14. Taryn
TARYN
The trouble with falling for somebody is that nobody warns you it happens in the dumb moments, not the big ones.
Not the gala. Not the hallway. It's a Tuesday, and Graham comes into the kitchen still half-knotting his tie and absently fixes the collar of Chloe's school dress on his way past her, automatic, not even looking, the way a person does a thing they've done a hundred times — except he's done it maybe four — and my whole chest goes warm and stupid, and I have to turn to the sink and run water I don't need.
It scares me, how fast it's moving. I've spent my life being the steady one, the one who reads the room and never gets caught flat-footed by her own heart, and here I am rinsing a clean mug because a man straightened a six-year-old's collar.
I take it to Brielle, because Brielle is the only person alive who'll tell me the truth with my coffee.
"You've got it bad," she says, before I've even sat down. The bakery's between rushes, flour in the air, her apron printed with cherries today and her mouth a matte plum. "I knew it the second you walked in. You've got the dopey face. The face I've been warning you about since week one."
"I don't have a dopey face. I have a tired face. There's a child."
"Tary." She sets a cardamom bun in front of me like evidence.
"I love you, which is the only reason I get to say this.
Men like that — and I'm not saying he's a bad one, I've never met him, maybe he hangs the moon — but men with that kind of money and that kind of name, when the choice finally comes, and it always comes, between the woman and the power?
They pick the power. Every time. They're built for it.
The reputation, the company, the board, the family legacy — that's the marriage.
We're the affair, even when they mean it.
" She softens, reaches across, squeezes my floury hand.
"I've watched you give your whole self to people who handed you back a receipt.
I just don't want to scrape you off this floor when his board decides you're a liability. "
"He defended me to them," I say. "Last week. To their faces."
"Words are cheap when there's no vote attached.
Wake me up when he picks you and it costs him something.
" She says it gentle, but it lands, because the awful part is she's not wrong about the world.
She's only maybe wrong about him, and I don't know yet which, and not knowing is its own kind of seasick.
The school art showcase is at six on a Thursday, which I happen to know is the same night as some Whitlock dinner with people whose names are on buildings, because Helena mentioned it and Graham didn't. I take Chloe alone, prepared to be the only grown-up in her corner, holding my phone ready to take the picture he won't be in.
He's already there when we walk in.
Standing in a hallway hung with construction-paper masterpieces, in a suit that's all wrong for a cafeteria, holding a paper cup of the worst coffee in the city like it's a privilege — Graham, who is supposed to be across town being toasted by titans.
Chloe spots him before I do and makes a sound I've never heard out of her, a little crow of pure delight, and bolts the length of the hall and slams into his legs.
"You came to the dinner thing instead of —" I start.
"There's a dinner," he agrees, like it's a minor weather event somewhere else. "Renner's covering it. Apparently I had a scheduling conflict." The corner of his mouth does the traitor thing. "She made a painting. You don't miss the painting for a room full of men you don't like."
And then Chloe — Chloe who rationed her words for weeks like they cost her blood — grabs one of his hands and one of mine and tows us both down the row to her piece, and to every classmate and teacher in tugging range she announces, in that small rusty voice that still knocks me sideways every time, "This is my uncle Graham.
And this is my Taryn." Not the nanny. Not my babysitter.
My Taryn. Like I'm a category of person that belongs to her.
Her teacher, Ms. Adler, catches my eye over the kids' heads with a look that's gone soft and knowing, and I have to study Chloe's painting very hard to keep my face together.
The painting is three figures. A tall one, a curvy one with a wild scribble of dark hair, a small one in the middle holding both their hands.
Over the small one's head, in the careful uneven letters of someone still learning them, she's written US.
Graham goes so still beside me I can feel it, and when I sneak a look at him his jaw is doing that thing where a proud man fights his own face and loses by a hair.
"That's a real good word, Coco," I manage. "US."
She nods, satisfied, and goes back to explaining the glitter situation to a classmate, and Graham and I stand there in front of our portrait not touching, both of us undone by a kindergartner with a glue stick.
It's late when we talk, Chloe long down, the painting already magneted to the fridge where the drugstore magnets finally have a job worthy of them.
We're at the wall of glass, the city doing its electric thing below, and Graham's looking at it the way he does when he's about to say something that costs.
"I've owned this view for nine years," he says.
"I bought it because it looked like winning.
Sixty floors above everybody, nothing able to reach me.
" He turns the cup that isn't there anymore, an empty-handed habit.
"I never once wanted to come home to it.
It was a place I went to be alone efficiently.
And now I stand here and all I can think is which corner the next fort goes in, and whether you'd let me put a real chair by the window instead of the one that's just for looking at.
" He says it to the glass, not to me, like that makes it less enormous.
"I have never in my life wanted a home, Taryn.
I wanted a fortress. You walked in here in a traffic-cone sweatshirt and made me want a home, and I don't have the first idea what to do with that except tell you it's true. "
It's the most beautiful thing anyone's said to me, and it's exactly why I'm scared, and I'm too honest to let one stand without the other.
"Here's what you should know about me, then," I say, "because you're being brave so I'm gonna match you.
I've been the warm thing in cold houses my whole life.
Families love me right up until I'm inconvenient — until the kid's settled, or the divorce is final, or the board gets twitchy — and then I'm a line item they trim, and they always do it kindly, with a good reference and a check, like that makes it not what it is.
" My voice isn't as steady as I'd like. "Brielle thinks you'll pick the power when it costs you.
And I keep waiting to become the inconvenient thing.
The thing you set down when keeping me gets expensive.
I'm terrified, Graham, that I'm falling for a man who's gonna wake up one morning and file me under lapse. "
He turns from the glass then, and takes my face in both his hands, careful, like I'm the breakable thing for once.
"Listen to me, because I'm only good at saying things once.
I have spent my whole life setting people down to keep things.
I know exactly the man you're describing, because I was him, last month, in this room.
" His thumbs move along my cheekbones. "You are not a line item.
You are not temporary. Whatever it ends up costing me — and I think it's going to cost me a great deal — you are the thing I keep.
That's not a feeling I had tonight. It's a decision I've already made. "
I have no comeback for that. For once in my life, I just believe him, and let him see that I do.