11. Weston
Weston
I'm twenty feet from the pool door when I hear it. The irregular sound of water that isn't doing what it should be doing.
I push through the door, and the pool lights show me Monique in the water, her arms reaching for something that isn't there, her head going under and coming back up and going under again.
I'm in before the door finishes swinging.
The water closes over me, and I find her arm and pull her.
She comes up gasping, hands finding my shoulder. I get her to the edge, onto the tile. She's on her hands and knees, coughing water out.
I'm crouched beside her with my hand flat between her shoulder blades, steady, waiting.
It takes a minute. When the coughing slows, she sits back on her heels and puts her hands in her lap.
The pool area goes quiet except for the filtration hum and the small sounds of the water resettling.
"Okay? What happened?" I turn to her.
When she nods, her hair is flat against her neck, and her eyes are on the water.
I keep my hand on her back and wait.
The first thing she does when her breathing levels is create distance.
Her arms cross over her chest, and her jaw sets. "I was fine.”
"You weren't."
"I had it under control." Her voice is even and fast. "I lost the breathing sequence. That's all. It happens when you're learning."
"Monique. You were going under."
"I know what was happening." She gets to her feet.
I stand with her.
She takes a step back, arms still crossed, and looks at the pool instead of me. "You didn't need to come in."
"Monique."
"I said I was fine." The words come out harder than she meant them to. I can hear it in the slight break at the end, the breath that follows. Her jaw tightens. Her arms press harder against her own ribs.
I want to put my hands on her shoulders, but I don't. "What happened tonight? Before the pool."
Her mouth closes.
"Talk to me."
"There's nothing to talk about." She's looking at the tile now, at a point somewhere between her feet and mine. "I made a mistake. That's all." A pause, and then she adds, "I just…" She stops.
When her chin drops a quarter inch, her arms cross tighter. Something in her face moves — a compression around her eyes, the muscles in her jaw working once. "It's nothing."
"It's not nothing."
"Please don't." Her voice breaks on the last word. It comes out thin and involuntary, and she catches it a half-second too late, swallows hard, and turns away from me.
When she puts one hand flat against the pool wall, her shoulders shake with the effort of holding something in.
My hands come up.
I make myself stop.
She’s standing with her back to me, one hand on the tile, head down. The shaking is getting worse.
Everything in me wants to close the five feet between us, but it’d be the wrong thing to do. She told me to leave, and she meant it. So I stand there with my hands at my sides and wait.
It takes a while. Her breathing comes out ragged. Then longer. Then, finally, even.
I cross the pool deck and pick her up.
She makes a sound of protest — hands to my chest immediately, pushing, fingers curled against my shirt. "Put me down."
"No."
"Weston!"
"No." I carry her through the door, into the corridor, past the pool equipment storage and the back stairwell.
She's wet and cold, and her hands are still pushing at my chest. I walk until the tile turns to carpet, and there's a bench against the corridor wall.
I lower her onto it and crouch down in front of her so my eyes are below hers.
When she looks at me, her eyes are red, and her jaw is set tight enough that I can see the muscle working in it.
"I said put me down."
"I did."
"That's not — " She stops. Her hands go to her lap. She looks at them. "You should go," she says. Quiet now. Not the defended version. Something under it.
When I look at her, her hair is dripping onto the carpet. The back of her neck has gone pale with cold. Her hands are shaking slightly in her lap, and she's pressing them flat against her thighs to stop it.
I put my hand out between us, palm up.
She looks at it, then at my face. Her jaw works once.
Then she puts her hand in mine.
Her fingers are cold enough that I close mine around them slowly. She stands when I stand, and we walk — wet, quiet, the corridor dim around us, the carpet muffling our steps.
I don't have a destination fully formed, but we come around the corner toward the lobby.
Juan is at the desk.
He looks up. His eyes move across us — her wet hair, my wet clothes, her hand in mine. He's already coming around the desk. He doesn't look at me. He looks at her.
"Monique,” he says.
Her head lifts. Something releases in her jaw.
He puts his hand on her shoulder, and she turns toward him by about ten degrees.
When he looks at me over her head, he says, "I've got her."
She's already leaning fractionally into Juan's steadiness, already allowing the redirect in a way she didn't allow mine. I don't want to understand it, but I do.
I open my hand.
Her fingers slip out. Juan guides her toward the staff corridor, one hand at her shoulder, unhurried, and she goes.
I stand at the corner of the lobby and watch until the door closes behind her. The lobby hums. The marble holds its own quiet.
She was here, and now she isn't. There's a lightness in my hand where her fingers were.
Ethan chooses a restaurant too quiet for a Thursday, which means he planned it.
Jasper is already there with a drink and a bread basket. He looks up when I sit. "You look terrible."
"I'm fine."
"Sure, you are." He tops up my glass. "Woman trouble."
"Don't."
"It's the desk agent." He tears a piece of bread without looking up. "The one you've been going downstairs for months now."
I look at Ethan. He’s looking at the menu.
"You told him?" I say.
Ethan shrugs. "You weren't going to."
When I pick up my glass, I tell them about the pool — what I walked into and how I pulled her out. Then the corridor, her hand in mine, Juan taking her from me at the desk. Then standing at the corner of the lobby, watching the staff door close, and feeling the emptiness in my hand afterward.
I hear myself saying it all out loud in a restaurant, and I don’t stop because Ethan is looking at me like he’s been waiting for this moment to happen.
Jasper says, "She just needs time." Easily, the way he says things designed to close a subject. "You're not doing anything wrong."
Ethan hasn't touched his bread. He's turning his glass on the table, one slow rotation, thumb tracking the base of it.
"Do you remember," he says, "about two months after the funeral, I came to pick you up for dinner?"
I wait.
"I pulled a chair out for you." His thumb stops on the glass.
