makes a face—it's a good whiskey, but she's not built for it neat—and then she drinks again anyway. Stubborn little thing.
"He didn't say anything about the kids?" she asks. "When you talked to him?"
"He said a great deal about the kids. Most of it in the context of himself.
" I take the bottle from her and let it dangle between my fingers.
"He won't fight you for them, Cali. Not really.
He wanted them because taking them from you was the point.
Now that he can't take everything, they're just an expense he'd rather not have. "
"That's horrible."
"Yes."
"You're supposed to soften it when you tell me awful shit like that."
"You told me at dinner you'd rather walk forward with your eyes open than have someone hand you a comforting lie." I look at her. "I took you as a woman of your word."
She hesitates, then sighs. "Yeah. I did say that. I am that."
The whiskey's doing its work. I can see the day catching up with her, the adrenaline finishing its long, slow drain out of her body, leaving behind only the essentials.
She's not going to cry. I believe her about that.
But she's cracked, and she's tired. Shockingly, she's letting me sit close enough to see all of it.
That's not nothing.
That's a great deal, from a woman who trusts almost no one.
"Can I ask you something?" she says.
"By all means."
"Your parents," she says cautiously. "At the aquarium, when I asked about the worst thing you ever cooked, you said there wasn't anyone to teach you. And you just looked, like, a certain kind of way when you said it."
I don't answer right away.
"You don't have to," she says quickly. "Forget it. I'm being nosy."
"No," I say. "It's fair. I've asked you plenty."
I look out at the street. I've spent my whole life not talking about this.
It's a well-worn groove and it's easy to stay in it.
But she's sitting here with her guard down for the first time, letting me see the damage she's been dealt, and it feels wrong to demand that of her while giving nothing of myself in return.
"My father was a large man," I say. "Larger than me.
Louder, too. He filled up a room the way—" I stop and laugh when the obvious comparison comes to me.
"—the way Todd wishes he could. But it was real, with my father.
When he was pleased with you, it was like standing in the sun. And when he wasn't…"
I tap the bottle and the glass rings out. It reminds me of things I wish I could forget.