Chapter 9
GAbrIEL
Gabriel told himself Thursday would be soon enough. That he could wait. That showing up anywhere Tessa happened to be before then would make him look desperate.
Then Devney mentioned Eleanor Beauchamp was sponsoring a gallery opening and that Thorne Events was catering. Gabriel had called Eleanor within the hour to secure an invitation.
So. Desperate it was.
He stood outside the gallery and studied her through the window.
She wore a navy dress that moved with her breath, and her dark hair fell loose down her back.
She had paused in front of a Rothko, her head tilted, her mouth moving as if she were talking to herself, or to the painting.
The gesture was private. Unguarded. She looked like she’d forgotten the room behind her existed.
Eleanor Beauchamp materialized at his elbow. “She has been standing there for ten minutes.”
“When did she arrive?”
“Right at seven. I told her to relax and enjoy herself. She was fussing about checking on her team, but I insisted. David has it handled. She deserves a night off.” Eleanor patted his arm. “Are you going to stand out here all night, or are you going in?”
Gabriel walked inside.
Conversations and laughter echoed off the walls. He moved through the crowd, past Martin Calloway from the Meridian deal who raised a hand in greeting and got a nod in return, past a woman he vaguely recognized from a board dinner two winters ago. Tessa hadn’t moved from the Rothko.
He paused beside her, and she didn’t look surprised.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
They stood there studying the painting. Orange bled into red. Red bled into darker red. The colors vibrated against each other.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“I think it’s angry.”
“Angry?”
“Or hungry. I can’t decide.” She turned to face him. “What about you?”
“I think Eleanor wanted us to see it because she knows neither of us will say what we’re supposed to say.”
Her mouth curved. “Which is?”
“That it’s transcendent. Or meditative. Or speaks to the human condition.”
“Does it?”
“I have no idea. But I know why I’m here.”
“Eleanor invited you.”
“Devney mentioned you’d be here. I called Eleanor.”
Pink touched her cheeks. “Oh.”
He got her a white wine from a passing waiter and kept the red for himself.
“You look amazing.”
“You keep saying things like that.”
“Because you keep wearing dresses that make me forget how to think.”
She laughed.
The gallery was three rooms deep, and the third room was where the work got serious.
The paintings gave way to sculpture: bronze figures pressed against one another, a wall installation of woven copper, and at the center of the room, a piece of twisted steel nearly seven feet tall, all sharp angles and nothing soft.
Tessa halted in front of it. “This one’s definitely angry.”
“I’d say defensive.”
“Same thing.”
“Not always. One’s a choice. One’s a reaction.”
“Which is this?”
He studied the piece. The way the metal jutted outward. Spikes where curves should’ve been. A center that was hollow on one side and sealed on the other, as if the artist had welded it shut to keep something in or out and never decided which.
“Reaction. Someone hurt it. This is what’s left.”
“You said that with confidence.”
“It’s a personality I’m familiar with.”
She glanced at him. “Yours.”
“Some days.”
“Today?”
“Today I’m working on it.”
She didn’t turn away, and neither did he.
The next piece was a bronze of two figures standing back-to-back, almost touching, but not. Tessa moved on to it. He stayed where he was for a beat, then followed.
She was close enough now that he could smell her shampoo when she leaned in to read the placard. Something herbal, clean. Underneath it, just her. He hadn’t stood this close to a woman and known what her shampoo smelled like since the last time he’d stood this close to her.
She read the placard aloud. “Distance Studies, 2019. Steel and bronze. The space between two people is the only honest part of any relationship.”
“That’s bleak.”
“It’s also accurate.”
“Today’s mood?”
“Last decade’s mood. Today is undecided.”
He almost laughed.
By eight thirty they had circled back to the Rothko. She set her empty glass on a passing tray.
“I should eat something before I start interpreting sculpture as having feelings.”
“I have a reservation. A Thai place two blocks from here.”
“You had this planned.”
