10. Reed
Reed
“Museum, gelato, family photos. Saturday. Nine o’clock.”
Mia doesn’t look up from the tray she’s sliding out of the oven. Six-forty in the morning, Calder Bakes not officially open yet, the display case half-stocked. She sets the tray on the rack, pulls off the mitt, and checks the bottom crust before she answers me.
“You’re telling me, not asking me,” she comments.
“Sharpe has a source from the Lowell benefit. We read stiff in the second half.” I lean against the counter she hasn’t told me to move away from yet. “We need something that doesn’t look like a briefing document came first.”
“And a museum fixes that.”
“A Saturday fixes that. The museum is Harper’s call.” I check my watch. “Nine o’clock.”
She holds my gaze for a beat, then sets the mitt down. “I’ll be ready at eight-fifty.”
Harper announces the Natural History Museum at breakfast Thursday morning, not as a request but as a scheduling update she’s doing me the courtesy of sharing.
“The one with the big whale,” she says.
I tell her Mia hasn’t seen it.
Harper nods, as though this settles something she’d already suspected. “She needs to.”
Saturday. Eight forty-seven. Mia’s in the penthouse hallway in jeans and a rust-colored jacket, hair half-up and losing the battle with itself.
She looks exactly like herself, which is the point of today, which is also why I’m looking at the floor instead of her when I call down the hall for Harper.
Harper comes out with her rabbit and stops in front of Mia. She takes a full inventory.
“You have paint on your sleeve,” she says.
“Cerulean,” Mia tells her. “It’s my best accident.”
Harper considers this, then takes Mia’s clean hand and pulls her toward the door. “Come on. She doesn’t wait.”
“Who doesn’t wait?” Mia asks.
“Cecily,” Harper says, and that’s the end of it.
The museum is deep into Saturday chaos by ten. Strollers and school groups, families moving in slow overlapping currents through every hall. Harper cuts through them like she has a destination and mild contempt for anyone without one.
She finds the whale room. Stops in the middle of it. Tilts her head all the way back.
I’ve brought her here four times. I know this moment. She goes quiet under the whale every time, this stillness that doesn’t belong to a six-year-old but shows up in her anyway. All that weight suspended over nothing visible. She stands there until she’s ready to come back.
Today she goes quiet, then turns to Mia.
“Ninety-four feet,” she says. “Since 1969.”
Mia tilts her head back too. “Does she have a name?”
Harper’s chin lifts. “I named her Cecily. Blue things have to start with C. Cerulean, cobalt, cyan.” She glances at the paint on Mia’s cuff. “Like your accident.”
Mia follows her gaze down to her sleeve. The corner of her mouth pulls up before she crouches to Harper’s level and says, very seriously, “I want to use that rule for the rest of my life.”
Harper laughs, full body, eyes creasing shut, tipping sideways into Mia’s shoulder and staying there.
I look at the whale.
I study Cecily’s underside for a long moment.
Eight months since I heard that laugh. Eight months of Harper tightening her grip on her rabbit whenever a voice got too loud, scanning every room we walked into, pressing against my leg in crowds before I’d even clocked the threat.
Eight months of a six-year-old braced for the next thing to shift.
One afternoon under a whale and she forgot to be careful.
I look at the exit. I put my hands in my pockets, breathe through my nose, and give myself to the count of five.
Harper is already pulling Mia toward the meteorite room, so I follow.
Mia lets Harper set the pace through every room.
She doesn’t cut her off, doesn’t rush, doesn’t check her phone.
When Harper develops strong opinions about a meteorite that landed in Arizona in 1891, Mia crouches beside her and develops strong opinions too.
They spend twelve minutes on that rock. I stand two steps back, tracking the room, watching sight lines, noting who’s too close.
Nobody’s too close. The room is full of children and parents and everyone’s looking at the rock.
By noon Harper has consumed gelato the color of a traffic cone and decided, firmly, that Cecily belongs in the Central Park reservoir on weekends.
“The joggers can just go around her,” Harper says, like this is obvious.
“Hard to argue,” Mia says.
I wipe a stripe of orange off Harper’s chin. She’s still talking about the reservoir when we join the crowd moving toward the elevators, rabbit swinging from her hand, and I’m exit-checking, running the perimeter in my head.
I see the first photographer at the same moment Harper’s grip on her rabbit tightens.
Not Celeste’s photographer. Wrong lens, wrong position, already shooting. A second one appears from the left side of the lobby, both moving fast, working the angle before security cuts them off.
Harper presses against my leg without a word.
