Chapter 1
Vivi and Samuel sat in the dark, except for the flicker of birthday candle at the center of the dining room table. The candle
illuminated a painted wooden box with a latch, inside which nestled an antique French chatelaine, a belt clip once used by ladies of the manor.
The clip was an ornate crest of silver filagree, inset with a square sapphire. Delicate chains hung from the clasp. One held
a tiny pair of scissors; another, a thimble. All the necessary accoutrements for a woman of consequence, meticulously restored.
Samuel’s chatelaine was one of those gifts that comes around once in a lifetime; so considered and original that Vivi could
only wonder how he had known what she wanted when she could never articulate such a thing for herself.
“The setting is from the eighteenth century, but the jewel was likely plundered long before that,” he said, fiddling with
the button on his cuff. He was nervous, trying to hide it. “The chatelaine made its way across Europe after the Reign of Terror
and during the Napoleonic Wars. Can you imagine what it might have seen?”
Samuel Noi, art historian and curator, could not help but be attuned to the echoes of the past. Vivi, in her role as a conservator, was no stranger to a beautiful artifact either.
But where he saw romance, she ferried her mind toward the materiality of the object, cataloguing details of construction and provenance.
She wanted to know the what; he, the why.
They were suited in that way, two levers of the same passion.
She lifted the chatelaine and studied the sapphire, refracted in oceanic reservoirs that pulled the eye downward, into its
shadowed heart.
“This is exquisite, Sam. I’ve never owned anything like it.”
His glasses were falling down his nose and his curls—dark, lush, still damp from his shower—stroked against his forehead like
crooked fingers. Those curls were the only part of him that he ever permitted to become unruly. She wanted to reach over and
wind one around her finger.
“But did you see the key?” he asked, pointing.
It was not an antique, only a standard house key hung like an afterthought from this centuries-old piece of jewelry. The key’s
head was inscribed with her initials. VN. No one, she reflected, could execute a gesture like this man.
“I’d like you to move in with us,” Samuel said.
She held the key in her hand, turning it this way and that, as if it held an answer within the glints of light.
She’d turned thirty-four that morning. Around her, the eclectic order of Samuel’s Hyde Park brownstone. Paintings by local
artists, a Japanese woodblock print that Vivi had given him upon his promotion to lead curator, an air-dry clay sculpture
that his five-year-old daughter, Phoebe, had abandoned. The plaid loveseat looked as if it could have come straight from a
1990s sitcom. It was worn-in, slumped in welcoming divots, but spotlessly clean, like the rest of his home. Each book had
its place on the shelf; each shoe, its designated rack. Through the sliding sash window, she could see the blinking of the
Chicago skyline, a reminder of how far she’d come.
By contrast, Vivi’s Lakeview studio had the appearance of a temporary lodging.
Her furnishings had been purchased for utility rather than beauty.
A jar of olives sat lonely in the fridge.
Hidden in her nightstand, the cigarettes Samuel hated.
After her childhood, she’d become pathologically frugal, ever fearful that the financial rug would be pulled out from under her.
Consequently, most of her wages lay unspent in a savings account. Her studio remained coldly spare.
The chatelaine, so treasured a moment before, now summoned panic in her. Its chains turned metaphorical.
After a pause, he asked, “Do you remember how we first met?”
“I was restoring the umbilicus on a handscroll. Song dynasty, silk, with an ivory toggle shaped like a trout.” She could still
see the dirt that’d gathered in the depressions of the carved gills. Clay and sweat and skin cells, all the living and dead
matter of the world collected inside the minutiae of art.
Samuel’s lips twitched. “Of course that’s what you would remember. Here’s what I remember. You were bent over that scroll
with the tiniest paintbrush I’d ever seen, wearing a white lab coat, these clunky orthopedic shoes. Abel was trying to introduce
us, but you waved him off, you said you were too busy for him.”
“It was a hard restoration. I’d been at it for six hours already.”
“He apologized for you afterward, but there was no need. I thought of you all day. I wondered what sort of mind—what sort
of heart—gave itself so fully to art.”
They were nothing more than colleagues for the first year of Samuel’s employment at the Forster Institute of Art and Antiquity.
Vivi ignored the rumblings of the new curatorial wunderkind and stuck to her work. But when she looked up, she saw him reading
late into the night at the archives. Gazing at the art as if it were about to speak back to him. He was unlike Smith and Dylan,
the two other Forster curators, who saw art as a rung on the ladder of prestige. He stirred her curiosity.
Samuel was a highly respected scholar who could have gone to the Met, LACMA, or any number of museums, but instead chose to bury himself in a tiny institution lodged like a wayward pebble within the brownstones of the Gold Coast. Chicago would always be home, he’d once told her, and she’d nodded as if home was a word that meant something to her.
Then they worked together on a nineteenth-century photography exhibition, where she discovered that Samuel saw art as possibility.
He did not use art to shield himself in an ivory tower, but to connect him to others. This boundless idealism required a sense
of courage that fascinated Vivi. Soon after, like petals closing in on themselves, their friendship turned inward, cocooning
a deeper and more enticing burrow of emotion. A late-night discussion over one of Julia Margaret Cameron’s portraits turned
into dinner, drinks, a midnight walk on the lakeshore. They first consummated their relationship on the floor of her lab,
a transgression that still made her shiver, unfamiliar with her own recklessness.
Then the pandemic, its escalation of the relationship and their reliance on one another. Samuel was the first man Vivi allowed
herself to love. Now he wanted more. But how much more did she have to give?
Buying herself time, she clipped the chatelaine to her belt loop. “It fits.”
