Prologue #2
Here is the thing I’ll turn over later, in the dark of the apartment, when I have the leisure to be honest with myself.
No one watching would ever guess this is the first time we have touched.
Not the first real time. The only time. A handshake in a judge’s chambers, the cool press of a pen passed from her fingers to mine, and now this, her whole body fitted against me, her hands fisted white-knuckled in the wool of my coat, and not one professional skeptic in that crowd doubts for a second that they are looking at a husband holding his wife.
They aren’t wrong, which is the strange part. They have built an entire marriage out of a single photograph, and the photograph tells no lie.
I bring one hand up to cradle the back of her head, her hair cold and soft under my palm from standing out here in the wind, and I say nothing, because I have nothing yet that is true enough to be worth saying.
Behind us, Jeff steps up. I hear him before I see him, that courtroom baritone he keeps holstered for exactly these occasions.
“Ladies and gentlemen. I’m Jeff Cruz, Mr. Flint’s counsel.”
“What’s Mr. Flint doing here?” someone calls.
“It would make rather less sense if he weren’t”—and I can hear the small, lethal smile he’s wearing without turning to look at it—”considering Camilla is Mr. Flint’s wife.”
The sound the crowd makes then is a different animal entirely.
I’ve stood in front of enough rooms in my life to know the noise of one being handed something it didn’t have a minute ago.
Cameras detonate in a fresh volley. The questions climb a full octave.
And against my chest Camilla goes very still, the particular stillness of a person whose private grief has just been carried out into the street and set alight for the warmth of strangers.
I draw her in a fraction closer, enough to say I have you in a language I’m not at all certain I speak.
She doesn’t pull away.
That doesn’t mean anything either, I tell myself, and very nearly believe it.
It takes two hours to make a death administratively survivable.
Two hours of lawyers and prepared statements, a service elevator and a side exit and a second unmarked car, Jeff being very good at his job while Bills feeds me logistics by text that I approve without reading, until the chaos is finally behind us and the door of the apartment closes on a silence so complete it rings.
The penthouse swallows the two of us the way a cathedral swallows a pair of mourners, all that glass and grey stone and forty-one floors of nothing underneath, the lights of the bridges laid out cold and far below.
Our apartment. I keep having to correct myself on the pronoun.
It’s been mine for years, and before that simply the place I slept between flights, and now it belongs to the two of us, because one of the conditions buried in the arrangement was that we live as any married couple would, under one roof, behind one door.
Richard wrote that clause himself, in his own failing hand.
I’d taken it for sentiment at the time. I am beginning to suspect it was strategy, and that the old man saw something coming that I am only now catching up to.
She stands in the middle of the vast main room with her arms wrapped around herself, a small dark figure on a pale acre of floor, like a guest no one has told where to sit.
“There’s a room made up for you,” I tell her, crossing to the bar cart because my hands want something to do that isn’t reaching for her. “Down the hall, second door. Anything you need that isn’t already in it, you tell me, and it’s there tomorrow.”
The day still clings to her, the funeral-home pallor, the swollen eyes, the coat she hasn’t thought to take off, and I feel an unfamiliar pull toward gentleness, which is not a tool I keep anywhere within easy reach.
“Camilla.”
She lifts her gaze to mine, and I make myself say it.
“You’re twenty-two. You’ve your whole life in front of you, and your father asked this of you when he had no time left and no leverage but love.
A dying man asking his daughter for something isn’t a fair fight.
So I’ll say this once, and mean it. The arrangement can be renegotiated.
Any part of it. If you signed because you were frightened, or grieving, or because you couldn’t bring yourself to tell him no?—”
“I’ll think about it,” she says, her fingers twisting together in front of her, knuckle over knuckle. “Tonight. Can I think tonight, and tell you in the morning?”
“That’s a reasonable request,” I tell her, and I mean to leave it there, the responsible thing said and the door to it left standing open.
I tell her to rest. I pour two fingers of something I don’t especially want into a heavy glass and carry it to the far windows, putting the whole width of the room between us, and I let her go down the hall to shower, and I make the single error of the evening, which is believing the hard part of the night is behind me.
Then she comes back in silk.
I don’t know whose idea the nightgown was.
Hers, or some well-meaning aunt who packed a trousseau for a marriage that was supposed to be a performance.
It hardly matters. What matters is that she stops in the mouth of the hallway when she finds me still awake at the glass, and her whole face goes shy, color climbing up her throat into her cheeks, and underneath the shyness is the one thing she hasn’t yet learned the trick of hiding.
She is looking at me the way I have spent six months refusing to admit I wanted to be looked at.
Helplessly. As though the wanting embarrasses her and she can’t make it stop.
I should send her down the hall. The words are right there, cold and serviceable. Go to bed, Camilla. We’ll talk in the morning. Eight words, and I have built an entire life on my ability to say the disciplined thing in the place where the wanted thing lives.
What I do instead is set the glass down on the sill and crook a single finger toward her.
It isn’t a decision. I want to be clear with myself about that, here, while honesty is still on the table between us.
It is the opposite of a decision, the one thing my whole discipline was built to prevent, and it slips the leash anyway, one small motion of one finger, and across the room her breath catches audibly and the pink in her cheeks deepens into something I feel answer low in my own chest.
She crosses to me slowly. Every step its own small argument, and I can watch her losing it the way I have already lost mine.
I see the exact moment her body remembers to be bashful and nearly turns her back toward the safety of the hall.
Her hands knot in the silk at her sides.
Her gaze drops to the floor, lifts to my face, drops again, as though she can’t work out whether looking at me makes the wanting better or worse.
A braver woman would have crossed the room in four strides.
A colder one would never have left the doorway at all.
She does neither. She wars with herself the whole short distance, flushed and shy and entirely unable to pretend she’d rather be anywhere on earth than here, and somehow that artless little struggle undoes me more completely than any practiced confidence could have.
I’ve had wives of a sort before. Not wives.
Arrangements. Women as fluent in the terms as I was, who understood to the letter what was being traded and asked for nothing the contract didn’t name, and walked away clean when the term ended because neither of us had ever once pretended it was anything more.
I have been comfortable in that whole cold economy my entire adult life.
Not one of those women ever crossed a room to me as though it cost her something to do it.
Not one of them ever blushed. She doesn’t know the terms. That is the thing that guts me, standing here watching her come.
She is looking at me as though I’m a thing she wants and not a thing she has bargained for, and I haven’t the first idea in the world what to do with being wanted that way.