9. “Ardent”
“ARDENT”
Idressed for the meeting at six fifteen in the morning.
The text from Ardent’s office had come through at eleven the night before. *Senator Ardent would like fifteen minutes of your time. Tomorrow. Eight a.m. The Carlyle. Private dining room. We will send a car if you prefer.*
I had not preferred.
I had texted Atlas the screenshot before I had even put the phone down.
He had texted back at 11:14: *Don’t go.*
I had texted back at 11:16: *I’m going.*
He had not answered for forty minutes. When he had, the message had been three words. *Foster will follow. He will be in the lobby at seven thirty. He will not approach unless you signal. Eden, I am asking you to take the cashmere blazer that was your mother’s. The gray one. Wear it.*
I had not asked him how he knew the gray one was my mother’s.
I had simply gone into the closet at the back of my bedroom and pulled out the wool garment bag I had not unzipped in two years.
The blazer was the color of dove. Cashmere.
Lapels with the slight roll that had been in fashion in 1996 and had quietly come back into fashion in 2022.
The lining was silk and had the small embroidered initials *EBW* — Eve Brennan Whitlock — at the inside breast pocket where my mother had once told me she liked to keep her good pen.
The sleeves were a quarter-inch too long for me. They had always been.
I rolled them very precisely.
I pinned my hair back. I put on my mother’s pearls. I chose a dress that was almost the same color as the blazer, and I put on a pair of low black flats because I did not want to be standing on heels in a room where I might need to stand up suddenly.
I looked at myself in the mirror.
I looked like my mother.
I had not let myself look like my mother in a long time.
I had been wearing her face cautiously for eight years, the way you wore an inheritance you had not yet decided you deserved.
This morning I let it sit fully on my own face.
I let the angle of my mother’s jaw stand in for whatever spine I did not yet trust myself to find.
I went to the window.
The sky over Tribeca was the gray of an October morning that had not yet committed to weather.
The cab arrived at six fifty-eight.
The cab uptown was almost empty of traffic. The driver took the West Side, then crossed at 79th, then went north along Fifth past the park where the joggers were already out and the leaves were already starting to turn the color my mother had loved best, which was the color of pumpkin pie.
I rode with my hands flat on my thighs.
I had not eaten.
I had drunk one cup of tea and three sips of water and that was the entirety of my morning so far. My stomach was a closed fist. My chest was not entirely closed but was on its way.
I went through what Atlas had told me on the phone last night.
Three things, he had said.
One: she will show you something. Photographs, probably. She has nothing real, so what she has has to look real.
Two: she will offer you a way out. She will offer you control of the story. She will use the word *narrative.*
Three: she will threaten your father. Not directly. She is too smart for direct. She will imply that what she has is going to hurt him if you do not do what she wants.
You do not bargain with her, Atlas had said.
You do not negotiate. You do not say anything that can be quoted.
You walk in. You let her speak. You let her finish.
You give her one sentence in return. The one sentence is: *I appreciate the time, Senator.
* Then you stand up. You walk out. You do not run.
You do not look back. You take the elevator down.
You get in a cab. You call me from the cab.
I had practiced the sentence in the cab on the way uptown.
*I appreciate the time, Senator.*
It sounded, when I said it out loud, like the kind of thing a woman my mother’s age would have said and meant exactly what she meant by it.
The Carlyle’s lobby smelled the way it had smelled my entire life. Old roses. Wood polish. The particular green-gold of the carpets that the hotel had been replacing with the same exact pattern for sixty years.
The doorman knew me.
The doorman knew everyone.
He nodded the small nod he always nodded when one of the senator’s daughters passed under the awning. He did not call me by name. The Carlyle was the kind of place where calling people by name in the lobby was a violation of the contract.
I crossed the marble.
The ma?tre d’ of the breakfast room recognized me too.
She was a woman in her late fifties named Lourdes who had been a hostess at one of my grandfather’s Christmas parties when I was nine.
She had given me a candy cane that year and she had also told me, in a whisper, that I had a very smart mouth.
