Chapter 9 #2
"That's not donor relations." Margaret takes a sip of her wine without breaking eye contact. "That's strategic analysis. There's a difference, and if you don't know that, someone hasn't been paying attention to what you're actually good at."
The praise lands clean, specific, aimed at something I did. It's not something I performed, and for one fraction of a second my chest opens like sunlight breaking through a window I didn't know was there.
Then my father's voice rises underneath it. Warm, and proud, and indistinguishable in its mechanics. I'm so proud of you, baby. You handled that beautifully. And I can't separate this from that.
I hold. I smile. The shutter clicks back into place, steady as stone.
"That's very kind of you to say, Ms. Winchester."
"Margaret." She touches my arm briefly and steers us a half-step toward the conservatory entrance, away from the board members drifting closer.
"And it wasn't kindness. It was observation.
I'd love to talk more about what you see in the donor landscape, if you have time this summer.
The Foundation is always looking for women who think the way you do. "
She glances past my shoulder. "Have you met Judge Castellano?"
A woman near the conservatory doors looks up at her name.
Dark hair pulled back. A small gold medal at her collarbone.
Quiet bearing, the kind that doesn't perform attention but receives it.
She crosses the courtyard at the pace of a person who's never been late to anything, and Margaret receives her with the brief courtesy of two professionals who've crossed paths at enough of these events to skip the warmup.
"Judge Castellano, this is Evangeline Blanchard. She just diagnosed the reintegration pipeline as infrastructure instead of charity."
"Did she." The handshake is brief, the warmth measured.
"Angelina is fine. The title gets in the way at events like this." Her voice is unhurried, a register that doesn't rise or fall regardless of audience, and her eyes hold mine like a witness she hasn't decided about yet. "She's reading further than the people writing the appropriations memos."
"I'm only reading further because Margaret made the case in three meetings and I read it twice."
"If you got that from just reading it, I'd like to see what happens when someone actually puts you to work." A small smile, contained. "Margaret has my number. If she gives it to you, use it."
"I'd like that very much."
She gives me her card. Her personal cell is handwritten on the back. I tuck it into my clutch next to the elastic bandage and carry both of them through the rest of the afternoon, aware of each one against my hip every time I shift the clutch.
The string trio plays Debussy. I work the event for another hour, shaking hands that aren't his, accepting compliments that echo, keeping my weight off my right ankle and the wrap pressed against Margaret's card inside the clutch I hold against my hip.
When the courtyard starts to thin, I step into the conservatory where the jasmine is thicker and the light is lower and pull out my phone.
The text is already there.
Outside whenever you're ready.
He sent it twenty one minutes ago. That means he drove here, parked, sat in the car with the engine running while I worked an event full of people who think they know me, and he didn't text again, didn't call, didn't knock on the garden gate to ask if I was almost done.
Just waited. Twenty one minutes a man who could have been anywhere chose to be here, outside a party he wasn't invited to, because I might need a ride home.
If someone who doesn't ask for anything keeps showing up anyway, what does that make the people who only showed up when they wanted something?
I tuck the phone back into the clutch and walk out through the jasmine with my weight mostly on my left foot, my expression composed for anyone watching.
The Range Rover is idling at the curb. I open the passenger door, and the interior smells like his soap and leather seats trapped in the warm air. He's sitting with one hand on the wheel, his eyes forward, the radio playing something low and acoustic I don't recognize.
"How was it?" The way he asks it, flat and easy, it's an opening I can walk through or close behind me.
"Productive." I pull the door shut and the city noise disappears. "I met Margaret Winchester."
"The Foundation." His thumb shifts on the wheel. "She's the real thing."
"She told me I think like a strategic analyst and not a donor relations coordinator." I buckle the seatbelt and the strap crosses over the place where my chest hasn't stopped humming since the garden. "I think she meant it as a compliment."
"You think?"
"I think." And there it is, the crack, because I don't know anymore.
"Chère, she did." The endearment leaves his mouth before his English does. He catches it half a second after I hear it. His knuckles flex once on the wheel. He doesn't take it back.
He pulls away from the curb and the afternoon light slides across the windshield in gold bars that stretch and break and re-form.
I watch them instead of watching him. My hand rests on my thigh and the console armrest is right there, his forearm settled across the dark leather, palm down, fingers loose.
A short stretch of nothing between us, and I could close it and feel something solid and warm that isn't waiting for me to react the right way.
My hand doesn't move.
He doesn't push. The acoustic song ends and another one starts.
The garage door rolls up at our approach and he eases the Range Rover into its slot beside Darcy's hatchback. The engine cuts. I step out before he can come around to my side, push through the interior door into the entryway, and toe off my flats where they land.
The house is quiet downstairs. Upstairs, behind Darcy's closed door, music plays, something bright and muffled. The hallway stretches between three doors I navigate every night without touching the walls.
My clutch goes on the desk. The dress comes off over my head, the bra after it. I pull on the t-shirt I stole from his laundry two weeks ago, and the cotton settles against bare skin and the scent of him settles against the back of my throat.
My pulse kicks up under the cotton. Heat drops low, exactly where it dropped the first time he put his hands on my waist in a hotel room in Louisiana.
The ache I woke up with hasn't moved an inch.
My skin under the cotton remembers what his thumb felt like above my hip, what the heat of his hand did through silk, and what eight years of not seeing him did to a body that apparently never agreed to forget.
I'm standing in the dark in a man's shirt, two thousand miles and two months and a sprained ankle from the room where I first learned what his proximity does to me. The flame is the same. Only the address has changed.