Chapter 27 #2
"The feeling is entirely mutual," she said, her voice low enough for Theodora alone. "And with you looking the way you do, I have absolutely no intention of leaving your side.”
She felt Theodora's arm tighten fractionally at her waist. Then, close enough to her ear that she felt it more than heard it: "Good. Don't."
The flashes kept coming as Catherine turned toward Theodora and smiled. The photographs would be good. She could feel it.
Inside, the church had been transformed in ways that made Catherine's breath falter.
She'd been part of the planning, had seen the vendor lists and the lighting diagrams and the seating charts, and still the reality of it was something else.
Candles everywhere, hundreds of them, on every surface the venue allowed.
The pews were rearranged to create space, flowers on every pillar, the instruments on the raised altar platform at the far end catching the light in a way that made them look like they belonged there.
Josiah materialized at Theodora's shoulder almost immediately.
"The band's been delayed," he said, low and easy, catching Catherine's eye briefly over Theodora's shoulder in a way that communicated rather more than the words did.
"Some kind of traffic accident." He gestured upward, to where a jazz playlist was moving softly through the speakers, warm and unobtrusive, filling the room. "But it’s fine. Everyone’s just assumed the entertainment starts later. "
Theodora looked at him, then at the ceiling, then back. "How delayed?"
"Don't worry, Theo. They'll be here," Josiah said. "Now, go and enjoy this for a minute. You've earned it. Both of you."
He slipped back into the crowd, and Theodora watched him go, jaw tightening in the way it did when she was running calculations she didn't want to share out loud.
Catherine stepped closer and took her hand. "Look at this room," she said.
Theodora looked. Catherine watched her do it, watched the calculation slow and something else take its place, something like relief.
"Theodora," Catherine said.
"I know," Theodora said. Her voice was slightly thick. "Don't."
"I'm not going to say anything."
"Good."
Catherine leaned in close. "You did this."
"Catherine."
"Okay, okay, I’m done."
They moved through the space together, accepting champagne from a passing tray, falling into the rhythm of a formal event, the greetings and introductions, and the small conversations that happened at gatherings like this.
Catherine knew several of the donors; she’d worked alongside some of them in her previous life, in previous chapters of herself, and she moved through the room with the ease of someone who had been doing this since she was a child, accepting compliments and deflecting them and turning the attention always back toward The Mission, toward Theodora and what she'd built here.
Theodora was remarkable to watch in this environment.
She had a way with people that Catherine had noticed before in smaller settings, but that here, scaled up, was something to see.
She remembered names. She knew what mattered to people.
She could move from a conversation about a donor's grandchildren to a detailed discussion of The Mission's outreach program to a joke that made a room of strangers laugh in the space of four minutes, and through all of it, there was something genuine underneath, something that wasn’t a performance but actual care, and people felt it and responded to it.
Catherine stood beside her at the bar, half watching the room and half watching Theodora work it. "You're good at this," she said, during a brief pause between conversations.
"Don't sound so surprised," Theodora said.
"I'm not surprised. I'm admiring."
"Well, admire away," Theodora said with a small sideways smirk.
Catherine was about to respond when she saw Josiah approaching through the crowd. She saw the expression on his face before he'd reached them, the careful neutrality of someone carrying bad news and trying not to show it in a room full of people they can't afford to alarm.
"Theo." He appeared at Theodora's elbow, leaning in close. "Sorry to interrupt. Can I have a quick word?"
Theodora looked at his face, and whatever she saw there made her straighten. "What is it?"
Josiah glanced around the room once, quickly.
"The band," he said discreetly. "The ‘bad traffic’ turned out to be an incident on the Manhattan Bridge.
NYPD has closed it completely, with no timeline for reopening.
They're stuck in Brooklyn, and there's no way around it, not on a Saturday night.
" He paused. "I've spent the last thirty minutes trying to find alternatives, but every act worth having is booked. "
Catherine watched Theodora absorb this. Watched the color change in her face, the smile that had been there a moment ago disappearing, like a light being turned down.
