CHAPTER 4
Sebastian
My mother found me before the doors opened, the way she’d found me my whole life: by the elbow, close enough that no one could hear.
“Look at her,” she said, not looking at Ada, who was somewhere behind us in that green dress, invisible the way I’d let her become.
“Married up and never once had the grace to be grateful for it. A girl from nowhere in my son’s name.
Tonight you fix it. Tonight you put a face on this company that people can actually believe in. ”
I told myself she was old and cold and had never understood love.
I told myself that, and then I let her walk me toward the light anyway, because a Vale does not argue with his mother in front of six hundred people, and because, god help me, some rotten, tired part of me had begun to think she was right.
Chloe did the rest. She always knew how to do the rest. She’d sat with me in the car an hour earlier, her hand light on my sleeve, her voice soft as talc.
“A brand needs a face, Sebastian. Not a chemist in a lab coat. A story. Let me be the story. You know I’d never take anything from Ada that was really hers.
” She’d smiled up at me, blue-eyed, effortless, and I hadn’t heard the lie in it because I had never once had to work to be loved by Chloe Beaumont.
That was the whole trick. Ada made me feel like something I had to earn.
Chloe made me feel like something I already was.
The board loved it. When I crowned her on that stage, when I raised her hand and kissed her knuckles and forty cameras went white, I felt the room tilt toward me the way rooms are supposed to.
Approval, clean and total. My father’s men nodding in the dark.
For the length of that applause I was exactly the man I had spent my life pretending not to be afraid I wasn’t.
Then Ada found me in the gallery, and I set my champagne down, and I said the thing.
I’ve replayed it more times than I’ve replayed any deal I ever closed.
You married up. Everyone knows it but you.
Without the Vale name you’re a nose in a white coat.
I hear my own voice saying it and I don’t recognize the man wearing it, except I do, that’s the horror, I recognize him completely.
There was a half-second, one, where her face didn’t crumple the way I’d braced for it to, and the truth lurched up in me and opened my mouth to take it all back.
It’s a marketing decision, Ada. Come home.
It’s still ours. One sentence and I could have kept my whole life.
I chose pride instead. I felt my face settle into the mask my father wore, and I finished her.
And she didn’t cry.
That was the first wrong note. I knew Ada’s tears the way I knew her breathing; I’d catalogued them like she catalogued her essences.
This was not that. She went still. She went calm, terribly and evenly calm, and she said, You’re right, the Vale name was never mine, and I felt relief, actual relief, that she was going to be reasonable about it.
Then she slid her ring off her finger.
It came away too easily. I noticed that even then, some animal part of me noting that she’d gone thin, that I hadn’t seen her eat in weeks, that I hadn’t looked.
She set the ring on the stacked magnums between us and the light caught the stone once and let it go, and she said, “Keep it. You’ll want it back for the next girl who photographs well. ”
“Ada—”
“Goodbye, Sebastian.”
And she walked out. Green as jasmine leaves, unhurried, gone through the service door before I’d finished deciding whether to follow.
I didn’t follow. I picked up my champagne again and I told myself the story I needed.
She was hurt. She was being dramatic (she’d never been dramatic a day in her life, but I told myself she was) and she would cool off by morning.
She’d come home and I’d let her be angry and in a week this would be a hard night we didn’t talk about.
That’s what people did. They made scenes and they came home.
There was nowhere else for her to go. She was a girl from a city no one remembered, and everything she had, she had through me.
I believed that the way I’d believed my mother. Completely, and only because believing it was easier than the alternative.
The alternative was the calm. Because I knew (under the champagne, under the applause still buzzing through the wall) that calm from Ada had never once meant surrender. It meant a decision already made and locked. It meant a door that had finished closing before you heard the latch.
I made myself stop thinking about it. I picked her ring up off the magnums and slid it into my breast pocket. To give back later, I told myself. When she comes home.
It wasn’t until the gallery had emptied and I stood there alone in the dark with the party roaring somewhere behind the wall that I looked down and saw that the hand holding my glass would not stop shaking.