8. Knox
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Knox
I haven’t slept at home since the gala.
Mostly I’ve crashed at the office, a hotel, the office couch again, anywhere my mother wouldn’t think to look while the city chewed through the news of the event. Three nights of dodging her, and tonight I finally give up and come home, hoping for one decent stretch of sleep in my own bed.
I let myself in, rolling the ache out of my neck. My jacket is already half off one shoulder and I’m exhausted from sleeping on furniture built for sitting. I reach for the switch and flood the place with light.
There’s a figure on my couch.
“Jesus,” I jump, a full step backward. Then the figure resolves into my mother, seated with her ankles crossed and her handbag in her lap. My heart climbs down out of my throat. “Mom… Were you just sitting here? In the dark?”
She doesn’t smile.
Which is, frankly, scarier than the ghost I’d braced for. A ghost I could handle. My mother, unsmiling, on my couch, wants a conversation, and there is no exorcism for that.
She looks at me instead, her expression set to a temperature I know very well, and when she says my name, the quip dies on my tongue.
“Knox.”
“Mother,” I amend.
I finish shrugging out of the jacket and drape it over a chair, buying myself a second. There’s exactly one person with a key to this place and the nerve to hand my mother the address.
Idris. That absolute snitch.
I’m going to have a very pointed conversation with my assistant about loyalty, the second I survive this one.
“You’ve been hard to find,” she says.
“I’ve been busy.” I head for the kitchen instead of the couch, because I’m too tired to be cross-examined standing up. “Water? I have juice, if you want to pretend it’s a social call.”
“Water.”
I pour two and bring them over. The simple ritual of it loosens my shoulders. I sit across from her, and I find I don’t have the energy to fence with her tonight. I’d rather just talk.
“You’re going to lecture me,” I say. “So let me save us both some time. Yes, the gala was spur of the moment. No, I wasn’t out of my mind when I did it. I knew exactly what I was doing.” I take a sip. “And before you start, you were right about Blythe. I misjudged her, badly. That one’s on me.”
She tilts her head, recalibrating, surprised to be handed the point instead of made to take it.
“Well,” she says. “That’s more honesty than I expected to get out of you tonight.”
“Enjoy it. It’s rare.” I set the glass down. “But do me one favor and don’t be like the rest of them about Adriana. Don’t sit there with your bridge table’s opinion already formed. You taught me to read people for myself. So read her yourself before you decide what she is.”
She considers that, turning her glass a slow quarter on her knee, and I can tell it’s landed without moving her an inch.
“That’s all very mature,” she says. “It doesn’t change the fact that the entire point of our arrangement was for you to be serious. And now, what, you’ve simply swapped one woman out for another the moment the first went bad?”
“Isn’t this exactly what you wanted, though?” I lean back. “You told me to find someone and take her seriously. I’ve found someone who interests me, which, if you’ll recall, is not a thing that happens often. And I intend to be serious about her. You should be thrilled.”
“I’d be more thrilled if it weren’t a rebound dressed as a romance.”
“It isn’t a rebound.” Here’s the part I’ve actually thought about, so I let it sound like it. “Adriana and I understand each other. We match and we don’t need to be swept off our feet to want the same outcome. That’s a steadier foundation than half the marriages you and I both know.”
“Love isn’t a merger, Knox.”
“No,” I agree. “It’s a worse bet. I know what a merger costs me, and I’ll take the one I can survive.”
It’s a half-truth, because while the romance part is invented, the other about wanting the same things, is real. I just leave out that the thing we both want is to watch William and Blythe burn for it.
Minor omission, though. Details, details.
She gives me a look, but I’m not finished with the point I’m making.
“And when you set your terms, you told me to commit. You never said I’d be barred from trying again if the first attempt failed. People are more unpredictable. I still believe this is within the rules of our deal, right?”
Technically, it is. I’m meeting them to the letter even if it might look like a cheat from a certain angle.
Adriana fits the standard perfectly. The right name, the right world, believable across a dinner table in a way no stranger I started courting tomorrow could manage in the time I have left.
I’m not breaking her rules, I’m using them.
She’s quiet for a moment, and I watch her concede the logic even as she dislikes where it leads her.
“It’s a mess, Knox,” she says finally. “The woman is in the middle of a divorce the whole city is dissecting. They’re calling her unhinged.
