Chapter 23
I sit in the chair in the waiting room for nine minutes.
I stand up and sit back down.
The door opens.
The room is small with two chairs, a low table, and a window that looks at the side of another building. The chair is not trying to impress me. There is a file on the desk that has nothing in it yet.
We sit.
"What brings you in."
"A woman left me. I'm the reason. I'm trying to figure out how to fix it."
She nods.
"Are you here because you want her back, or because you want to be better."
I open my mouth and close it.
I sit with it.
"The first one."
"Mmm…"
"Is that wrong?"
"It is not wrong. I'm asking you which is harder to answer."
I look at her.
She does not give me the answer. She does not lean forward in the chair and tell me the second one. She just looks at me with the small unreadable patience of a woman who has been doing this for forty years and has decided to wait the way she always waits.
She asks me about my father.
I answer her with fewer words than I thought I would.
She asks me about the woman.
I answer her with even fewer.
I arrive at it in the middle of a sentence I'm making about something else.
" — and so I have spent my whole adult life building a life nobody could reach me inside.
I'm good at it. It worked. I have been not-reachable for twenty years.
The problem is I have met a woman I want to let in, and I keep — I keep handling her instead.
Every time I'm afraid I'm going to lose her, I tighten my grip.
And every time I tighten my grip she has less room.
I'm doing the thing I'm most afraid of and it's costing me. "
She does not congratulate me for saying it.
"What do you think you should do?"
"Stop."
"Stopping is harder than it sounds."
"I know."
"Do you?"
I look at her.
"Mr. Nightingale, the men I see in this office who are good at handling things are the men who have the hardest time stopping.
The handling is the apparatus you have built to keep yourself safe.
You have used it for twenty years and it has worked.
I'm not going to ask you to take it apart in one hour. "
"What do you ask?"
"That you notice when you are reaching for it.
The first ten times you notice you will already have used it.
The next ten times you will catch yourself in the middle.
And then, eventually, you will realize before you have to reach for it.
That is the work. It is not glamorous and it does not happen this week. "
I sit with it.
"Okay."
I stand fifteen minutes before the hour is up.
"I'm going to leave."
"That's all right."
"I — thank you."
I mean it.
She nods.
"Make another one when you can."
I leave and sit in my car in the parking garage of the building.
I take out my phone.
I have not contacted her in four days.
I write three drafts. I delete all three. The first is too long. The second is too short. The third has the word please in it twice and I cannot send a message to Suzanne with the word please in it twice.
What I send is short.
Where are you? I'd like to come talk. — C
I put the phone face down on the passenger seat.
I don't expect an answer.
I drive.
I'm on the bridge when the phone buzzes. I pull over on the shoulder. I read it.
An address. Berkeley. Renée's house.
No other words.
I put the car back on the road.
The neighborhood is quiet in the small way a residential street is at 2:00 p.m. on a Tuesday. The house is at the end of the block. White siding. A porch with two rocking chairs. A small front garden that has been left to do whatever it wants for a season.
I park the car, sit for a minute, and get out.
I knock.
Renée opens the door.
She looks at me for a long beat. She does not say hello. Her face is the face of a woman who has been deciding, for the four days I have not contacted her cousin, whether she would let me in if I came.
"If you are here to fix this, you should know she has been doing all right without you."
"I know."
"I'm giving you that as information. I'm not asking you to do anything with it."
"Renée."
"What?"
"Thank you."
She studies me for one more second and steps aside.
"She's in the kitchen."
She is at the counter with a cup of tea in her hands and turns when she hears me.
Her face does the small thing it does — the flash before the close — but the close does not fully come this time. She holds the flash. She lets me see her.
I stop in the doorway and don't cross the kitchen.
"I saw someone this morning."
She waits.
"A therapist. I went on impulse. I went alone. I was there for less than an hour."
She does not say anything.
I take a breath.
"You were right about all of it. I have been handling you instead of trusting you.
I did it again the night Adrian came to the door.
I did it every time you tried to tell me something was yours.
The reason was mine, Suzanne. It was not yours.
I'm going to work on it. I don’t know how long that takes. I'm going to."
She sets the tea down on the counter.
"I'm going to tell Maddox. Today, if you'll come with me. I'm not asking you to come because I need you to carry it. I'm asking you to come because we are doing this together, or I'm doing it wrong."
She does not speak for a beat.
She walks across the kitchen.
She stops in front of me.
"I love you."
"Suzanne."
"I have loved you for a while."
I cannot speak for a second.
The kitchen goes suspended the way rooms do when someone you love says a thing you have been waiting to hear for so long that your body does not have a place to put it yet.
Everything is the same as it had been when I walked in — the light, the kettle, even the calendar on the fridge — it's still Tuesday.
She takes my hand.
