Chapter 4 #3
Ward catches my eye as he passes through the reception. The look carries nothing explicit. A door held open, an invitation to cross back into the warm room, the quiet rules, the understanding between men who share a name and a mountain and a secret. You're still my brother's son. Come home.
I stay at the back of the room with my bourbon. I don't follow him.
Greer makes it through a few more handshakes before she breaks for the bar.
She steps into the space beside me without looking at me, close enough that the sleeve of her dress brushes my forearm. "Single malt. Neat. Whatever's closest," she says to Keaton.
Keaton pours. He sets it in front of her and retreats to the far end of the bar with the instincts of a man who reads rooms for a living.
She picks up the glass and takes a drink that is not a sip. The line of her throat moves as she swallows, and I watch it because I can't stop watching it. The memory of my mouth against that exact stretch of skin is so immediate that I can feel my own pulse readjust.
Her hip is inches from mine. The edge of her elbow rests on the bar close enough that if either of us shifted, the contact would happen. The effort of keeping that distance steady in a room full of people who could be watching is a kind of torment I am cataloging for future reference.
"Your family throws a lovely party for a woman they wanted gone," she says, still not looking at me. Her voice is low enough that the walnut paneling swallows it before it reaches the nearest cluster. "The lilies are a nice touch. My mother was allergic."
"I know."
"Of course you do." She takes another drink. Her eyes find the photograph on the easel, the too-young June on display. "They used the wrong photograph. She would have been furious."
"She would have told me to make a scene."
"Then we're both disappointing her today."
She sets the glass down. Her fingers rest on the base of it, close enough to my hand on the bar that I can feel the warmth without the touch. The restraint of not closing that gap is costing me more than any silence I've ever held for Ward.
She turns her head just enough to look at me.
The full weight of her attention lands with a force that has nothing to do with grief and everything to do with the dangerous negotiation that has been running between us since the night she told me to prove I wasn't the man who tried to kill her, and I proved it on her kitchen counter.
"Your uncle just told me my mother would want me to take care of myself," she says, her voice carrying a quiet edge. "In the voice a man uses when take care of yourself means be careful."
The words sit between us on the polished bar. Ward's warning, delivered through a woman who just walked straight from the patriarch to the fixer and handed him the threat as though choosing which Aldrich to arm with it was never a question.
She didn't crumble. She didn't go pale. She absorbed the hit the way June absorbed every hit this family ever landed, and then she walked to the one person in this building she's decided to trust. She is trusting me with this right now, in the inches of bar between her elbow and mine.
The weight of that trust is heavier than anything Ward has ever put in my hands.
"He means it," I tell her. My voice is low. I am looking at the bar because looking at her face from this distance in this room would give the room more than I'm willing to spend. "When Ward tells you to take care of yourself, it's not a suggestion. It's a preview."
"I know what it is." She finishes the scotch. "My mother got the same preview for decades. She didn't take care of herself. She took care of the truth."
She sets the empty glass on the bar, and her fingers brush the back of my hand as she draws away. The contact is brief and deliberate and sends a current through me that I feel in the base of my spine.
Whether she meant it as reassurance or as something else entirely, I can't tell. The not-knowing is its own kind of fixation, the pull of a man who needs to understand everything this woman does, rapidly discovering that she will always be one move ahead of him.
She straightens and walks back into the reception without another word. I stand at the bar with Ward's warning and Greer's trust and the ghost of her fingers on my hand.
The room thins. Through the lobby windows I can see the lot. The black BMW with the Denver plates is gone. Whoever Ward brought in left while the memorial was still running, went out through the kitchen, the same way they came in.
Ward is gone too. He left through the staff stairwell, absorbed back into the building, back up to the top floor. He was here. Now he isn't. The gravity remains.
Thayer is the last to leave. He pauses at the door and turns for one more scan of the room.
His gaze finds Greer, holds for a fraction of a second, then moves to me.
The smile he gives me is open, fraternal, entirely correct.
'Take care of yourself today, Cal.' The same words he used on me at the bar.
The same words Ward whispered to Greer. The Aldrich phrase, it seems, the family's native tongue: concern that carries a second meaning and never specifies which one it intends.
Underneath the smile, the assessment continues. Patient and very careful.
I finish the bourbon. I set the glass on the bar.
Greer is still looking at the photograph of her mother.
Ward told her to take care of herself. My uncle brought in a new attorney on the same morning he whispered a warning to the woman I'm protecting, and the coincidence of that timing is not a coincidence at all.
The machine is building something I can't see, and it's being built to be pointed at Greer. The only tool I have left is the choice I made last night when Ward's name lit my phone in the dark and I let it ring.
I chose her.
The choosing cost me a silence I can't take back. Fine. It was the only honest thing I've done in years.
Now I need to figure out what Ward is building, because whatever he's assembling behind that closed door on the top floor, it's aimed at the woman who just walked out of my family's hotel with June's jaw and her mother's war and the ghost of my hands still on her skin.
I will take apart every piece of legal framework I've ever built before I let it reach her.