"Josiah," Theodora said, and her voice was very controlled. "Without a performance, we can't build to the appeal. The numbers won't—"
"I know," he said.
"Could we delay it? If we push it back an hour, maybe we can find—"
"There's no one, Theo. I've called everyone."
Catherine watched Theodora's jaw tighten.
She was doing the thing she did when she was trying very hard not to cry, the thing Catherine had watched her do after bad shifts and difficult days, the holding together that cost her enormously and showed only in the very set of her shoulders and the slight, too-controlled quality of her breathing.
"Thank you, Josiah," Catherine said. "Leave it with us. We'll handle it."
Josiah looked at her with the expression of someone who would like to believe that and is not quite there yet. "The program starts in forty minutes."
"I know. Go and get yourself a drink. I'll find you in a little while.”
He held her gaze for a moment, then nodded and moved away.
Catherine's hand found Theodora's arm, and she steered her gently toward the secluded alcove she'd clocked earlier off the hallway, a pair of small couches tucked behind an elaborate arrangement of white roses.
She sat Theodora down and sat beside her, close enough that their knees touched.
"Breathe," Catherine said.
"I am.”
“No, you're holding your breath and hoping I won't notice."
Theodora exhaled. A real, reluctant one.
"Again," Catherine said.
"I don't need to do breathing exercises, I need to fix—"
"Again, Theodora."
Theodora looked at her, and something in Catherine's expression must have conveyed that this was not negotiable, because she breathed in slowly, and out, and then again, and Catherine watched the slight change settle through her, the shoulders dropping a fraction, the jaw unclenching by degrees.
"The goal tonight," Theodora said, "was three hundred thousand.
We'd planned the whole evening around the music building the room to the right emotional place for the appeal.
Without it, we're looking at maybe half that.
Maybe less." She stopped. "The residential program.
We were going to expand it in April. If we don't hit the number, we can't. And there are people on the waitlist who—" She stopped again.
"There are people who need those beds, Catherine. "
Catherine looked at her. At the way she talked about the people on the waitlist as if they were people she knew, which, Catherine supposed, they probably were.
She cupped Theodora's face in both hands, turning her so they were looking at each other directly, and ran her thumbs over her cheeks. Theodora's eyes were bright, not with tears exactly, with the strain of keeping it together in a room full of people she could not fall apart in front of.
"What do you need from me right now?" Catherine asked calmly.
Theodora laughed, a short, unhappy sound. "A miracle, probably." She paused, and then, with a look of embarrassment, said: "I know it's an obscene amount of money, and I'm sorry I'm even asking, but could The Mission borrow—maybe if we could charter a helicopter to get them here in—"
Catherine shook her head slowly, and Theodora's face fell.
"Not because of the money," Catherine said quickly. "Money is not the issue. If a helicopter would work, I would pay for it without a second thought, and you would never have to mention it again. But if the NYPD closed the bridge, it’s most definitely closed the airspace over it too."
Theodora nodded once and looked down at her hands.
The noise of the event continued around them in the distance, the clink of glasses, someone laughing too loudly near the bar, oblivious to the two women trying to figure out a crisis.
But the reality was, Catherine wasn’t panicking.
She already knew what she was going to do.
She had known it, she realized, the moment she'd watched Theodora's face change when Josiah told her the news.
There had been no deliberation, no weighing of options.
The answer had been there, obvious and complete, waiting for her to look directly at it.
She was terrified.
"Do you trust me?" Catherine said.
Theodora looked up, clearly surprised by the question.
She opened her mouth, then closed it again, and Catherine watched the thought move across her face.
It wasn’t the quick, automatic response the question usually produced, but something slower, more considered, as if she were actually asking herself, right there in the alcove, what the answer was.
Then Theodora said, "Yes."
Just that. And Catherine heard in it not just the answer to the question but something larger, something the word was carrying that it could barely hold.
"Then leave this with me," Catherine said.
"I have contacts in the industry. Some strings I can pull.
" She held Theodora's gaze. "I promise you the room will have music tonight.
I promise you will meet your goal. And I promise that everything you've built here will be exactly what you wanted it to be. "