Chapter 5 – Elena
Ifind James near the bar.
He's in conversation with two men I don't know, glass in hand, doing the easy sociable thing he's always been better at than me. He sees my face and excuses himself before I have to say a word.
"What happened?"
"Nothing." I keep my voice even. Around us the reception hums along, oblivious. "Can you take me back to your place instead of—" I stop. Recalibrate. "I just don't want to go back to the penthouse tonight."
James looks at me for a moment. He has always been able to look at me the way other people can't, like he's reading something under the words, something I'm not doing intentionally but can't prevent. "Get your coat," he says.
In the car I take out my phone and look at it for a moment, scrolling to a name I haven't touched in eight months.
Petra Vasquez. She'd know what to say about Veronica.
She'd probably have said it before I finished the sentence.
The thought is a brief, clean ache, and I put the phone back in my bag.
I don't call.
James's apartment has that particular stillness it gets late at night, the radiator ticking, the street noise a floor below, everything in its assigned place.
I'm sitting on his couch with both hands wrapped around a mug I haven't touched.
The heat from the ceramic is the only warm thing in the room.
James is in the chair across from me, legs stretched out, his expression doing that careful, neutral thing he does when he's choosing whether to speak.
I tell him what Veronica said at the coat check.
I repeat it the way she said it, low, deliberate, dressed in concern.
I'm telling you this as one woman to another. He's done this before. Used someone when it suited him, moved on when it didn't. He never looks back. Her hand had briefly touched my arm. The gesture made it worse.
"She was warning me off him," I say. "Or warning me about him. I'm not sure which."
James looks at me steadily. "There's a difference?"
"One means she was doing me a favor. The other means she was doing herself one."
He goes quiet. The specific kind of quiet where I can see him turning something over, deciding how much of it to give me.
"You should know," he says finally, "that Veronica isn't a neutral source."
"Because of whatever happened between them."
"Yes." He turns his glass between his palms. "A few years ago. On her side more than his. He wasn't cruel about it, but he also wasn't—" He pauses, searching for the word. "He wasn't available in the way she wanted him to be. She's never quite forgiven him for that."
I let that settle. It re-frames the coat check scene, but only partially. A warning with a wound inside it is still a warning.
"So she's lying."
"I didn't say that." He looks at me directly now.
"And she's not powerless; that's what makes it complicated.
She has real standing on the board. A third of the votes follow her lead.
Whatever she said to you tonight, she has the position to back it up.
" A beat. "Milo is one of my oldest friends.
I trust him with things I don't trust most people with.
But he operates at a distance. Always has. "
"What does that mean?"
James is quiet for a moment, the way he gets when he's about to say something he isn't sure he should. "He's not cruel, Elena. That's not what I'm saying. But he's controlled in a way that makes everyone around him feel like—"
The word controlled catches on something I don't want to look at. The elevator. The specific quality of stillness in the moment before everything shifted. I redirect.
"—like a variable in an equation," James finishes. "You start thinking you understand what you are to him, and then you realize he restructured the equation three moves ago and didn't tell you."
I look down at the mug. The tea has gone cold.
"So you're warning me too."
"I'm telling you what I know." He meets my eyes. "He's my friend, Elena. But you're my sister. Those aren't the same thing."
The room is quiet for a moment.
"I don't know what I'm reacting to," I say. It comes out more plainly than I intended. "With him. I don't know whether it's — I don't know whether I'm responding to the actual person or to some version I've assembled out of proximity and not enough information."
James watches me.
"Because I know what I'm supposed to feel," I go on. "Cautious. Clear-eyed. I've held that steadily enough that I almost convinced myself it was real. And then tonight happened, and I sat in the car on the way over here, and I couldn't — I can't get to the bottom of it."
"What happened tonight," James says. Not quite a question.
I think about the elevator. I'm not going to tell him about the elevator.
"You went pale," he says quietly. "When Veronica spoke to you."
"I know what I looked like."
"Elena."
"I have this handled," I tell him.
He looks at me the way older brothers look at you when they know you're lying and love you too much to say so directly.
"I know you think you do."
The mug is cold between my palms. The radiator ticks. Neither of us says anything else.
My phone buzzes on the coffee table between us.
I look at the screen. Milo's name. Four words beneath it.
We need to talk.
James sees it. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't need to.
I stare at the screen for a long moment.
I think about the elevator. I think about the photo shoot, and his hand not moving, and the one photo where he was looking at me instead of the lens.
I think about a man who restructures equations without telling you, and a woman at a coat check with a wound she's dressed up as a favor.
I think about the fact that I don't know what I feel and that not knowing feels more dangerous than anything Veronica has said.
I set the phone face-down on the cushion beside me.
James watches me do it. "You're not going to answer."
"Not tonight." I pick up my cold mug and hold it anyway. "I'll deal with it in the morning."
He nods, and I can tell he understands, and neither of us mentions the phone again.