"You didn't sit down. The whole meal — an hour and a half — you stood.
Every time I said something, you'd check your watch, or you'd go find the server, or you'd ask me something.
I thought you were just being difficult.
" He looks up. "I didn't figure it out until I was in the car going home.
That was the chair your mother used to take. "
The bread basket is between us. I look at it.
"I don't remember that," I say.
"I do." He sets his glass down. "You told me you were fine every time I asked.
You said it so many times, I started to believe it.
And then I'd notice something — the chair, or the way you never answered the phone before the third ring for about a year, or the fact that you stopped ordering the pasta your dad used to make because the smell of it in a restaurant would make you put your coat on.
Small things. You weren't aware of most of them.
" He pauses. "You weren't fine. You were just very good at functioning. "
Jasper is quiet now. He's turning his drink slowly.
"That's not the same situation," I say.
"I know it isn't." Ethan's voice is level.
"I'm asking if you remember what it felt like.
From the inside. The part where someone tries to get close and your body finds a reason to stand up before you've decided to.
" He holds my gaze. "Because that's not a character flaw.
It's just what happens to people who've been through something and haven't finished yet. "
When I reach for the pen beside the bread basket, I turn it over in my fingers once.
"The first Friday I came back to The Langford," I say. "After I recognized her, I asked her if we'd worked together somewhere." I look at the pen. "I already knew she'd say no. I knew she wouldn't recognize me. I framed it as a coincidence, and I told myself I was being careful."
Jasper looks up.
Ethan doesn't say anything. He just waits.
"I wanted to know if she remembered," I say, "and I wasn't willing to just ask. So I asked her a question she was guaranteed to fail. And she said she didn't think so. I nodded and checked in, and that was that. And I told myself I'd say something the next week." I set the pen down. "But I didn't."
"You were testing her," Ethan says.
My hands stay flat.
I think about Monique who packed a bag at eighteen and spent six years moving from city to city, never staying long enough for anyone to find her.
She sat on a bench in a harbor on the worst night of her life and still left before it could become anything, because wanting something had always been the most dangerous available option.
And then I think about walking into a hotel eight months ago and recognizing her face behind the desk and choosing, instead of saying I know you. I was there. I've been thinking about that bench for six years.
I preferred to ask if we'd worked together somewhere in a voice calibrated to produce no.
Ethan says, "Being over something isn't the same as being healed from it. She may be carrying things you haven't begun to understand yet." He picks up his glass. "Give her room to find her own way there. Don't engineer it. Just…stay."
Jasper drinks. I turn the pen over once more and put it in my jacket pocket.
The investor meeting the next afternoon runs long.
The man Ethan has brought in is calm and polished, wearing a dark suit and a good watch. He talks about expansion, timing, and long-term positioning for the coastal project. When he asks questions, it's like someone checking if you know the answers he already has.
I answer and take notes. When he pauses before a question — a half beat too long, too deliberate — I file it away without comment.
After the meeting, I go to the tennis court.
I'm mid-rally against the back wall when the door opens.
Monique is just inside the entrance in her dark jacket, jeans, and bag strap across her chest. She walks toward me with her hands loose at her sides and her chin level.
I lower the racket.
"I wanted to say thank you," she says. "For last night."
"How are you feeling now?"
"I'm fine." Her eyes hold mine for a beat. "I'm sorry for how I reacted. I was scared, and I took it out on you, and that wasn't…" She stops. Her jaw moves slightly. "That wasn't fair."
"You don't have to apologize."
"I want to." She looks at the court between us — the net, the lines, the distance.
Then she turns back at me, and her face does something I don't usually get to see. The professional version drops away for a second. Underneath it, she looks tired, young, and more honest than she means to be. "I know you were trying to help."
I touch the back of my neck.
"I was worried about you," I say.
She holds my gaze for a moment longer than necessary, long enough that something is happening in it that neither of us names.
Then she clears her throat and says she should get back, and she goes. Watching the door close behind her, I stand on the court with the racket in my hand and a full sentence I never said sitting in my chest.
I go upstairs and call Iris.
She picks up on the fourth ring. Her voice comes through the phone already flattened.
"Hey," she says.
"Hey." I sit on the edge of the desk. "How are you?"
"Fine."
"How was the week?"
A pause. "Also, fine."
"Iris."
"What?"
"Talk to me."
The line is quiet for a moment. I can hear her shift on whatever she's sitting on — the couch, probably.
"I had a portfolio review at the studio," she says. "For the series I've been working on."
I wait.
"I didn't go."
I put the pen down on the desk. "What do you mean you didn't go?"
"I mean I didn't go." The flatness again, steady, like she rehearsed this before.
"I was supposed to be there at two, and I wasn't. I've been working on that series for two months — the light refraction ones.
I was actually…" She stops. "I was excited about it.
I hadn't asked you what you thought once, which, I know, is unusual. "
"Iris." I lean forward. "What happened?"
She's quiet for a moment. "Beckett said the work was too personal for a portfolio review. That reviewers want technical range, not emotional indulgence." A pause. "He said it twice."
The room is very still.
I'm looking at the wall in front of me — a blank section between the window and the door.
I can see Iris at seventeen, lying on the floor of the sunroom with paint on both arms, showing me three different angles of the same photograph and wanting to know which one I thought was best. I can see her hands and the paint.
"But anyway, Beckett's taking me out tonight. We both need a little breathing room, and — " She stops there.
"Iris?"
The call drops.
The silence that follows is immediate and complete.
I look at the phone and call back.
Four rings. Voicemail.
I call again. Four rings. The automated voice.
I put the phone down. Then I pick it right back up, call again, and listen to the ringing stretch longer than it should.
She doesn’t answer.
The paint on her arms stays in my head and won’t leave.