“I’m efficient.”
“You’re transparent.”
“Is that a problem?”
“No. It’s refreshing.”
She texted David, slipped her phone into her bag, and met his eyes. “I’m ready.”
The restaurant was small and warm, and the owner saw Gabriel as soon as they came in.
“Mr. Sterling. Booth in the back, yes?”
“Please. Jan, this is Tessa Thorne. Tessa, Jan. Jan and her husband have run this place for seventeen years.”
“Twenty-one in November,” Jan said, pleased to be noticed. “He keeps forgetting because he keeps trying to retire and I keep giving him jobs to do.”
“How’s Aron?”
“Better. The new medication is working. Thank you for asking.”
“Tell him I owe him a chess game.”
“I will.”
She walked them to the back booth. Tessa watched the whole exchange with the look of a woman taking notes.
“Jan’s husband is a chess champion in Queens,” Gabriel said when they sat down. “He destroys me every time I play him. Every time.”
“You play him anyway.”
“He likes the company. So do I.”
“Hm.”
“What?”
“You like small places.”
“I like the same booth in the same place where the owner asks me how my week was and means it. I don’t have a lot of those and don’t give them up easily.”
“My grandmother would’ve approved of you for that.”
“Just for that?”
“Possibly more. I’m still gathering data.”
He laughed.
They ordered without menus. Tom yum, pad see ew, spring rolls. Jan disappeared and returned almost immediately with a pot of jasmine tea.
The spring rolls came fast, hot and crisp, and they ate them with their fingers while Tessa told him about the woman who had hired her for a sixtieth-birthday dinner and asked Tessa to write the menu in rhymes because the husband was an English professor and loved poetry.
He told her about Knox’s pet theory that all of Manhattan’s best restaurants were run by women whose husbands quietly handled the books and never got credit.
They argued briefly about whether a martini was a drink or a delivery system.
He had opinions, but she had stronger ones. The argument ended in a draw.
Halfway through the pad see ew, Gabriel set down his chopsticks.
“Tell me what you’re most proud of,” he said. “Three things.”
“That’s a big question.”
“I’ve been watching you for weeks. The way you work. The way you feed people. I want to understand.”
“Why?”
“Because the woman I left back then wasn’t a woman yet. The woman I’m sitting across from is. I want to know who built her.”
She sat back. She considered him, considered the question, then considered her plate. After a long moment, she met his eyes.
“Fine. Three things.” She drew a breath.
“The first is the house in South Jersey. I handed my mother the deed in a manila envelope. She read it three times before she believed me. She didn’t have words for the next hour.
She kept walking from room to room, touching things—the wallpaper, the kitchen counter, the window over the sink—like she was checking if any of it would disappear.
I put it first because giving her that house was the proudest day of my life, and I think it might be the proudest day I’ll ever have. ”
He nodded.
“The second is the fifteen people who work for me. David told me last week he’s saving for his daughter’s college fund.
Saving. Not drowning. Not choosing between her tuition and his rent.
Saving. Jessica took a real vacation last March, the first one she had taken in seven years.
Maria has health insurance for the first time in her life and a dental cleaning on the calendar.
That’s what I’m most proud of. That my warehouse pays its people enough to live a better life than the one they came in with. That’s the only reason I built it.”
He waited.
“And the third.” She paused for a long time. “The third is that the first time my bank account hit fifty thousand dollars, I sat alone in my apartment and cried for an hour because I knew I’d never be hungry again.”
He held the silence with his eyes on her.
“About being hungry,” he said. “Tell me what you mean.”
She looked down at her plate for a second before answering. “My mom skipped meals so I could eat. For years.”
“We’d sit down to dinner, and she’d say she wasn’t hungry, that she’d eaten at work. But she was losing weight and her work clothes hung off her. She was giving me her food.”
“Tessa.”
“We weren’t the kind of poor that means no vacations. We were the kind that decides between the heat and the groceries. Ashford changed it. The scholarship covered tuition and the dorm and the meal plan. I worked the dining hall for spending money.”