I get my hand on her shoulder, step in front, steer us both into the elevator as the doors open. We fold inside packed with two strollers, three families, a grandfather with a museum map, and not enough room for any of it. The photographers hit the closing gap but the doors cut them off.
The inside is warm. Harper has one hand twisted into my jacket, the other wrapped around Mia’s wrist. She’s scanning the other passengers, chin down, rabbit pressed tight to her chest. She’s seen men with cameras chase us before. She knows to stay close and stay quiet until we’re outside.
I move in behind Mia, angling us into the back corner, putting my body between her and the glass panel above the doors where a long lens could still find a face. She steps back without being asked, shoulders against my chest. I drop my head so my mouth is near her ear.
“Don’t move,” I say.
She goes still.
The elevator climbs. My hand settles at her hip, then drops lower, past the hem of her coat, finding the outside of her thigh through her jeans. I don’t grip. My palm sits flat and warm for a full three seconds. Then my thumb drags one slow arc down the outside seam and back up.
Her spine straightens against me.
I watch the floor numbers tick upward. In the brushed steel panel above the display, I watch her teeth press into her lower lip and hold there, jaw tight, biting down on whatever sound was building. Her breath goes shallow. I feel it in her back against my chest.
I move my thumb again.
She bites harder, but says nothing. Keeps her chin level, her face forward, totally fine.
The doors open on the lobby. I lift my hand, settle it at the small of her back, and we walk out. Mia smiles at the family holding the elevator for us, falling into step like the last ninety seconds happened to someone else entirely.
Harper pushes between us and goes straight back to the reservoir. “She could swim there on Saturdays,” she tells Mia. “And Sundays.”
She’s still talking about it in the back seat on the ride home, rabbit in her lap, fingers drawing invisible maps on her knee.
By the time we get upstairs her voice is dropping, sentences trailing off before she finishes them.
I steer her to the couch. She’s asleep before I get the museum guide out of her hands.
I get the blanket from the hall closet and tuck it over her. She doesn’t stir.
Mia’s in the kitchen when I come back, leaning against the counter with a glass of water, eyes on the middle distance, turning something over in her mind.
“Don’t,” she says, before I open my mouth. She doesn’t need to say more for me to know what she’s referring to.
I stop on the other side of the island. “It was crowd management.”
“I know what it was.” She sets the glass down. Her voice doesn’t rise. “Don’t do it again.”
“It worked.”
“I’m not arguing about whether it worked.” She holds my gaze. “You don’t get to put your hands on me whenever it suits you and then stand there telling me why. I know how to smile for a camera without you running your thumb up my thigh to help me along.”
“I have a custody hearing inside a two-week window and a board breathing down my neck while we’re working on the Walsh vote,” I say. “Every photo between now and that shareholder meeting either holds the story together or blows it apart. I made a call.”
“You keep deciding my body is part of the plan.”
“You signed the contract.”
She stares at me, deciding something.
“There’s a difference between keeping someone safe and just keeping them,” she says.
The kitchen stays quiet. I hear Harper breathing from the couch.
“You want to tell me I’m doing this wrong,” I say.
“Harper spent today thinking I wanted to be there.” She picks up her glass.
“She doesn’t know what this is. She just knows today felt real.
” She looks at me. “You keep doing that to her and one day she’s going to figure out it wasn’t, and that’s going to hurt her a lot worse than anything Sharpe does to you. ”
I have nothing for that. I’ve been running through it since the elevator and every answer I reach proves her point before I get to the end of it.
She doesn’t press it. She holds my gaze, waiting to see what I’ll say next.
My phone rings.
The screen says Vincent. I glance at Mia, then pick up.
“Vincent.”
“Reed.” His voice has the temperature it gets when he’s already decided how the conversation ends.
“Apologies for the weekend intrusion. The board has been discussing the timeline and we’d like something less formal than a meeting room.
Dinner, Wednseday evening. The six of us.
” He gives it three full seconds. “Bring the fiancée. We’d like to meet her properly. ”
I watch Mia across the island. She’s reading the call off my face, water glass held still in both hands.
“Wednesday works,” I say. “We’ll be there.”
I hang up.
Mia sets the glass down without a sound. She already knows. She watched my face through the whole call.
“Wednesday,” I say.
She nods once, eyes moving past my shoulder, running the math I can see her working through. The cover story under direct examination. Six men who’ve spent their careers finding the crack in every version of events they’re handed. Six men who are specifically looking for hers.
“I’m going to need a different dress,” she says.
It’s not what she’s thinking. We both know it isn’t. But she says it, and I let her have it, because some thoughts are better left exactly where they are.