"And yes, I'll come with you."
I pull her in.
She folds against my chest, her body fitting in the grooves of my arms. I hold her for a long time until the spinning stops and the world is back on its axis.
"Please come home."
"Cade."
"Tonight. Please. I cannot spend another night there alone. I have been pretending I can. I cannot."
She laughs into my collar.
"Okay."
"Yes?"
"Yes, Cade."
I call Adrian from the living room of the apartment the next morning.
He picks up on the second ring.
He does not sound surprised.
"Adrian."
"Cade."
"I'd like to meet you today. An hour from now. The lounge at the Park, downtown. Not the Cresswell."
A pause. "All right."
"Bring nothing. I'm bringing what is needed."
"All right."
I end the call.
Suzanne squeezes my hand.
We drive to the hotel together.
The lounge at the Park is small and quiet with a single low table and three armchairs. The hotel keeps it for senior guests who want to take a meeting. The light is low. The hallway outside the door has the small even quiet of money.
Adrian is already there.
He stands when we come in and shakes my hand.
He shakes Suzanne's. He holds hers for one beat. He is composed and does not perform this time.
We sit.
I put the folder on the table.
I don't open with an apology.
I open with the work.
I walk Adrian through the memos. I name what Henrik Maddox was doing in the years before the acquisition.
The contract template his network had been using since 2014.
Predatory percentages. The clause that let the gallery hold work for up to seven years without paying.
The systemic underpayment of emerging artists across nine cities.
I name three of those artists. I have spoken to all three in the last seventy-two hours.
All three have given permission to use their names.
I walk Adrian through the due-diligence file my attorneys prepared in the spring of 2017.
I tell him the memos in the folder in front of him are copies. He can keep them. The originals are secured. He can verify any of it by calling the artists I named.
"Your father was two things at once, Adrian."
He does not move.
"He was a man you loved. He was also a man who was hurting people. Both are true. I'm not asking you to choose between them."
He does not look at the folder.
He is looking at me.
"I did the acquisition legally. I did it because the evidence was clear and because the people he was hurting did not have the power to stop him from continuing.
I never publicly explained why. I told myself for seven years that the silence was discretion.
It is not. It is cowardice. It's easier to be the villain in a story I did not write than to tell the true one. "
I take a breath.
"I'm sorry, Adrian."
He looks at me.
"Not for the acquisition. The acquisition was necessary.
For the silence. The silence cost you seven years.
It cost you this. The man you have been imagining is not the man I am, and I let you imagine him because telling you the truth meant trusting you to hear it.
You were twenty-three. I was twenty-three. I made a coward's choice."
I stop.
He has not spoken the entire time.
His face has been doing the work of a man reading a history he thought he had memorized and finding the chapters in a different order.
Suzanne speaks.
She does it without looking at me.
"Adrian."
He turns.
"During the meetings. The three weeks of meetings. I saw a man who cared about artists. I saw someone with real taste. Real patience. The portfolio you walked me through wasn't only the long game. You were also doing real work."
He is quiet.
"Your grief is real. The firm you have built — the four artists you have placed carefully, the patience of the year — that is real.
So was the long game. So is what your father became.
The man your father was when you were eight is not the same man as the man he was when he died, and both of those men are yours to carry, and you get to decide what to do with them. "
She breathes out.
"I'm sorry for what you lost."
His face does something he does not try to hide.
He does not speak.
He looks down at the folder, at the closed cover, and at the pen I have left on the table. His gaze moves to the small framed print on the wall above my shoulder.
He breathes out. "I need time."
"Of course."
"I will not make any public move. I — I would not know what move to make."
He gives a small almost-smile. The first honest thing his face has done in this room.
He stands and shakes my hand.
He holds Suzanne's hand for a beat longer than mine.
"I'm glad I met you. Even like this."
"You too, Adrian."
He leaves.
The door closes behind him.
The lounge is quiet.
The folder is on the table between us. He has left the copies. He took nothing with him except whatever he is carrying that does not belong to me anymore.
I look at her and take her hand across the table.
"I love you."
It is not the word as a last attempt. It is not desperate. It is not the word in the foyer with her hand on the door. It is true, and I'm saying it because there is no reason not to.
"I love you too."
I lean across the table and kiss her.
It is not a first kiss. It is not the alley.
It is not the suite in Santa Barbara. It is a kiss that knows something the earlier ones did not, which is that the woman across the table has stayed and that the man at this end of the table has, for the first time in his adult life, told the truth in a room that had to hear it.
When I pull back, her face is flushed and tired and here.
I look at her and think, with a quiet I have not had access to before, that I'm going to be doing this with her for the rest of my life.
I don't say it.
I don't have to.
I squeeze her hand.
We sit in the lounge for a long time.