Chapter 14
Forty seats. Maybe thirty people in them.
I counted — twenty years of walking into rooms and reading them, who's here, who matters, where the exits are.
My father's habit, installed so early I couldn't tell anymore where he ended and I began.
Except this room didn't have anyone who mattered in the Harrington sense.
A retired couple in matching fleece. Three film students.
A gray-haired woman in the front row in combat boots.
Nobody who could do anything to me. Nobody who knew my name.
It was the most relaxed I'd felt in a theater in my life.
Ethan sat beside me with his knee going like a piston. He'd been impossible all day, loud, narrating the drive, butchering the Stones at ninety decibels. Now the lights were going down and he'd finally run out of things to say.
"It's good," I told him. "You know it's good."
"I don't know anything."
The screen went white, then black, then his name. He breathed in beside me and held it.
The lights were gone and the film was running and I wasn't watching it.
I was doing the thing I'd been doing for days, the thing I couldn't stop doing…
running the problem. Taking it apart, looking for the seam, the angle, the move everyone else missed.
There had to be a version where I kept both.
There's always a version where you keep both, if you're patient enough, if you're smart enough.
That was the whole religion I'd been raised in.
So I ran it. Take the deal, say the words, perform the statement to the team, let him make the hearing disappear, and then leave later, on my own terms, once I had standing of my own.
Buy time. Except I'd already tried buying time.
I'd said okay in Patterson's office and the word had landed on Liam like I'd hit him.
There was no quiet version of taking the deal; taking the deal meant Liam watching me end it in front of everyone.
Fine — flip it. Refuse.
Walk out clean, keep him, keep myself. And go where? On what money?
I was twenty years old and every dollar I'd ever touched had my father's name on it, and I'd watched what happened to the last person in this family who said no out loud. The doors didn't slam. They just stopped opening, one by one, so quietly you couldn't point to the moment it happened.
Every path I built ran the same way — it forked, and one fork cost me Liam and the other cost me everything else, and there was never a third fork, because the whole thing had been engineered by a man whose entire genius was making sure there was never a third fork.
I took a breath and tried to focus on my best friends film.
The film was about people who built something out of nothing. I caught maybe half of it. The other half I lost, because somewhere in the dark my mind slipped its lead and went somewhere it had never been allowed to go.
It went forward.
It was a strange feeling because I'd spent my whole life inside a schedule someone else built.
Kingswell, then law school, then Harrington Capital, the track laid down before I could walk.
I knew what every year of my life was supposed to look like until I was sixty.
And not one of those years had Liam in it.
There was no version of the plan with him in it.
The plan was built specifically so that a person like him could never get in.
So in the dark, with Ethan's work flickering on the wall in front of me, I built a different one.
A small apartment somewhere. Liam's stuff everywhere.
The ratty erg shorts, the protein tub on the counter, a single oar he refused to throw out leaning in a corner for no reason.
Morning light. Coffee that isn't good because neither of us knows how to make it.
Liam at the stove in boxers, hair messy, telling me to sit down.
A Tuesday. Just a Tuesday. Nobody watching.
No photo to manage, no pretending at the boat house, no shower at five in the morning so we could pretend it never happened.
A life nobody handed me. A life nobody could repossess, because no one gave it to us and we'd have built it ourselves..
It hit me in the throat first. Then the chest. My hands had gone tight on my knees and I made them let go.
I sat in a theater in Vermont and I wanted that ordinary life more than I have ever wanted anything my father ever put in front of me, and the wanting was physical. It sat behind my eyes and pressed.
On the screen a woman was painting at three in the morning because she couldn't afford the space in daylight, and she was crying, and she didn't wipe it away, and the camera didn't flinch and neither did she.
That was the thing. That was what cracked. Ethan had taken the most private thing he owned — what he actually thought was worth looking at — and he'd put it on a wall in front of strangers and let them see it. While I'd been spending twenty years making sure no room ever saw anything real about me.
The lights came up, and thirty people clapped like there were three hundred of them.
Ethan didn't move. He sat there with his hands flat on his thighs, staring at the blank screen where his name had just been, and I watched something move across his face that I'd never seen on him, not the cocky grin, not the deflection he reached for like a reflex.
Just raw and open. A guy just looking at his art that he showed a room full of strangers.
I knew that look. I'd been wearing some version of it for two months.
"Hey," I said, quiet, so it stayed between us. "That's you. Up there. You did that."
"It's stupid." His voice came out rough. He cleared it. "It's just a—"
"It's not stupid." I waited until he looked at me. "Strangers just cried at something you made. Do you understand what that is? You took the realest thing you had and you put it in front of a room full of people you'll never see again, and you let them look. You didn't hide a single frame of it."
He huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh, and his eyes were too bright.
"One stranger cried," he said.
"Two. The fleece couple were both wrecked." I bumped his shoulder with mine.
That got the laugh, finally… small yet real. He scrubbed a hand down his face, breathed out, looked at me sideways.
"You came," he said. Like it mattered more than he was going to admit.
"Course I came."
He nodded, then he knocked his knee against mine, once, and let it go.
"Don't make it weird."
"You're the one crying at your own movie."
"I'm not—" He laughed again, and this time it held. "Okay. A little. Shut up."
***
We spilled out of the theater into the cold with the rest of the crowd, forty people thinning to a dozen as they peeled off toward cars and B&Bs, and the few of us left drifted down Hartwick's main street toward the one place still lit at the end of it.
It wasn't far. Two blocks of brick storefronts gone dark for the night — the bookstore with its window display, the coffee shop with the chalkboard sign flipped around to CLOSED, a hardware store, a bakery window.
