19. Mia
Mia
“Tell me about the divorce settlement,” I say.
Harper’s in her room. The crackers are put away, the island wiped down, nothing left to do with my hands, so I stop pretending there is and just ask.
Reed sets his own phone face-down on the counter. His hands stay flat on the surface for a second, then he straightens up and crosses to the coffee machine. His back is to me when he answers.
“It’s handled.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“It’s what I can tell you right now.” He pulls a mug down, fills it, and sets it on the counter. “Whoever sent that text wants you off balance. Don’t give them the satisfaction.”
“I’m not off balance,” I say. “I’m standing in your kitchen asking you a question.”
He turns around and his face has gone somewhere I recognize from the board dinner, shut down, nothing behind the eyes he’s willing to show me. I’ve seen him point that face at Sharpe across a table full of suits. It worked on all of them.
I’m not a suit.
“The settlement went through the court,” he says. “It was documented, signed, and finished. There’s nothing in it that changes anything about where we are.”
“The message says you ruined her.”
“She said a lot of things. On television, in a deposition, to anyone who’d hold a microphone.” He picks up the mug, then puts it back down without drinking from it. “Vanessa rewrites history to suit whatever she needs it to mean on a given day. That’s not news.”
“Reed.”
“Mia,” he warns, not coldly. “Not tonight.”
I look at him across the island. He holds my gaze without shifting, without giving an inch. He’ll tell me the parts that make him look like the one who had no choice. He always does. It’s the parts where he did have a choice that he keeps to himself.
I pick up my phone and take it to my room, because standing in his kitchen waiting for a door he’s already shut is not how I’m spending my evening, and if I stay at that island another thirty seconds I’ll say something I can’t take back.
I sit on the edge of the bed with my sketchbook in my lap without opening it. The cerulean paint on my jacket sleeve has dried into a streak I’ll never fully get out, and I pick at the edge of it and think about nothing useful for twenty minutes.
The buzzer at the front door goes off twenty minutes later.
I come out of my room because Reed’s still in his office and someone has to answer it.
I open the door and Vanessa is in the hallway in a camel coat, bag over one forearm.
She looks like she has never once picked at dried paint on a jacket sleeve.
“I came to see Harper,” she says, and walks past me into the apartment before I’ve said a word.
I close the door. She’s already at the island, setting her bag on the counter, taking in the space with the same eyes-over-everything sweep she did the last time she stood in this kitchen.
“Harper’s doing homework,” I say.
“I won’t keep her long.” She turns to face me. “Did you get my text?”
I don’t confirm it.
“I didn’t send it to destabilize you,” she says. “I sent it because you’re not stupid, and stupid is the only reason not to ask the question.” She tilts her head, her eyes moving over my face. “He went cold when you brought it up, didn’t he?”
The fact that she’s right makes my jaw tighten.
“He has a tell,” she says. “The mug. He picks it up when he doesn’t want to answer and puts it back down without drinking.
Ten years and I don’t think he ever knew I’d noticed.
” No triumph in it, just information, like she’s reading off a list of facts she memorized a long time ago.
“Ask him what he used to make me sign the custody agreement. Ask him what was in the filing his lawyers prepared that made mine tell me to take the deal.” She picks her bag back up.
“It’s not because you owe me anything. It’s not even because I’d owe you anything.
It’s simply because you’re living in his apartment and sleeping in his bed, and I think you deserve to know what his lawyers are capable of when he decides someone is a problem to be managed. ”
“And you’re telling me this out of the goodness of your heart,” I say.
“I’m not your enemy,” she says, her hand on the door. “I just want you to know that when I finally asked the right questions, it was already too late to do anything with the answers.” She opens the door. “Don’t wait as long as I did.”
She goes down the hall. I hear her knock on Harper’s door, hear Harper’s voice shift into the careful tone she uses when she’s working out what she’s supposed to feel.
Vanessa stays four minutes. I count them by the city noise outside the window, the distant grind of traffic, a siren that starts and fades.
Then heels in the hallway, past me, and through the front door.
I return to my room just as Harper walks up to my doorway.
Her cardigan’s still on, rabbit under her arm, one sock pulled up and one bunched around her ankle.
I gesture for her to enter the room and together we climb onto the bed.
She pulls her knees to her chest, her shoulder pressing against my arm.
“You okay?” I ask.
“She always brings me the same chocolate,” Harper says, to her rabbit. “The kind in the gold wrapper. I don’t really like it but I eat it anyway.”
“Why?”
Harper turns the rabbit over in her hands, thinking about it. “Because she looked happy when she gave it to me.”
I look at the side of her face. Six years old and already eating chocolate she doesn’t like to protect someone else’s feelings. I want to say something about that but I don’t know how to say it without it costing her more than the chocolate does, so I put my arm around her instead.
She leans in, her head dropping against my ribs, rabbit tucked between us. Her fingers find my wrist, and she wraps three of hers around it, holding on.
“Are you going to leave?” The question comes out barely above a whisper, her chin tipped down toward her rabbit.
My ribs pull tight around the answer I don’t have. I press my chin to the top of her head, feel her hair against my jaw, the faint strawberry from her shampoo.
“I’m here right now,” I say.
She tightens her grip on my wrist like she’s heard the pause in that answer but decided to ignore it.
We stay there until her breathing slows and her hand goes loose, and then I carry her to bed.
Rabbit tucked in, light on low, door open to the exact width she likes it.
I hold it in place for a second before I let go.
The hallway is quiet. Reed’s office door is half open, a line of light across the floor, his voice carrying just enough for me to catch it.
I’m not trying to listen. I’m standing six feet from Harper’s door making sure it’s right, and his voice finds me anyway.
“The board needs this settled before Friday.” A pause. “I understand what’s at stake.” A longer pause. “If she leaves, we lose the board vote. I need two more weeks.”
I stand in the hallway with my hand still raised from Harper’s door.
Two more weeks.
I go to my room, close the door, and sit on the edge of the bed. My hands are in my lap. The oval ring on my left hand catches the light from the nightstand, warm gold, slightly irregular, the one Harper picked.
I think about Reed’s avoidance and Vanessa’s warning.
I pull the ring off. It comes over my knuckle and I set it on the nightstand next to my sketchbook. Small thing on a wide piece of wood, throwing a tiny shadow in the lamplight.
I don’t open the sketchbook, and I don’t turn the light off. I simply sit there with the ring on the nightstand, and I think about two more weeks like it’s a number I’ve never heard before.