7. “Sunday Two”
“SUNDAY TWO”
Sunday dinner had a particular energy that I’d never encountered before.
The roasted chicken was excellent.
No one was tasting it.
The conversation was careful. Sterling talked about his clinic. Knox updated everyone on the market. Hawk mentioned the lake house and said something about timeline and permits and Aspen shot him a look that could have melted steel.
I watched my father watch Atlas.
Atlas was holding his bourbon with the particular precision of a man who was training every part of his body not to react to me sitting six feet away.
I had spent the morning in the guesthouse alone.
Atlas had left before dawn again. The note he had left on the pillow had been three words. *Be careful today.* Nothing else. No name, no signature, no flourish. The handwriting had been the small disciplined cursive of a man who had been signing legal pleadings since before I was born.
I had folded it into the pocket of my jeans before I came up to the main house.
I could feel the corner of it now, against my hipbone, every time I shifted in my chair.
Mrs. Harris had taken one look at my face at breakfast and put a second egg on my plate. She had not asked. She had simply added a slice of bacon and slid it across the island and pointed at the sun coming in through the window.
“You look like you saw it come up,” she said.
“I did,” I said.
“Mm.”
That was all.
Aspen had appeared at ten with two coffees and the determined energy of a sister who had been told by Sloane that she was on Eden duty.
She had taken me on a long walk down to the dock and back, talking about everything except Atlas.
She talked about Hawk and the lake house and the design changes she was secretly considering.
She talked about a literary agent she’d met at a party in Boston.
She talked about the dog she was thinking of getting.
I had let her.
I had needed to be talked at by someone who loved me and was willing to fill the silence so I did not have to.
By noon I had been able to breathe.
By two I had been able to eat a sandwich.
By four I had been able to put on the navy dress my father had asked me to wear and look at myself in the mirror without flinching.
Now it was 6:47 and I was at the table and Atlas Cain was across from me and our knees were not touching but they were inside the field where they could.
At 7:53, my father stood.
“Come with me,” he said to Atlas.
It wasn’t a question.
Atlas set down his glass. He stood. He followed my father into the library and closed the door.
I watched the door for one second, two seconds, three.
The hallway was empty behind it. The brass hinges had gone the color of dark honey from sixty years of being polished by Mrs. Harris’s mother and then by Mrs. Harris.
I had been watching that door my entire life.
I had been watching men disappear behind it my entire life.
I had never, until this moment, been the woman the conversation behind the door was about.
I could feel all of my sisters’ attention snap toward me at once.
“Don’t,” I said.
“We didn’t say anything,” Sloane said.
“Your faces are very loud.”
“Your face is very loud,” Aspen countered. “You’re in love with him and everyone at this table knows it.”
“Not everyone,” Sterling said helpfully. “Cole only figured it out Friday night.”
“I knew by the boathouse situation,” Knox said.
“I knew when Eden started getting dressed like a person with something to prove,” Hawk said. “Also, I saw the kiss, so that helped.”
I set down my fork.
“You saw the kiss.”
“I was walking back from checking the dock lighting,” Hawk said. “I walked by the boathouse at the exact moment Atlas was putting his hands on your face. I’m not a snitch, so I just kept walking, but yes. I saw it.”
“I’m going to die,” I said.
“You’re not going to die,” Sloane said. “You’re going to marry him and Dad’s going to be at the wedding pretending he didn’t orchestrate the whole thing, which he obviously did, and we’re all going to watch you be happy with a man who looks at you like you’re made of light.”
“He does not look at me like I’m made of light.”
“He absolutely does,” Aspen said. “It’s disgusting. It’s beautiful. It’s both simultaneously.”
“He has the worst poker face of any man at this table,” Knox said. “And I’m including myself in that, and I lost three thousand dollars Friday night.”
“You lost on purpose,” Sterling said.
“I lost on purpose to two of the hands. I lost the third on principle. There’s a difference.”
Cole, who had not spoken since dinner began, leaned back and looked at me.
His face was the face I had been watching since I was a child — the face of a man who had buried a wife at thirty-eight and then made a decision about how to be in the world, and the decision had been: very gentle. Very steady. Very honest.
He set his fork down.
“Eden.”
“Cole.”
“You are not going to die.”
“Okay.”
