Chapter Nineteen — Sienna #2
I don't know how long I'm there. Long enough for the rain to ease off. Long enough for the street to go quiet the way it does in the deep, empty hours, when even Manhattan takes a breath.
I pull the folder back toward me and read it again. All of it.
The supplier timeline. The intercepted communications. A summary from Harlan Briggs of six weeks of covert work, tracing Vane's receivership insider, building the case document by document. A note at the end: Subject unaware of operation. Her exposure was the primary risk factor throughout.
Her. Me.
I am on page nine when I start crying. Not pretty crying. The ugly kind, the kind that comes from somewhere below the throat. I let it happen. I don't try to manage it.
There is no later. This is it.
I pick up my phone, and I call Izzy.
Voicemail. It's one in the morning. Of course it went to voicemail.
"It's me," I say. "Don't call back tonight. I just—" My voice goes. I wait. "He came, Iz. He came and I pulled away. I did the exact thing I always do." I press my hand flat on the table. "Call me in the morning."
I sit with the folder spread across the scarred wood and look at the evidence of everything I got wrong. The calls I'd watched him make from the other side of a closed door and filled in with my worst fears. The briefcase I'd assumed was locked against me instead of for me.
He'd built a case to destroy the man who'd destroyed me. And I'd looked at the locked briefcase and seen my father's face.
My father, who left on a Tuesday. Who said he'd be back by Friday. Who sent a birthday card every year until he didn't. My father, who had a look on his face every time my mother asked him something he didn't want to answer. That flicker of distance, of a man already somewhere else.
I spent twenty-three years reading that exact look on every man who got close enough to matter. Waiting for the flicker. Finding it whether it was there or not, because finding it first meant I got to leave before it found me.
Adrian went quiet, and I read my father in his face like tracing a pattern I already had cut. I never once asked if the pattern actually fit.
I'd seen something in Adrian's face and decided I knew what it meant.
I'd been wrong.
I close the folder.
Outside, a cab rolls through the wet street. The sound of it is the loneliest thing I've heard in a long time.
I go to my bedroom. My sketchbook is on the nightstand, open. I don't remember leaving it that way.
I sit on the edge of the bed and look at the page.
The wedding gown. The one I drew at two in the morning and never showed anyone. Bias cut, clean lines, the kind of dress that doesn't apologize for itself. I'd buried it in the back of the book and told myself it was just an exercise.
Adrian found it anyway.
I stare at it for a long time.
He isn't gone because he has stopped caring. He's gone because I couldn't let him stay.
I built the walls. I checked the exits. I preemptively packed, preemptively grieved, preemptively wrote the ending. And then when he showed up in the rain with proof of everything he'd done for me, I pulled my hand back.
I'll be looking for you. That's all.
I press my palm flat against the silk. The red is deep. Almost black in the low light.
Somewhere across Manhattan, in a penthouse forty-four floors above the city, there's a drawer that used to hold this scarf. Three years, he kept it. Three years of a man who keeps nothing, who is precise and ruthless , keeping one piece of red silk because he couldn't make himself let go.
And I spent three years being certain he would.
I lay back on the bed with the silk against my chest.
I don't sleep for a long time.
***
My phone lights up at seven in the morning. Izzy's name on the screen.
I answer before the second ring.
"He came," I say. No hello.
"I know." Her voice is still rough with sleep. "He called me after. From the car." A pause. "He was looking for you in the rain, Si. Do you understand what I'm telling you?"
I stare at the ceiling.
"There was a man at the mills," I say. "Market week. I told you about him."
The line goes quiet.
"It was Briggs. It's in the folder. Adrian had him on me since the week I moved in."
Still quiet. Long enough that I pull the phone away from my ear to check the call hasn't dropped.
"Iz."
"I thought it might be." Flat. She doesn't dress it up. "When you said it at the café. A man with a list, working all the way down it. Nobody in fashion behaves like that. That's how my brother behaves."
"You didn't say anything."
"No."
"Why."
"Because if I said it out loud, I'd be the one who put it in your head." Something happens in her voice that I've never heard happen in it. "So I told you it wasn't another woman. Which was true. And which you hadn't asked me."
I sit up slowly with the silk still in my lap. Three weeks ago I would have ended the call.
"I didn't know about the log," she says. "I need you to know that. I didn't know there was a log, or a name on it, or any of it. I had a feeling in a café on Broome Street and I sat on it."
"And after?"
"After, you'd already found the folder. Telling you I'd suspected wouldn't have done anything for you." A pause. "It would have done something for me. That's the part I've been sitting with."
The radiator knocks twice and gives up.
"You should have told me," I say.
"Yes."
"I'm not doing this with you today."
"I know." A sound that isn't quite a laugh. "That's worse, honestly. Do it later. I'd rather you did it later than decided I wasn't worth doing it with."
I close my eyes.
She's the only person in my life who has ever said something like that to me and meant it as an offer instead of a threat.
"Later," I say.
"Later." A breath, and then she's Izzy again, because that's what she does. "Okay. Ask me what you actually called to ask."
"The gala," I say. "Nobody's expecting you to have an answer today. Or this week. Whenever you're ready, I'll be there. You won't have to walk in alone."
I close my eyes. The silk is still warm in my hand.
"I don't know if I can do this," I say.
"You've been doing hard things your whole life," Izzy says. "This one's just harder because it actually matters."
I don't answer right away.
Outside my window, Manhattan is already loud. Already moving. It has no stake in whatever I decide on the third floor of a Lower East Side walkup with yesterday's rain still on the sidewalk and red silk in my hands.
I'll be looking for you. That's all.
I sit up.
A month is enough time to decide who I want to be when I finally walk into that room.
It has to be.