Chapter 18 #2
"She gets that from me." A pause with weight in it. Then Allison looks at me directly, with the specific quality of attention she brings to things she's decided to say clearly. "She's different. Your journalist."
"Yes."
"And you're different. With her." She holds my gaze.
Not hostile, not warm. The clear-eyed assessment of a woman who has known me long enough to recognize the specific quality of a man who has stopped performing something.
"Don't hurt her. She looks like someone who has been hurt before and has built something careful out of the aftermath. "
"I know."
"Then be careful with the careful thing." She says it simply, the way Allison says everything she means. Then she moves away into the crowd, and I watch her go with the uncomplicated feeling of two people who have made peace with the shape of what they are to each other.
She was right, when we were together, that I didn't know how to be present. That I was always managing rather than arriving. That the machinery was always running between me and whatever was in front of me.
She's right now, too, that something is different.
I go find Summer and Lily.
They're at the bench near the conservatory windows.
Lily now has her viceroy butterfly. Summer has a small monarch on the inside of her left wrist. I clock it as I approach and feel something move in my chest.
I don't think Summer chose it by accident. I don't think Summer does anything by accident.
Lily is explaining something with the focused energy of a child who has found a genuinely interested audience. Not performing interest. Actually following, actually asking, her pen moving in the small notebook she apparently extracted from somewhere in her navy dress.
"She let me borrow it," Lily tells me, holding up the notebook when she sees me. "She has three more in her bag."
"Of course she does."
"She says the most important thing about any investigation is patience." Lily looks at Summer with the expression she reserves for information she considers essential. "I'm going to be a journalist. Or a lepidopterist. Possibly both."
"Can you be both?" Summer asks.
"You study people instead of butterflies," Lily says. "That seems harder, because people don't hold still."
"They really don't."
"Do you like it anyway? Studying them?"
"More than anything," Summer says. Without hesitation. Without performance. The way she says things that are simply true.
Lily beams like she's been given something she was looking for.
Rosa appears at the edge of the conversation with the specific expression of a nanny who has a bedtime to maintain and is deciding how to begin the negotiation. Lily accepts the signal with the dignity of someone who has decided resistance is beneath her.
She hugs me first. Fierce and immediate and entirely without self-consciousness, the way Lily does everything she means.
Then she turns to Summer.
"It was good to meet you," she says, with the same handshake gravity as before. "I hope you come to breakfast sometime. I make very good toast."
"I've heard excellent things about your toast," Summer says, completely straight-faced.
"Don't believe everything you hear." Lily considers this for exactly one second. "Actually, in this case, believe it. The toast is genuinely good. I've been refining the technique."
"I'll keep that in mind."
"You should." Lily nods once, decisive. Then she takes Rosa's hand and walks toward the exit with the unhurried dignity of someone who has accomplished what she came for.
Summer watches her go.
"She's extraordinary," she says.
"Yes."
"She told me you make a face when you say her name." Her voice is careful. Testing the edges of something. "My name."
"She mentioned that to me as well." I look at Summer's profile. The line of her jaw. The monarch butterfly on the inside of her wrist. "She was talking about butterflies at the time."
"I know." The corner of her mouth moves. "That's what made it land."
Diana materializes with the Pearsons. Another auction to bring to a close.
I step back into character and resume the performance.
But I think about the monarch on Summer's wrist for the rest of the evening. She chose it. She knows the difference between a monarch and a viceroy. She said so immediately, without hesitation. And she chose the monarch anyway.
I think about that and don't say anything and let it be what it is.
The gala winds down.
I find my car at the curb and I'm checking the evening's final messages when I see her on the steps.
Her heels in one hand, phone in the other. The expression of someone doing sidewalk arithmetic about subway routes while wearing a vintage Halston and a butterfly on her wrist.
"Summer."
She looks up.
"This feels like déjà vu. Let me drive you home. Well. Let Joel drive you home. I'll ride along."
She looks at the car. Then at me. The risk assessment. I've watched her run it enough times now to read its stages. Not whether to trust me, but whether accepting this particular thing in this particular moment is consistent with who she is and what she's decided.
She gets in.
I get in after her and don't examine what it means that I've been looking forward to the ride home with her even before I found her standing on the steps.
Then my phone lights up. One missed call. Helen Chen. 11:14 PM.
Not a text. A call. Helen texts for information. Helen calls for things that require a voice.
I look at the screen for a moment.
Whatever Helen has found, it will still be true in eight hours. The preservation order is in place. The documents are secured. Nothing that can be done tonight cannot be done better in the morning with coffee and a clear head.
I put the phone in my pocket.
But I'm aware of it there. The specific weight of a thing not yet opened, sitting at the edge of the evening like a door with something behind it.
Everything else can wait. I turn to Summer.
The city slides past the windows, and I let it. We make small talk on the way home, and for once I am entirely where I am, and nowhere else.