Chapter 16
I see Suzanne before I have taken three steps into it.
She is behind a small bar station to the right of the entrance, in the hotel's event-staff livery — black pants, white shirt, a small black apron tied at the waist. It’s not housekeeping, but a different uniform. Her hair is up. She is pouring champagne from a bottle into flutes on a silver tray.
She looks tired, yet beautiful.
She does not see me at first. When she does, I wink at her, and she flinches for a second, then looks back at the glasses.
I make myself walk to the other side of the room.
I take a glass of wine from the bar, hold it, and let myself be seen by Davies, his two sons, and a collector from Berlin. I make small talk.
Every so often, I steal a glance at her.
She circles the room with the tray. I circle the room with the glass. Our eyes meet at a regular interval that is shorter than wise. She does not linger. Neither do I. The room is full of people who know my face and would notice me staring at the waitstaff, but I keep my eyes on her anyway.
She passes close to me once.
Her tray is half-full. I take a flute from it without speaking. Our eyes lock for a second — maybe two. Her face does not change. She keeps walking.
Christ. My pulse is already at my throat. I need to kiss her.
I take out my phone.
Service hallway. Two minutes.
She takes the tray back to the bar station, sets it down, and picks up an empty bottle as though she is going to refill it. She disappears through the staff door at the side of the room.
I finish a sentence with the man from Berlin and excuse myself. I walk down the service corridor like a man about to take a phone call.
She is 20 ft. past the staff door, in a doorway that puts her out of the line of sight from the kitchen. Her arms are crossed. Her chin is up.
Closing the distance, I kiss her.
Brief and charged, her hands go to my lapels. My hand is at her waist. She tastes like the mint she has been holding in her mouth. I don’t let go for longer than is safe.
I pull back. "You look beautiful."
"I'm wearing a uniform like every other staff. It's nothing new or special."
"Doesn’t change the fact that you look beautiful."
She straightens her collar and presses the back of her wrist to her mouth to check her lipstick. Turning, she walks back through the staff door without looking back.
I wait thirty seconds and follow her out.
Brandt finds me before I find him.
He is at my elbow with a glass of champagne. We have known each other for six years. Brandt has the permanent tan of Mendocino summers.
"Cade Nightingale. Even though you confirmed your attendance, I’m still surprised to see you here. You’re a hard man to pin down."
"Good evening, Eli."
"You’ve not been to one of my openings since I opened. And here you are at a Davies viewing. I’m wounded."
"You'll recover."
"Where is she?"
“Before that, I want you to look at these again.” I take out my phone and show him two of the scans — the hands and the lobby corridor.
He stops talking and looks at the screen for the length of one long breath and another, and a flicker crosses his face.
“Splendid. Just as I said before, she is a raw talent. Passionate. Is she here? I want to meet her tonight. I’m considering securing a deal tonight. That is, if you don’t snatch her from me.”
“You'd better move fast, then.”
I find Suzanne at the bar station. I lean across the counter and keep my face flat. I quietly tell her I need three minutes, that the man I emailed is here to see her, and that she should ask her floor captain for a bathroom break.
She nods once and finds her captain. She murmurs something to him.
She crosses to the side of the room.
I introduce them. "Eli Brandt, the gallerist I told you about. Eli, this is Suzanne, the artist whose work you’ve been looking at."
He extends his hand. "It's a pleasure."
"Likewise."
He asks her two questions he's used since 2018 to see if someone sees the world the way he hopes they do.
"What are you working on right now, and what is the last thing you saw that made you stop walking?"
She answers naturally, like she did with Hana in my conference room. She doesn't perform or struggle. She's already thought it through.
He hands her his card. "I'd like to meet with you next week at the gallery. We'll talk about what you're working on and whether what I do is what you want."
"Thank you."
"Excited to see you again, Suzanne."
He does not look at her uniform or at the apron. He treats her as what she is, which is a painter he has decided he wants to represent.
She thanks him a second time and returns to the bar station.
I watch her go.
I turn to track her across the room, and I see Maddox instead.
Adrian Maddox is at the edge of the crowd in a charcoal suit, not holding a drink, standing alone by the second-to-last temporary wall. He has been in this room — I register this now — for some time. He has not approached me or made himself visible. He is just there.
Why is the hermit here?
I watch him for three seconds.
He is not looking at me, but at her.
His face shows that look a man gets when he's just learned something useful. He watches her carry her tray across the room. He studies her carefully — her apron, her hair, and how her right hand holds the tray's edge.
He's clocking her, I realize. And I need to break his line of sight before he finishes.
I move before I have thought it through. The goal is to get between Maddox and her, interrupt his observation, make him lose the thread. I don't need to speak to her. I just need to be there.
I cross the room and reach her at the wall by the kitchen door. I touch the small of her back to redirect her toward the side of the room.