“I knew you worked the dining room. I didn’t know why.”
“You weren’t supposed to know why. I made sure of it.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t know enough to ask.”
“I wouldn’t have answered if you had.”
He nodded.
“That’s why,” she said. “The donations. The food banks. The granola bars.”
She paused.
“I feed people.”
The words hung between them, and neither of them moved.
“Your parents,” he said after a long beat. “Are they doing better now?”
“My dad is retired. My mom works part time at the bookstore on the corner of their street and volunteers at the library twice a week. For the first time in her life, she’s doing things because she wants to, not because she has to. That’s what the house bought her. Not the bricks. The freedom.”
He couldn’t stop watching her. Her eyes were bright, but her jaw was set, and she was letting him see both.
“Tell me about your father,” she said.
She was giving him an exit. He took it.
“What do you want to know?”
“Years ago you said he broke promises.”
His jaw tightened. “He did.”
“What kind?”
“Marriage vows. Birthday promises. I’ll be there — and then he never showed. My mother believed him every time. She forgave him every time. He failed her the same way he’d failed me my whole childhood, and every single time, she said yes to him again.”
“That’s why you like contracts.”
“Words are easy. Anyone can say anything. Paper is harder to walk away from.”
“Paper is also cold.”
“A father should be there for his son. Mine wasn’t. Paper would’ve been warmer than what he was.”
It came out harder than he intended. He caught himself and breathed once, and she didn’t flinch.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be. It’s honest.”
“I haven’t said it out loud in a very long time.”
“You can say it again if you need to.”
He didn’t need to. The first time was enough.
The waiter brought the entrees. He told her about the time his mother had taken him to the ballet for his eighth birthday, and they had eaten cheap halal cart food on the curb afterward, and how he could remember the lamb gyro but not a single thing about the show.
She told him her grandmother used to make a chicken and dumpling that wasn’t on any menu in the world because Nana refused to write down her recipes, and how Tessa tried to recreate it from memory each winter and got the dumplings slightly wrong every time.
He asked what part she got wrong. She said they were always too dense.
She was beginning to suspect Nana had been using cake flour and lying about it.
He laughed.
“I want to taste the wrong dumplings,” he said.
“Some Sunday.”
“That’s a date.”
“Apparently.”
At nine forty-five he paid, and they walked out together.
“I should get back,” she said. “I have early catering tomorrow.”
“Let me call you a car.”
“I’m fine with the subway.”
“Tessa.”
“Gabriel.” She grinned. “The subway is part of my process. Thirty minutes underground with my headphones. It’s cheaper than therapy.”
He didn’t push. He walked her the three blocks to the station. She paused at the entrance.
“Thank you,” she said. “For dinner. For listening.”
“Tessa.”
“Yes?”
“I meant what I said. About your mother. About you. All of it.”
She nodded.
“Does Thursday still work?” he asked.
“We had dinner tonight.”
“That wasn’t a date. That was reconnaissance.”
“Reconnaissance.”
“Information gathering.”
“And what did you learn?”
“That I’m already falling.”
The words landed, and she went still. Her face opened the way it had at the table when she had said I feed people—guardedness gone, something raw underneath.
“I’ll pick you up at seven on Thursday,” he said.
“Okay.”
She squeezed his hand once, and then she was down the stairs.
Gabriel stood on the sidewalk watching the entrance.
He took the subway too, because it was Thursday-quiet and because for the first time in weeks, he wanted to be alone with what was in his head and not with what was in his calendar.
He let himself into his apartment at ten forty-five. The lights were off. The kitchen was clean and silent. Tessa’s mother kept walking through his head. She was losing weight. Her work clothes hung off her. She was giving her daughter her food.
He sat at the kitchen table with his phone in his hand. He opened a browser and typed McDonald’s gift cards bulk order into the search bar.
He bought fifty.