Epilogue
Cade
Four months after the talk with Adrian.
I'm in my study with the door closed and a velvet box in my hand.
The box is from a small jeweler on Maiden Lane.
The ring inside is not something she would have picked from a tray, but it is the one I picked for her — a pale green stone in a thin gold setting, not a diamond.
It looks, when she puts it on, like something she has owned her whole life and has just remembered she had.
She doesn’t know I have it.
She doesn’t know I'm proposing tonight.
She has been in the bedroom for forty minutes. We came back from her show two hours ago with her hair already down and her shoes already off, and she has been humming through the closed door.
The show was at Iris's gallery in Oakland.
Six pieces. A small write-up in the local paper this morning.
Three of the six sold. Iris told her, quietly, that this is what a debut is supposed to feel like.
Suzanne told me, quieter, that it had not felt like anything yet because she has not been able to stop trembling.
I watched her in that gallery tonight.
I watched her stand by a piece that was hers and have a person tell her, with the small inarticulate awe of what the piece had done to them.
She did not deflect.
She thanked them.
She thanked them in her own voice, in her own name, in the room.
I had to sit down for two minutes in the back office because my throat was dry and tight in a way it hadn't been in years.
I have chosen tonight for two reasons.
The first is that the room at the auction will be full of my world. Beau. Vivienne. Henry. Theo. Every collector, board member and old friend I have shown up beside for ten years. The second is that the only version of this I have not yet given her is the version where the room watches.
She has earned the room watching.
I have earned the right to be the man who delivers it.
I slip the box into the inside pocket of my jacket.
I text Beau.
Set.
He replies in three seconds.
Try not to throw up on her.
I almost smile.
The bedroom door opens.
She comes out humming.
She is in a dress the color of the green stone in my pocket. She is wearing the locket. Her hair is down. She has put on the small pair of gold earrings my mother gave her and has not, in four months, taken off.
She stops when she sees me.
"You look handsome."
"You look like mine."
"Cade."
"You do."
She crosses to me. She straightens the lapel of my jacket the way she has been doing for months — a small, private claim.
She steps back.
"Wait."
"What."
"I have something for you. Before we go."
"Suzanne. We're already late."
"I know."
She turns. She disappears into the studio off the hallway — the room I had built out for her three months ago when she said, casually, over coffee, that she wished she had north light. I had a contractor in the apartment by the end of the week.
She comes back with a canvas held against her chest.
The back of the canvas is toward me. She is biting the inside of her lower lip the way she used to bite it when she was deciding whether to give somebody a gift they're not expecting.
She turns it around.
The painting is the size of a large book.
A man is on a bed.
His left wrist is cuffed to the iron frame above his head. His right hand is free. The key is on the nightstand exactly 12 in. out of reach. There is no sheet. The man's face is turned toward the door. He is waiting.
The whole image is rendered in warm golden light. It's the light that comes through the big window of a hotel suite at 11:00 a.m. when the curtains have just been opened. The kind of light that makes a thing that should be ugly into a thing that is beautiful.
I don't speak for a long moment.
"Suzanne."
"Mmm…"
"When did you paint this?"
She shrugs.
A small one-shoulder shrug. Her eyes are bright.
"You see," she tells me, "I can keep a secret."
I cross the room.
I take her face in my hands.
I kiss her.
I kiss her for longer than is wise given that we are forty minutes late for a five-hundred-person auction at which I have already arranged with my brother the moment that is going to redefine the rest of my life.
I pull back.
"I know you can."
"Cade."
"I know you can, baby."
"Do you like it?"
"Suzanne."
"Do you?"
"I love it. I love you. I cannot — I cannot look at this properly right now or I will not make it out of this apartment, and I have a very specific reason I need to make it out of this apartment tonight."
She laughs and wraps the painting back up in the soft cloth she had it in. She sets it by the door and takes my arm.
We leave.
The auction is full.
Five hundred people. The same room I have been coming to for ten years. The same view of the bay through the long bank of windows on the north wall. The same string quartet Beau hires every year because the cellist is the daughter of his second-grade teacher.
Heads turn when we walk in.
I'm used to heads turning for me, but I'm not used to them turning for her.
I like it.
Vivienne finds us first. She kisses Suzanne on both cheeks. She squeezes my arm in the small specific way that tells me she knows exactly what is in my inside pocket and has known since I called her three weeks ago to ask what stone color her own mother had worn.
Henry's behind her in a gray suit, looking slightly drawn at the temple. That's how he looks when he's had a migraine that day and is pretending he hasn't.
"Henry."
"Cade."
"How are you?"
"Fine."
"You are not fine."
"I'm fine, Cade."
"Mom."
"He had a migraine at 4:00 a.m. I told him to stay home. He said I would be cross with him. So here he is, being a martyr."
She kisses the side of Henry's head.
He pretends not to be pleased.
Theo crashes into us from the other direction with his arms open.
"You absolute bastard."
"Theo."
"You are in California and you did not text me."
"You have been in Monaco."
"That is not an excuse, Cade."