She looks up. "You okay?" She glances around the room.
I follow her eyes and see what I have just done.
I see the camera angles and the people whose heads have turned a quarter-degree. I see Maddox, 15 ft. away. His focus is broken. He is no longer watching her. He is watching me.
That's fine. That was the point.
I have just walked across a Davies reception toward a waitress. I take a champagne flute off her tray. I fake a polite expression. I lift the flute as if to say thank you and step back.
I leave her there.
She does not follow me with her eyes. She has already turned to the next guest with the tray, because she is a professional and because she is, at this moment, more composed than I am.
Brandt finds me again soon after. He has another glass.
"Cade, about your artist."
"Yes?"
"I'm very interested in the work."
"I gathered."
"I’m also interested in more than the work."
I look at him. "What does that mean?"
"Cade, come on. You're not a little boy."
"What does that mean, Eli?"
"I'm a man who likes to be inspired. I’m inspired tonight, in more than one way, and I fully intend to see that inspiration to the end. That is what it means.” I don’t react.
He grunts. “I’m talking about sex, Cade.
Sex.” His eyes begin to drift. I follow his gaze to Suzanne’s frame moving through the hall.
“She looks flexible, doesn't she? The way she carries the tray. "
I look at him and let it sit.
I smile. "I know exactly what you're talking about."
"There you go."
"Why don't we continue this outside? The light in the service hallway is better. We don't want the guests overhearing the back half of this conversation. It’ll make them cringe."
"Lead the way."
He follows me and is very pleased with himself.
The service hallway is empty.
Letting him get one step inside the door, I punch him once, clean, in the face.
He goes down.
His nose is bleeding before his back has finished hitting the wall. He makes a sound that is not quite speech, his hands are at his face, and the blood is between his fingers.
I crouch and whisper, "Eli."
He looks at me.
"If you ever say her name again, to anyone, in any context, in any city, I will ruin you. The Beaumont deal you’ve been working on for fourteen months?
I will kill it tomorrow. The Carrington loan that closes next quarter?
I will pull the floor out from under it the day before signing.
I have the names of the three private collectors who are funding your spring program. I will have them out by Friday."
"Cade — "
"If you so much as look at her across a room, Eli, I will hear about it. I will not be this generous next time."
"I — "
"Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"Yes, what?"
"Yes, I understand."
"I'll have a clean shirt brought up. The bathroom in this hall has a back door. Use it."
I stand and straighten my cuffs.
I walk back into the reception.
Davies is at the bar with his son. I shake his hand. I tell him the show is striking. My knuckle is stained with blood. I keep the hand at my side, out of sight.
I find Suzanne at the bar station and watch her for one beat.
She’s pouring champagne into the last six flutes on a fresh tray. The small piece of hair that has come loose from the clip is at her temple. She’s bracing her left hand on the counter.
She is the most beautiful thing in this room, and she has, in the last forty minutes, almost cost me a man's livelihood without knowing she did.
I will do anything for her.
I’ve known this for two weeks without saying it to myself in these words, and I’m saying it to myself now in the small private register I save for the things I’m not yet ready to say out loud.
A thought pops into my head. My father will be buried next week.
For days, I've told myself I won't go to that funeral because he doesn't deserve my presence. But I haven't asked whether running from the door is the same as owning it.
The man in the box gets nothing from my presence. He is dead.
I’m going to have to think about that later.
I move and cross to her.
"Suzanne."
"Cade?"
"Come with me."
"I’m working." She gestures at the tray in her hands.
"Set it down."
She looks at my face for one second and sets the tray down.
She follows me.
I take her through a door at the side of the ballroom — a small private terrace the hotel keeps for senior guests on slow nights.
It is empty. The lights from the ballroom fall through the glass doors at an angle, laying a square of warm yellow on the slate floor.
The music from inside comes through the wall, muffled, slow with strings.
I close the door behind us and turn to her.
I hold out my hand, and she looks at it.
"Dance with me."
"You can’t be serious.”
"Dance with me, Suzanne."
She takes my hand.
I pull her in, and my left hand is in her right, while my other hand rests at her waist. Her other hand rests on my shoulder. Then we move slowly in the square of light.
"You are a terrible dancer," she tells my collar.
"Liar."
"You stepped on my foot."
"I did not."
"You stepped on it twice."
"Slander."
"I’m going to have a bruise."
"Suzanne." I laugh.
It's a small, surprised laugh — my first in this hotel in twenty-eight days. Her face moves against my collarbone, and I know she heard it.
I look down and kiss her.
When I pull back, her hair has come further loose from the uniform clip, and her face is flushed from the closeness. I don’t want this night to end, and I don’t want to share her with any one of the people 15 ft. away on the other side of the glass.
My Suzanne.