Classless. A woman who made a circus of her own marriage.
And you’ve tied your name to the center of it.
I don’t see how a thing built on that much wreckage serves you, or her, in any way that lasts. ”
“Don’t.” It comes out flatter and faster than I mean it to, and it stops her. “Don’t repeat their version of it. You don’t know the full story. They’re wrong, and I’d think less of you for joining them.”
The room goes quiet in a way it wasn’t before.
“Hm,” is all she says, and she keeps looking at me, studying a thing in my face I didn’t know I’d put there.
My brows pull together. “What? What is it?”
“Nothing.” She shakes her head, and the scrutiny softens into a gentler look, almost a sad one. “Nothing at all.”
She sets the matter down then, as easily as she picked it up.
“I want you to be happy, Knox. That is the whole of what I want. You understand that, don’t you?”
“I am happy.” The deflection comes easy, a reflex polished over years. “I’m fine, Mother. I have more than any man has a right to. You can stop worrying about me.”
“That is exactly what worries me.” She studies me a moment longer, and whatever she finds there, she folds away without comment. “You’ll climb to the top of all of it and never once notice how alone it is up there.”
I don’t have an answer for that one and she’s kind enough not to press. Instead her expression turns lighter, more familiar, the look she wears right before she gets precisely what she came for.
“Well, if you insist I let you have this, it really would put my mind at ease,” she says, examining her water glass, “to meet her properly. Somewhere quiet. To see the two of you together, instead of in a photograph.”
And there it is.
I almost laugh, because I know this move. The careful little setup, the suggestion left hanging just so. She wants me to be the one to say it.
So I let her have the win, because there’s no beating the woman who taught me the game.
“Do you want me to invite her to dinner, Mother?”
Her face blooms into a grin, genuinely pleased now, the disappointment of the whole evening melting off her.
“Why, what a lovely idea, Knox.” She rises, smoothing her skirt, and collects her handbag. “I’ll bring your father. Eight o’clock Thursday. I took the liberty of holding a table at Asher’s. The corner one, away from the windows, so we won’t be photographed mid-meal.”
I walk her to the door. My hand’s on the latch before the rest of it catches up to me, and I go still.
“Wait.” I turn and look at her, really look. “You’ve already booked it?”
“Mm.”
My eyes narrow. “Did we just have that entire conversation, the lecture, the worrying, all of it, so that I’d suggest the exact dinner you’d already reserved?”
In answer, my mother only smiles, serene as a saint.
“I’ll see you and Adriana Thursday,” she says, and rises onto her toes to kiss my cheek, looking far happier than the situation strictly warrants. “Wear the gray. You look less like trouble in the gray.”
She gives me a little wave and steps into the hall.
I close the door and stand there with the distinct, familiar sensation of a man who’s just been thoroughly played by a professional and lost without ever knowing. I scratch the back of my head at the empty room.
I pull out my phone and text Adriana before I can think better of it.
: Minor development. Will you murder me if I say you and I are having dinner with my parents?
I hit send, put the phone down, and decide the reply can wait until I’ve earned a proper shower.
The hot water does its work, twenty uninterrupted minutes of it, and I come out feeling close to human again with a clean shirt and towel around my neck. The penthouse quiet, the night finally mine.
Padding back toward the couch, already deciding between sleep and one slow drink to earn it, I reach for my phone to see whether Adriana’s threatened my life yet.
The buzzer goes.
My brows pull together. I glance at the door as though it’s done me a personal wrong.
It’s late. No reason for the buzzer at this hour unless my mother’s circled back for a second pass, some final instruction or another agenda.
I cross the room still drying my hair, towel hooked around my neck, and pull the door open without checking the screen.
It isn’t my mother.
Blythe.
She’s standing in my hallway in a coat I recognize.
Every instinct I have says don’t. Shut the door. Nothing good is standing on the other side of it.
But I’ve already opened it, and some part of me wants to hear what she thinks she’s going to say. So I step back, just enough to let her over the threshold and no further, the door staying open at my back.
She stops where I leave her, a few feet inside, and I watch the boundary of it register on her face, watch her clock exactly how far she didn’t get to come. That alone tells me nothing’s changed about her.
“Knox.” My name comes out soft, wounded. “You won’t answer my calls.”
“I’m aware. That was rather the point.”