20. Monique
Monique
Victor finds me at a charity gala in Newport, Rhode Island.
His jacket is pulled sideways at the collar where security has him by the arm, but he's not fighting them now. He's looking at me.
Thirty or forty faces turn together, eager to see what is happening.
"Monique!" He shouts my name. "There she is. There's my daughter."
I brace myself to defend.
The string quartet plays one more bar and stops.
I count my breaths. In. Out. I keep my face level and my hands loose at my sides.
Victor is drunk. He scans the room with the wide proprietary look of a man who believes he's owed an audience.
"My own daughter," he says to no one. "You see this?
Wouldn't take my calls. Wouldn't write back.
I had to come all the way down here to see my own child.
" He looks at me. "You think I don't know what's going on?
You think I don't see what you've done?" His voice drops into the register I grew up inside.
"Latching onto a man with money. Diana did the same thing and look — "
"Sir." Security at his elbow, firmer now.
"I'm talking to my daughter — "
"Sir, you need to come with us."
He doesn't come with them. Not yet. He looks at me for another moment, and I look back at him, at the gray in his hair and the slack at his jaw.
He was once the largest thing in my world, and I think, Diana didn't latch onto anyone. She stayed because she was afraid, too tired to leave. And I know that. But he’s using her name to throw me off.
They get him moving. He goes, still talking, his voice carrying down the corridor. I watch him until the service door closes behind him, and the sound cuts.
Then I turn.
The room returns but the conversations are different from what they were two minutes ago. A woman near the dessert table has her hand on her collarbone. Two men from the architecture firm are looking at each other. Georgia is twelve feet away with her mouth slightly open, and beside her, Noah.
Weston walks up behind me.
I can feel him there before I turn.
"Monique, what’s going on?" he asks.
"It’s about my dad and his debts. I think I need to meet him outside and talk to him. This is all too much," I say, looking at him, then at the ground. “I can handle it.”
“It’s okay. Take all the time you need, just know that I’ll be here when you need me.” Weston steps back once and nods at me.
I turn, knowing well enough he wants me to do this.
The service corridor is dim and cool after the heat of the gala room. My heels on the concrete are a different sound than they were on marble.
I push through the exterior door, and the cold air comes in fast. I breathe it, and I keep walking, toward the low wall at the edge of the property where the coast sound is loudest.
Victor is there.
Not far. Security surrounds him, one of them on the phone, the other standing beside him. He's sitting on the bumper of the nearest van with his head in his hands. He looks old and used up and exactly as pathetic as he is.
He looks up when he hears my heels on the pavement.
"Monique…" He starts to stand.
I hold up my hand. “Stop tracking me. Get a job and take responsibility for your debts. I’m not going to stay in a role where I’m treated like your caretaker. I’ve moved on, and I’m done with how I’ve been treated. You need to leave.”
He looks at me.
My feet are flat on the pavement, and my hand is at my side now. I’m not counting my breaths anymore.
I’ve been flinching since I was eight years old. In kitchens, in hallways, at dinner tables, in a hotel lobby not long ago where I felt my hands start to fold the way Diana's used to.
I’m not doing it right now.
He's just a man. A small, tired, drunk man sitting on the bumper of a catering van in the cold, who found me because he was desperate and came here because he had nowhere else to go.
He's not the thing I was running from. He's what was left of it.
"We're done." I hold his gaze. "Don't come back."
Victor opens his mouth and closes it.
Measured footsteps behind me on the pavement.
Adrian comes to stand a few feet to my left.
He sees Victor. "Mr. Castellano," he says pleasantly.
"I've been looking for you for quite a while.
I think we should have a conversation." He glances at the security staff, who step back without being asked.
Then he looks at me. His chin drops a fraction — acknowledgment, not apology.
"We have no further business, Monique. Looks like you’ve delivered him perfectly to me. "
“What are you gonna do with him?” I ask.
He smiles. “He’ll work for me to pay off his debts. I’ll take care of him.” He turns. "Mr. Castellano," he says, walking toward Victor. “Please come with me.”
Victor, after a moment, gets up off the bumper and goes with him. They disappear around the side of the building, and the sound of the coast fills the space they left.
I stand there in the cold in a navy blue dress, watching them leave, and I breathe.
Weston crosses the gravel toward me. He doesn't put his jacket around my shoulders yet. He's looking at the corner of the building where Adrian took Victor.
"That was Reeve," he says. Not a question.
"Yes."
"He didn't come for your father's sake." His voice is level. "He came to collect him."
I could hand him the shape of it and keep the weight. The old reflex stands up in me fully dressed, reasonable. Solve it in the dark. Don't make it his.
"He found me three weeks ago," I say instead.
"In the lobby of my building. He holds Victor's debt — bought it off the man I ran from six years ago.
Two hundred thousand dollars." I keep my eyes on the corner.
"Deliver Victor or pay it. And if you ever found out, he said, he'd double the interest." I make myself turn and look at him. "So. You've found out."
Weston goes still in the way he gets when something is moving underneath the stillness.
"He put Victor in this room," he says slowly. "Your father couldn't find the door of a Blackwood gala on his own, let alone the money to get to Newport. Reeve walked him in."
"I think so."
"To watch you fold in public. And he stood next to you while it happened." His jaw moves once. "Why tonight. Why tell me now."
"Because I watched my mother carry one of these alone until it was the only thing she was." My voice holds, barely. "And he was counting on me to do the same. He told me to keep it from you because the keeping was the whole point."
I wait for the cost — the floor opening, the interest doubling, the thing I've braced against for three weeks. It doesn't come. What comes is Weston taking his phone out of his jacket, unhurried, and looking at it the way he looks at a floor plan with a load-bearing error in it.
"He has one thing," he says. "The fact that you hadn't told me. You just took it from him." He looks up. "The rest of it has my name on a document next to his. Let me carry the part that's mine to carry."
"It's not that simple."
"No." He puts the jacket around my shoulders now. "But it's not yours alone anymore. That part is."
No triumph. What's there instead is something quieter.
Diana.
Just her name. The cardigan on the chair, the sleeves she always pushed up, the kitchen table. I stayed quiet for eighteen years and carried the silence like it was protection. It wasn't. It was just weight, and I've been putting it down one piece at a time without knowing that's what I was doing.
Tonight, I put down the last piece.
I hear Weston behind me.
He comes to stand beside me and puts his jacket around my shoulders.
"I’m sorry about that," I say. “I think I ruined the gala.”
"Every gala needs a good party crasher." He grins.
We stand there a little longer. The gala behind us resumes its splendor — music starting again, the low hum of a hundred conversations, and the room deciding to move on.
I turn to face him.
He looks at me. His expression is the open one.
"Weston… I can't take the promotion," I say.
He's very still.