He hugs Suzanne, then me. His clap on the shoulder lands hard enough that the ring box presses against my ribs and I almost laugh.
He turns to Suzanne.
"Has my friend been overbearing?"
"Always."
"Good. Stay with him. He is more fun when he is overbearing than when he is brooding. I have known him since we were eleven."
"Theo."
"I'm stating a fact, Cade."
We move through the room.
Suzanne is greeting people she has met at three of these in the last four months.
She has a composure in rooms like this now that is not performance.
It is her. She is talking to a collector across the floor about a piece of hers she has decided not to sell, and the collector — a man who has been buying art in this city since 1987 — is leaning toward her the way men lean toward an artist they have decided to chase.
I watch her from 3 ft. away.
I have to work to swallow.
The ring is against my chest.
I excuse myself to the bar.
Beau intercepts me halfway there.
"Tell me you have not lost it."
"I have not lost it."
"Tell me you are going through with it."
"I'm going through with it."
"Cade."
"What?"
"The bartender told me, to my face, that if I order my drink the specific way one more time she will close the bar."
"Beau."
"She is a nightmare, Cade."
"You hired her."
"Because she is the best bartender in the city and I'm not dying on this hill. But you should see the look on her face when —"
"Beau."
"What."
"I'm going to propose to my girlfriend in twenty minutes. Could you summarize the bartender problem for me in one sentence so I can move on with my life."
"She hates me."
"That is one sentence. Thank you."
I walk to the bar.
The woman behind it is mid 20s. Dark hair pulled back tight. She is not smiling. She is holding a bottle in one hand and pointing at a guest with the other in a way that makes the guest take a step back from the rail. The guest leaves. She returns to her station.
"What."
"A glass of the white. Whatever's open."
She makes it in under thirty seconds without looking up and slides it across the bar.
She does not ask if I want anything else.
I take the glass and look at her name tag.
Sabrina.
I have a more pressing matter than the bartender Beau is going to be miserable about for the next year.
I walk back to Suzanne.
Twenty minutes later, Beau steps onto the small raised platform at the front of the room. The string quartet pauses as he takes the microphone.
He does the scheduled auction announcement. He thanks the patrons. He announces the highest bids of the evening — a Vargas piece at $180,000, a Diego at $220,000, a sculpture I don't catch the name of at 300,000.
He pauses, then grins.
"Now. My brother has something he would like to say."
Suzanne turns to me.
Her face goes through several things at once. Recognition first. Then panic. Then a third thing softer than both.
"Cade."
"Come with me."
"Cade —"
"Come with me, baby."
I take her hand.
I walk her to the platform.
She is looking at me with her face halfway between laughing and crying. The dress moves around her knees. The locket catches the chandelier light.
I take the microphone.
I don't need it. I don't raise my voice. The room has gone the kind of quiet a room goes when five hundred people have all decided at once to be present.
I look at her.
"I have been trying to think of the right place to do this for a month."
She is looking at me.
"I realized the right place is wherever she is."
The room makes a sound.
"I love her."
She closes her eyes for one second. She opens them.
"I'm going to love her for the rest of my life."
I get down on one knee, take the box out of my inside pocket, and open it.
I look up at her.
"Suzanne Jenkins, will you marry me?"
She is nodding before I have finished her name.
"Yes, Cade. Yes."
She is crying, laughing, and reaching for me before I have stood.
The room erupts.
Beau is yelling something inappropriate from the side of the platform. Vivienne is crying into her champagne. Henry has his hand flat against the small of her back. Theo is howling. Iris is somewhere in the back of the room with her hand over her mouth.
I slide the ring onto her finger.
The pale green stone catches the light.
She looks down at her hand, then up at me. Her eyes are wet. She is biting the inside of her cheek the way she did on the porch in November, at Renée's kitchen counter, at every moment she’s been holding herself together — piece by piece.
"Cade."
"Yes."
"This is real."
"This is real, baby."
I stand and kiss her.
When I pull back I keep my forehead against hers. The room is loud somewhere behind us. I ignore it.
"I love you."
"I love you too."
I smile against her mouth.
"Soon to be Mrs. Nightingale."
She laughs and kisses me again.
The room is still going. Beau is still yelling. Vivienne is still crying. The string quartet has started up again with something more cheerful than what they were playing before.
I don't think about any of it.
I think about the painting wrapped in soft cloth by the door of our apartment, the man on the bed in the warm golden light, waiting for the door to open, and the woman who painted it.
I think about the rest of my life.
She pulls back, looks at the ring on her finger, then at me. She holds the hand up between us so the stone catches the chandelier light, and she does not say anything for a beat, and the silence is the loudest thing in the room.
She says it anyway.
"Marguerite would have liked this."
"Tell me about her tomorrow."
"Yes."
"Tell me everything."
"Cade."
"All of it. Whatever you'll give me."
She nods once and squeezes my hand.
The string quartet starts a waltz behind us.
Beau is still yelling.
We go down off the platform together.
To be continued in Don’t Go