She did not smile this morning.
She nodded at me very slightly and she walked me past the public dining room and through a small set of double doors and down a hallway with cream silk wallpaper and into a small private breakfast room overlooking 76th Street.
She held the door open.
She looked at me one more time.
“Buena suerte,” she said, very softly.
I went in.
Senator Vivienne Ardent was waiting for me at a round table set for two by the window.
Not the Plaza. Not the famous places. The small private room of a hotel where senators went when they wanted to be unbothered.
Chamomile tea at her place. Fresh croissants. A woman in her sixties in a cobalt-blue suit with silver hair pulled back so tightly her face looked almost painful.
She smiled when I walked in.
“Eden,” she said. “Thank you for coming.”
“You didn’t give me much choice. Your office said it was about Atlas.”
“Please. Sit.”
I sat across from her at the small table.
She poured my tea without asking if I wanted any.
The teapot was Limoges. The cup was thin enough that I could see the shadow of her hand through the porcelain when she lifted hers. The croissants were the croissants the Carlyle had been making since the late 1940s. The butter was in a small ceramic crock.
I did not touch any of it.
“I’ve known your father for eighteen years,” she said. “We’ve been political adversaries for most of that time. Nothing personal. Just the way the game goes.”
“Okay,” I said carefully.
“I’ve been monitoring his operations. The way you do when you’re trying to understand an opponent.
And I came across some very interesting information.
About your divorce. About the attorney representing you.
About the particular nature of the relationship that seems to have developed between you and Mr. Cain. ”
She slid a folder across the table.
I didn’t open it.
“I’m not interested in your files, Senator.”
“You might want to be. These are photographs. Old photographs. From when Mr. Cain was married to his previous wife, Helena. From when your mother was still alive. Very intimate photographs. The kind of photographs that suggest Mr. Cain’s interest in your family might have predated your mother’s death. ”
“You’re lying,” I said.
“Look,” she said simply.
I opened the folder.
There were photographs inside.
Three of them. All of them from a similar time period, based on the clothing and the hair and the particular way the light looked in the images.
One: Atlas and Helena at a gallery opening, his hand on her lower back.
Two: Atlas and Helena at some kind of party, his face very close to hers as they talked.
Three: Atlas and someone else — not my mother, a different woman — at a restaurant. His hand on her arm. The kind of hand placement that could mean anything. That could mean nothing.
I looked at the third photograph for a long second.
I knew the woman.
I had not seen her in twenty years.
It was Helena’s older sister, Margot, who had come to dinner with Atlas and Helena several times when I was very small.
Margot had moved to London in 2008 and had not come back.
Helena had stopped speaking to her. Atlas had not, to my knowledge, mentioned her in fifteen years.
The photograph was at a restaurant I recognized — the old Le Cirque on 65th — which had closed in 2009.
I knew exactly when the photograph had been taken.
It had been the spring of 2007. I knew because the woman across the table had been wearing a turquoise pendant that her grandmother had given her for her thirtieth birthday in March of that year.
I knew because I had been at the same restaurant a week later, with my mother, and Atlas had been at a table by the window that night with Helena, and my mother had said, very quietly, *that’s a marriage that’s not going to make it. *
It had not made it.
It had not made it because of a great many things, of which one was probably a sister-in-law.
I pulled my eyes away from the photograph.
“These are old,” I said.
“These are old,” she confirmed. “The implication is that Mr. Cain’s interests have always run toward women in your family circle. That perhaps his interest in you is not a new development. That perhaps your mother might have been aware of an inappropriate dynamic before she passed away.”
I closed the folder.
“My mother died eight years ago,” I said. “These photographs are from before I was even eighteen. Even if they suggested something inappropriate — which they don’t — what you’re implying is illegal.”
“I’m not implying anything criminal,” Ardent said smoothly.
“I’m simply presenting you with context.
With the understanding that when you file your divorce from Tristan Beauchamp and when you begin your relationship with Atlas Cain publicly, the narrative is going to be very different depending on who controls it first.”
“The narrative,” I repeated.