“Like you, in our life.”
Because it would not just be him she was saying yes to. It was him and Phoebe with her own wild curls, her captivating yet
exhausting prattle about gemstones and glitter slime; his parents living on the floor above, playing their Thai pop at deafening
levels; and his ex-wife, a chef in Lincoln Park who dropped in without warning, always bearing tubs of their favorite dishes,
including Vivi’s.
He was asking her to rejoin a unit, to tie her heart and fate with a network of others. To become a family.
Family was, perhaps, the only word she understood less than home.
She took off the chatelaine and laid it onto the table. “I love you.”
“You’re saying no.” The hope on his face schismed into hurt, then confusion, but he mastered both emotions, as he always did,
with a small intake of breath.
“I’m not.” She grabbed his hand. “I’m not. Could I think about it?”
He pressed his lips into her hair with a tenderness so bald that it nearly felt like a burden. “Take all the time you need.”
She’d chosen him because his love did not demand. He accepted her prolonged hours in the conservation lab, her propensity
to coil into her own interiority. He understood that she’d lived alone for so long that she’d become almost feral in her need
for solitude. With Phoebe, she was able to pretend, but only for short periods. She often left their bustling family gatherings
weary, ready to hibernate for days.
“Should I have waited?” Samuel’s voice was soft.
She knew he was thinking of her father’s death, wondering if it’d been too soon after the funeral to propose. Three months,
after all, was a blip of time after the decades spent putting Deer Creek behind her.
She’d tried, once or twice, to describe her childhood to him, but stopped each time, wanting to avoid his pity. Or wanting
to protect him.
Samuel saw the world as it should be, not as it was. Perhaps his sanguinity came from being a parent; he needed to believe
in the best, so as not to be crushed under the weight of all that could go wrong on his watch. Maybe that idealism also came
from being so completely adored by his parents, who still attended his every exhibition opening, grinning from the sidelines
as they did at his first soccer match, his kindergarten graduation. All his life, he’d known nothing but the consistency of
affection. He couldn’t help but take it for granted.
No, he would not understand a mother like May or father like Tu?n. Or a daughter like Vivi. Those who came from happy families would never fully stand in the same reality as a person like
her. After all, wasn’t that initially what made her maintain her distance, this dissonance between their comprehensions of
goodness? For Samuel, goodness was a given, an abundance. For Vivi, goodness arrived in brief, glimmering bursts, always snatched
away at the last moment.
And yet, eager to reassure Samuel of her love, no matter how she answered his question in the end, she pressed herself close
and lifted her lips to his.
In his bedroom, it was too simple for their bodies to find each other.
For him to slide off her shirt and count vertebrae up her spine with his long fingers, ticking each with the concentration of a scholar at his abacus.
She traced the tributaries of his veins with her tongue, let him in the only way she knew how.
He cupped her lower, harder, his grip so fierce that it scraped a cry from her.
“I want,” she said, not knowing how to finish the sentence. “I want—”
He kissed her eyelids, her clavicle, the dip beneath her navel. He filled her desire without words.
Then he was asleep and she was slipping out, soundlessly making her way back out into the night, the chatelaine heavy in her
coat pocket. It was her rule: she would spend the night with Samuel, but she would not confuse Phoebe by waking in their condo.
Not until she could be sure she could stay.
Vivi called for a car and waited on a bench under the bright sear of a full moon. The streets were empty, save one or two
drunks ambling from the bars, singing nonsense songs. She thought of grabbing them, telling them, It’s my birthday. I’ve just been offered a new life.
There was only one person she wanted to tell. But she and Calla hadn’t spoken since their father’s funeral.
A brilliant day in June, ecstatic warblers outside the crematorium, the open casket that held the last glimpse they’d ever
have of Tu?n. She and Calla had avoided eye contact. They spoke in one-word declarations, as if they’d been given a quota
for intimacies.
Vivi stood rubbing her arms and tugging at the hem of her black blouse, unsure what to do with her face. Calla was hovering
near the casket, bent slightly at the hip. From her sister’s incredulous glances, Vivi could tell that Calla found her lack
of outward emotion heartless. It wasn’t that Vivi was glad Tu?n was dead, but she could not find it in herself to mourn him the way Calla did, nor apologize for her dearth of grief.
Vivi glanced down at her father, unrecognizable in his postmortem makeup and still, so still. She remembered a Naomi Shihab
Nye poem she’d once read and loved, in which a young girl asks her mother how anyone knows if they’re going to die.
The mother had said: When you can no longer make a fist.
Each time the door to the viewing room opened—a solicitous attendant, an old coworker come to pay respects—the sisters turned
swiftly, hope brimming in their eyes. Privately, both had thought May might show up to the funeral, her shuffle on the carpet,
the gentle hands that would run across their brows like an eraser over a chalkboard. Maybe she was the only one who could
mend the unspoken rift between them, the way she used to patch their secondhand jeans with embroidered stars.
Calla leaned over the casket to place her hand on their father’s. A tear dropped onto his chin.
Before she turned to walk out of the room, she said to Vivi, “He loved us. I know you don’t believe me. But he did.” She took
her hand from Tu?n’s casket and held it up against Vivi’s protests. “I don’t want to argue today. I just want you to hear me.”
When, Vivi wondered, had they stopped standing on the same side? The girls who raced through the woods, twin shadows scrawling
stories in the dirt, had become women who could no longer hold a conversation without hidden currents.
But before she could reply, Calla was gone and it was just Vivi standing alone with a corpse, bearing the weight of their
shared griefs.