10. Cassian
CASSIAN
Sebastian comes into my office at three with the file in his hand and the expression he wears when he’s about to tell me something I am absolutely not going to like.
"Sir."
"Just say it."
"Owen Castellan has been making calls."
"Define calls."
"He has, as of yesterday afternoon, contacted three associates at his firm, two analysts at Whitcomb, and a paralegal at a corporate due diligence shop in Boston.
He requested informal background on the resort's recent financing activity, the Vance group's history with its other portfolio targets, and — this morning — the timing of internal staff announcements at the property over the last six weeks. "
"Did he?"
"Yes, sir."
"By name?"
"Your name. Hers."
I sit back in my chair. I rest my elbow on the arm and press my thumb into the muscle of my jaw and look at the wall, which has a small framed photograph of the property the year I bought it—half-derelict, two buildings still in scaffolding, the cliff path overgrown—and I think about Owen Castellan, polite at every meal, shaking my hand with the kind of firmness you get from a book, never once asking me a question I couldn’t answer.
I have, evidently, underestimated him.
"Where is he now?"
"Library. He took a coffee in twenty minutes ago. Reading."
"Mm." I stand. "Cancel my four o'clock."
"Sir—"
"Cancel it, Sebastian. And bring a second coffee to the library. Mine. Black."
He is in the wing chair by the south window with a paperback in his lap that he is not, in fact, reading.
He is reading me, by the time I come through the door — I see his eyes lift from the page exactly half a second before I cross the threshold, which is a tell I would respect if it weren't currently working against me.
I cross to the chair opposite his. I sit. Sebastian comes in with the coffee, sets it on the small side table at my elbow, and leaves without speaking.
"Owen."
"Cassian."
"I understand you've been making calls."
He doesn't pretend. I appreciate that. He sets the paperback down on the arm of the chair, spine up, and folds his hands in his lap, and his face — he has his sister's mouth, I notice for the first time — does the thing his sister's does when she is bracing for an argument she has prepared for.
"I have."
"About me."
"About my sister."
"There's a difference."
"Not from where I'm sitting."
I lift the coffee. I take a sip. I let the silence work for me, the way it always does, and Owen — to his credit — does not fill it.
"Tell me what you think you know," I say.
"I think the engagement is convenient."
"Convenient for whom."
"You. The Vance group is on Thursday. Your last quarterly press cycle was a disaster.
Your second wife's lawyers settled in March and the Journal ran a profile on you in April that called you, and I quote, temperamentally unsuited to long-term partnership.
A fiancée, this week, is — yes, Cassian. Convenient."
"Mm."
"My sister works for you."
"I'm aware."
"My sister has worked for you for three years and, until ten days ago, you would not, I am willing to bet, have known her name without checking a roster.
And now she is wearing your grandmother's ring — I assume it's your grandmother's, it doesn't look like something a man buys retail in a hurry — and she is hosting an investor dinner with you on Thursday.
And I am being asked, by my mother, what color the centerpieces should be at a wedding I do not, frankly, believe is going to happen. "
I do not answer.
"Is it real," he says.
"Owen."
"Is it real, Cassian? Look me in the face and tell me it is."
I meet his eyes. I tell the truth. I’ve lied to so many people this week that I can feel the weight of it in my ribs, and I won’t add him to that list—not when he’s the only one who asked me plainly.
"It started as an arrangement."
He exhales. It is not relief. It is the small, sharp sound of a hypothesis confirmed.
"It is no longer an arrangement," I say.
"Meaning what."
“Meaning I am not having this conversation with you, Owen. I’m having it with her. But you asked me a question, and the answer is: it started as one thing, and it is, at this point, something else. I’m not laying out the difference for you.”
"You used her."
"I asked her. She said yes."
"You threatened to fire her, didn't you?"
"I considered it. Aloud. She is not a fool. She made a calculation. She is good at calculations."
"She's twenty-six."
"And I am thirty-four. We are both adults, Owen. You are not, in this room, her father."
"No. Her father is on the terrace. He thinks you walk on water."
"I am aware."
He looks at me. He looks at me with the steady, patient, entirely unsmiling face of a young lawyer who has just decided to draft something, and I take another sip of coffee, and I think — clearly, without affection — I’ll be managing this man for the rest of my life if I do this right.
"Owen."
"What."
"I'm going to ask you for a week."
"Excuse me."