“And he is not going to leave you. Whatever you are afraid of in this moment, I want you to know that I have known Atlas Cain for twenty-five years and the man has never once not finished a thing he started. He is not going to start this and not finish it.”
Aspen squeezed my hand under the table.
I could not speak for a moment.
I drank the entire glass of water in front of me to avoid having to.
The library door opened.
My father and Atlas emerged.
Atlas’s expression was completely neutral.
My father’s expression was the same.
My father sat back at the head of the table.
“The leak has been sealed,” he announced. “Foster is delivering evidence to the FBI tomorrow morning. By Tuesday, we’ll know the full scope of what Ardent’s operation has managed. For now, we eat. We drink. We don’t discuss this again until Tuesday morning when the statement goes public.”
He picked up his fork.
He took a bite of chicken.
Everyone else followed suit.
I didn’t move.
Atlas was back in his seat like nothing had happened.
He was holding his bourbon glass and looking at the far wall like it was the most interesting thing he’d ever seen.
Under the table, his foot found the side of my shoe.
He pressed gently.
I pressed back.
We spent the rest of dinner like that.
One soft point of contact.
A language that nobody at the table could hear.
I tasted the chicken for the first time.
Lemon. Thyme. A pan sauce so reduced you could see the bottom of the pan in the gloss of it.
Mrs. Harris had been making this exact chicken since I was eleven and had decided I did not like chicken, and she had spent two months teaching me, very patiently, that the chicken was not the problem.
The problem was that I had not yet eaten chicken cooked by someone who knew what they were doing.
I drank my water.
I drank my wine.
I let Atlas’s foot stay where it was.
At 9:14, the boys started saying their goodbyes.
Cole stood first. He clapped my father on the shoulder. He told me he was glad to see me. He looked at Atlas for a long moment and then he nodded, once, which I now understood meant: I see you, and it’s fine.
Knox left second. He kissed my mother’s framed photo on the shelf on his way out, which he always did, because his mother had gotten it for him twenty years ago and had passed away and he would never stop missing her.
Sterling left third, asking Aspen about her schedule and whether she could talk next week about something he wouldn’t specify.
Hawk left last.
He stopped in front of me.
He said, “You’re good people, Eden Whitlock. And he’s better than most. So that’s going to work out.”
Then he looked at Atlas and said, “Take care of her, Cain. Or I’ll use you as a metaphorical example in my estimates.”
“Understood,” Atlas said.
Hawk left.
The dining room was quiet except for the sound of Mrs. Harris clearing plates from the kitchen.
My father stood.
“Atlas will walk you to the boathouse,” he said. “I want to discuss something about the filing, and I imagine you have questions. Then you’ll come back here. We’re going to play cards. Just the family. Just us.”
“Yes, Daddy.”
Atlas stood.
I stood.
We walked out of the dining room together with our hands not touching and everything in me aware of the exact distance between us.
In the foyer, Mrs. Harris handed Atlas a flashlight without looking at his face.
“The path lights have been weird,” she said. “Don’t trust them.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Harris.”
“Mm.”
She did not say my name.
She did not need to.
The boathouse was different in October darkness than it had been in Friday’s pre-dawn gray.
It was colder. Quieter. The Sound was absolutely black and moving and there was no moon at all. Just stars and the memory of what had happened here three days ago in the span of time that felt like either five minutes or five years.
The flashlight made a small cone on the gravel path.
The wind off the water carried the smell of brine and the small woodsmoke from the chimney up at the main house.
I could hear my own breath. I could hear his beside me.
The two of us, walking down the long sloping lawn at 9:23 on a Sunday night, looked from the outside like a lawyer and a client.
Looked from the inside like two people who had crossed every line they’d ever set.
I went to the window.
Atlas locked the door behind us.
“Your father told me he knew,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Does he hate you.”
“No. He told me that Eve would have known. He told me that Eve would have been planning the wedding before you even noticed me.”
I turned around.
“What did he say about after. About us.”
“He said I had to ask you properly. In a way that’s public enough that there’s no ambiguity. In a way that makes it clear to everyone that you chose this.”
“I did choose this.”
“I know. But I want you to choose it again. In front of everyone. I want your father to see it. I want your sisters to see it. I want the entire boys’ circle to know that you said yes to me with full knowledge of what I am and what I’ve built and what I’ve failed at before.”
I crossed the room.