Chapter 6
THE PERFORMANCE
Ezra Kittredge
By nine o'clock I've shaken sixty hands and meant none of it.
That's the work, at an event like this. Not the donations, not the speeches. The handshakes. The exact pressure and duration that makes a man worth four hundred million dollars feel personally regarded by me for the four seconds I can spare him.
I've been doing it since I was nine years old, when my mother first walked me into a foundation dinner and told me to smile and learn to talk about nothing. I learned. I got very good at it. It is, increasingly, the thing I am most tired of being good at.
The Metropolitan Club is built for exactly this. Not to be lived in. To be performed in.
Italianate rooms with ceilings too high to heat and portraits of men who have been dead for a century watching everyone pretend to enjoy themselves. A string quartet in the east room plays something correct and bloodless. The candlelight is engineered to flatter.
Diana moves at my shoulder, feeding me names and pressure points in the half-second before each conversation. The Hendersons want reassurance about the endowment. Pruitt has been drinking since six and will say something he regrets. Three people need handling before the auction.
I handle them. Each one gets the precise amount of me the interaction requires and not a gram more. I am present for all of it and I am somewhere else entirely.
I've been watching the door since I arrived, the way you track a variable you've decided matters. And at nine-forty the variable arrives.
Summer Knoll, in emerald silk.
My doing, though she doesn't know it yet. Diana sourced the dress three days ago, a vintage Halston, and I had it sent with no note, because a note would have made it a transaction and it wasn't meant to be one.
She wears it like she was never told it was expensive. That's the thing about her in a room like this. Everyone else is performing. She isn't performing anything, and the not-performing makes every performed person nearby look exactly like they are.
I watch her work the floor. The recorder is in her clutch and the questions are in her face, and she moves through the crowd extracting things from people who don't notice they're being extracted from.
She's building something. I find I don't mind being a load-bearing wall in whatever she's constructing.
That should concern me more than it does.
I attend to the Hendersons and to the auction. I do it thoroughly and I am aware of her the entire time, the way you stay aware of a sound under the other sounds. Not intrusive. Constant.
The trouble starts where I should have predicted it would.
I'm crossing toward the east terrace when I see Vale find her.
I'm too far to hear words. I don't need them. I know the set of Marcus Vale's shoulders when he's delivering something he's been carrying, and I know the particular smile he wears when he believes he's holding leverage over a thing he wants.
Summer's spine straightens. The controlled stillness she uses when someone has said something a lesser person would flinch at. She isn't flinching. She's furious, and she's holding it so completely that only the line of her back gives it away, and only to someone who has learned where to look.
I'm moving before I decide to.
The floor is full and I cross it the way I've crossed twenty years of full floors, fast without appearing to hurry. Vale sees me coming. I watch him rearrange his face from predator to colleague in the time it takes me to close the distance.
"Ezra." He doesn't step back from her. "Miss Knoll and I were just discussing optics. A man whose judgment starts bending around a particular person, the company tends to feel it." A pause, weighted to sound like concern. "I only raise it because I care what you've built here."
Every word arranged to pass for loyalty. Every one of them a blade laid flat so it looks like a table knife.
"Marcus." I stop close enough that the conversation is ours and not the room's. "You've spent a great deal of energy lately on my judgment. It's touching. Misplaced, but touching."
"I'm only?—"
"Miss Knoll is here at my invitation, doing work I authorized, to a standard your communications team has never once met.
" I keep my voice low and even, which is how I sound when I mean a thing entirely.
"She is not optics. She is not a liability for you to flag.
And she is not a subject you will raise with me again as though she were a line item. " I let that land. "Are we clear?"
His jaw tightens. He's calculating, the way he always is, and arriving at the only available answer.
"Of course," he says. "I misspoke."
"You didn't. You said exactly what you came to say.
I'm telling you it was the last time." I straighten his lapel, the way you might for a friend, because the gesture costs him more than a raised voice would.
"Henderson's been asking for you. Something about your last performance review. I'd attend to it."
Vale leaves. His spine is rigid and his steps are measured and he does not look back.
But in the last half-second before he turns, the smile comes back. Small, private, satisfied. Not the smile of a man who lost something. The smile of a man who came here to confirm a thing and is leaving with it confirmed.
I file that where I put things I'm not ready to examine. Then I turn to Summer.
She's watching me with an expression I've catalogued before and never quite named. Grateful and furious about being grateful, both at once. The specific war of a woman who has handled herself alone for years and is deciding, in real time, how she feels about not having had to.
"That was unnecessary," she says.
“Not a problem at all. It felt good to let him have it publicly.”
"I had him handled."
"Oh, yes, I was sure you did. However, you were thirty seconds from removing his skin in front of the endowment committee." I meet her eyes. "I deprived a number of people of a memorable evening. I'm aware. I'd do it again."
The corner of her mouth moves, against her will, I think. "You realize defending me in the middle of a gala is its own kind of optics."
"It is. The kind that says Marcus Vale picked the wrong person to underestimate." I hold the look a beat longer than I need to. "That's a different message than the one he intended to send. I prefer mine."
She doesn't answer right away. The assessment is happening behind her eyes, the recalibration after it. Whatever she decides, she keeps to herself, which I've learned is its own answer.
Diana surfaces to tell me the auction needs closing. I step back into the performance and resume being the version of myself the room paid to see.
I get through the rest of it the way I get through all of it. Precisely. Completely. With a part of me standing somewhere off to the side, watching.
But that part isn't watching the auction. It's watching her.
I see the sources she cultivates and the conversations she steers and the way she leaves people pleasantly unaware of how much they just told her. I see her decline two drinks and accept none. I see her catch my eye once across the room and look away first, which she almost never does.
What I keep returning to is Vale's smile. The half-beat it lingered. A beaten man doesn't smile like that. A man who has gotten what he came for does.
He didn't come tonight to wound my judgment. He came to watch me defend her in public, in front of witnesses, on the record of sixty pairs of eyes. And I did exactly that, the moment he gave me the opening.
Which means he wasn't testing whether I'd protect her. He was documenting that I would. He wanted the room to see Ezra Kittredge step in front of a journalist. He wanted it to become a thing people had observed and could later be reminded they observed.
I gave it to him without hesitating. I'd give it to him again. That's the part that should worry me, and the part I find I can't make worry me, which is its own kind of information.
He has decided that she is the lever. He has decided we are a single thing that can be moved by moving either half.
He may be right. That's the part I sit with, alone in a room full of people, while the quartet plays something correct and bloodless and the dead industrialists watch from the walls.
The gala thins the way they do. Gradually, then all at once, the cars stacking up along the curb.
I find mine and I'm about to get in when I see her on the steps.
Heels in one hand, phone in the other, doing arithmetic about subway routes she doesn't want to admit she's doing. Barefoot on the stone in a dress that cost more than she knows, frowning at her screen. It is the most herself she's looked all night, and the night has been nothing but her.
"Summer."
She looks up.
"Let me drive you. Joel drives. I ride along."
She runs the assessment. I've watched it enough times to read its stages now. Not whether she trusts me. Whether accepting this, here, tonight, is consistent with who she's decided to be.
"It's a long way to Brooklyn," I say.
"I'm holding my shoes."
"I noticed. It's hard to walk the city that way."
The corner of her mouth moves, and she gets in.
I follow, and I don't examine why I've been looking forward to forty minutes of bridge traffic since the moment I saw her on the steps.
Vale's smile sits in the back of my mind where I left it. Small, private, not quite gone before he turned. The smile of a man who got exactly what he came for.
Everything else can wait. I turn to the woman beside me in the dark of the car, and for once I am entirely where I am.