Our breath went up in clouds. The cold had teeth this far north and the whole street was empty except for us and the streetlights and a single traffic signal blinking yellow over an intersection.
Then a door, and warmth, and noise. The Bullfinch — gold-flaked letters on the glass, half worn off, a corner bar that had clearly been here longer than I'd been alive.
The bar hit all at once when Ethan pulled it open and a wall of heat and yellow light and what sounded like forty conversations going at the same time, the windows already fogged from the inside, the cold burning off our shoulders in seconds.
The music was something old and warm with too many horns.
The place was small and packed and gloriously mismatched: a long folding table down one wall with cheese gone soft and crackers and two boxes of wine set out like a centerpiece, chairs that looked collected one yard sale at a time, string lights, the smell of spilled beer and somebody's perfume.
The festival had taken the back room over and made it theirs.
Ethan walked into it like he'd been doing this his whole life. Three conversations deep in ninety seconds — a handshake here, a hand on a shoulder there, somebody calling his name across the room
I stood at the edge with my bad wine and watched him fit into his artsy film crowd.
"You're the rower."
The woman from the front row. Up close, fifty-five maybe, gray hair cut short, the combat boots, a festival lanyard flipped around backward so you couldn't read it.
"Ethan talks about you," she said.
"Yeah. I'm Alex." I said.
"Frankie." She didn't offer a hand, she took a sip instead. "I run this festival. And I make documentaries. Thirty years of it. His is good. Tell him the second act's too long, because he'll need to hear both eventually."
She looked at me like she could see everything — I didn't like it.
"You don't look like you're having a good time," she said.
"I'm having a fine time."
"Sure." She nodded at the room. "These are my people. Took me forty years to find them. You've got the face of someone who hasn't found his yet."
I should have deflected. I'm good at deflecting. The one skill I was taught that I'd wanted to keep on purpose. Instead I heard myself say, "You said it took forty years."
"Give or take."
"What were you doing before that?"
"Disappointing my family." She said it lightly. "They're from Greenwich."
That meant money, old money.
She continued. "They had a very short list of acceptable lives and I wasn't on it. So." She shrugged. "They made a choice and I made one and we don't talk."
The wine tasted so bad.
"Do you—" I stopped. Don't ask. I did anyway. "Do you ever miss it?"
"The money or the people?"
"Either."
She thought about it.
"The money, sometimes. When the car breaks. When a film falls apart because I'm twelve grand short." She drank. "The people, no. And that surprised me, the people part. Took me a while to figure out why." She set the cup down. "Turned out the people were the money. Same thing."
I couldn't say anything. My father's voice was in the room with us, calm, patient, the way it came through the speakerphone in Patterson's office.
Do you want to end up like James? No family.
No funding. No future. The picture I'd been shown so many times it had stopped being a picture and become a fact about the world. The thing at the bottom of the well.
And here it was. The thing at the bottom of the well. In combat boots, drinking wine out of a box, telling me she'd do it again.
"Was it worth it?" I said.
She laughed.
"Worth it's the wrong question," she said. "That's their question. Cost-benefit." She picked the cup back up. "It's just my life, kid. I like my life."
Then she was already turning, because someone across the room had called her name. I stood there holding wine I wasn't going to drink with my heart going like I'd just finished a regatta.
Ethan found me by the window twenty minutes later, already half-turned toward the door, phone in his hand.
"Two minutes," he said as he stepped outside.
I watched him through the glass. He stood on the sidewalk in the cold with no coat, breath fogging, and whatever the person on the other end said made him put his free hand over his face and laugh.
When he came back in his ears were red and it wasn't the cold.
"Remy," I said. Not a question.
He opened his mouth. The deflection was right there, I could see it loading. And then he didn't. He looked at me, and maybe it was the movie still in him, the residue of having shown a whole room his insides, but he let it go instead.
"You know what's stupid?" He dropped into the chair across from me. "The bus."
"The bus."
"To the Charles. Six hours up. I got stuck next to him because you were sitting with Liam.
" He turned a bottle cap over in his fingers.
"And we just — talked. The whole way. About rowing.
About the film. About nothing. And I kept waiting for it to get boring, because it always gets boring, and it didn't. Six hours and it didn't."
"Ethan."
"Then in the hotel room." He glanced up. "That was him, by the way. The swap. He moved the rooms around so Liam could have the night with you. Didn't even tell me until after." A short laugh. "Who does that. Who quietly fixes someone else's whole night and takes no credit."
"So you and Remy ended up—"
"In a room. Yeah." He looked at me straight, which Ethan almost never did.
"And nothing happened. I mean it. We just kept talking.
Sat on two separate beds and talked." He shook his head, like he still couldn't account for it.
"And it was better than if something had.
That's the part I can't explain to anyone.
It was the best night I've had in years and all we did was talk. "
I didn't say anything. I didn't need to.
"So that's — yeah." He shrugged. "We're a thing now. It's new. He's good, Alex. He's really good. He looked up an artist I mentioned once and sent me the guy's exhibition in Munich. On his own."
"You told me that already. In the car."
"Well, it's still true."
I looked at my best friend, his ears red, guard down, grinning because a coxswain from Riverside had sat up all night talking to him.
The easy version. Two people who got stuck next to each other on a bus and just kept choosing to keep talking.
No father two hundred miles away. No bridge crossed in the dark.
No war. They just liked each other and let themselves have it.
The thing I'd spent the whole film building in my head, sitting right across the table from me.
"What?" Ethan said.
"Nothing," I said. "I'm happy for you."
And I was. I also knew, sitting there, exactly what I was going to do.
The plan I told Liam I'd make, was made.