“A week. Sunday. Say nothing to your mother. Say nothing to your sister. Leave the paperwork where it is. At the end of the week, I’ll give you whatever you want—financials, the timeline, the email with the appendix that was, admittedly, insulting.
But I’m asking you—now that I’ve stopped pretending—for the time to tell her the truth the right way. ”
"Why should I."
"Because if you tell her now, she will leave this house thinking the wrong thing. And you and I both know what that will cost her."
He looks at me for long enough that the coffee in my cup shifts from hot to warm.
"Until Sunday," he says.
"Until Sunday."
"I'm watching you, Cassian."
"I expect nothing less."
He picks up the paperback. He opens it to his page. The conversation is, by his standards, over.
I leave the library. In the hall, I pull my phone out of my pocket and I send Sebastian three lines.
Pull her staff badge for the duration. Restrict access on the third-floor server.
No one in or out of the office wing without me physically present.
I press send before I have time to consider what I am doing.
I am tightening the room. I know I am tightening the room. I am aware, in a way I am not enjoying, that this is the first thing I do when I am afraid of losing a thing. And I am, currently, afraid of losing a thing.
Dinner is on the lower terrace. The kitchen has done quail with figs, and there is a small ensemble — two musicians from the resort, a violin and a soft guitar — playing in the corner, because Delilah requested something Italian this morning and my staff is, evidently, very good at this.
The string of bulbs over the table is doing its work.
Maren is in green silk, the color of a bottle held up to the light, and her hair is pinned at the nape, and she has not, since this morning's breakfast, allowed me to touch her in any way that would register to a person watching.
She is registering to me.
"More wine, sweetheart?" I lift the bottle.
"I'm fine."
"You've barely touched it."
"I'm fine, Cassian."
"All right."
Sienna's eyes lift. They go to Maren, then to me, then back to her plate.
"Cassian, the figs are unreal," Delilah says.
"Thank you. It's the chef's recipe, not mine."
"You have to give me the recipe."
"I'll have it sent up tomorrow."
Maren cuts a piece of quail. She does not eat it. She moves it to the side of her plate. I see her hand, on the stem of her glass, tighten and release.
"Maren."
"Mm."
"Eat something."
"Don't tell me what to do."
It is quiet. It is so quiet that the violin, which had been doing a small, lifting line, sounds, briefly, like the only thing in the room.
Delilah's smile flickers. Owen's does not.
"Sweetheart." I put my hand over Maren's wrist on the table, gently. "I only meant?—"
"I know what you meant."
"Maren—"
"I know what you meant, Cassian."
I keep my face. I keep it because there are six people watching me, and one of them is a man who has, this afternoon, been told to wait until Sunday, and one of them is a woman who is going to write the entire dinner up to her sister-in-law on the phone tonight, and one of them is the woman herself, who is — for the first time since I have met her — not interested in being managed.
I stand.
"Excuse us."
"Cassian—"
"One dance, sweetheart. Indulge me. Your mother loves this song."
I take her hand. She lets me, because her mother is watching and she is, even now, the woman who does not make a scene at a table, and I lead her three steps to the open flagstones at the edge of the terrace where the violin has been working, and I put one hand at her waist and the other in hers, and the musicians, bless them, shift into something slow.
She is rigid against my chest.
"Maren."
"Don't."
"You are going to tell me what is going on."
"Not here."
"Then later."
"Maybe later."
"Maren."
“Cassian, I am dancing with you. That is what I’m doing. I’m not capable of anything else right now, so let me do this and stop pressing me.”
I put my hand at the small of her back. I press her, lightly, into the dance. She follows because her body, traitorously, knows the steps, and her cheek, after a few bars, comes to rest against the front of my shoulder — not from tenderness, I understand. From exhaustion.
I bend my head. I speak into her hair, where her mother cannot hear, where the violin is loud enough to cover anything.
"I don't want this to end," I say.
She doesn't answer.
"Did you hear me, Maren."
"I heard you."
The violin finishes. Delilah, at the table, applauds. I lift Maren's hand to my mouth, the way a man does when he is putting on a show, and I press my lips to her knuckles, and her fingers — for one breath — curl into mine.
Then she takes her hand back.
We sit down. The figs go on. The music starts again.
I sit through the rest of the meal with her thigh six inches from mine and the sense, sliding slow under my ribs, that I have, somewhere in the last twelve hours, started to need a thing I do not yet have the language to ask for.