22. Chapter 22
Isla
I'm standing on the steps of the Garner Gallery in the cold with my trust fund restored, the man who stalked me in handcuffs, and no idea what comes next, because every plan I made was built around fighting and now there is nothing left to fight.
This is not a complaint. I have been fighting since October and I am tired in a way that is not unpleasant, the kind of tired that comes from having done the thing rather than from avoiding it.
The city is doing its Friday night thing around us — cabs, pedestrians, someone across the street talking too loud on their phone — and none of it is aware that anything has happened.
Somewhere two blocks from here a man who watched me sleep from a building across the street is in the back of a police vehicle, and the city is indifferent, and I find this, right now, deeply comforting.
I spent a long time being afraid of things that lived at the edge of my awareness. It is strange to have the thing resolved and be standing here in the cold, still upright.
Matt says something low to Drake. Drake nods and goes to the car. Matt says something to Lina, who has been standing three feet away doing the very Lina thing of being present without requiring anything from me, and Lina squeezes my arm once and goes to hail a cab.
Then it is just us and the cold and the steps.
"How are you doing?" he says.
"Ask me again in twenty minutes," I say.
Within thirty minutes of the arrest, three news vans are parked on the block.
Ivy calls from Match Maven. I tell her we're not handling the narrative, we're letting the arrest record speak for itself, and I hang up before she can argue.
She will argue anyway by text for the next several hours — I can already see the messages stacking up — but I'll address it tomorrow, which is a sentence I have never been able to say before about a press situation and I intend to enjoy saying it.
My phone rings six more times in the ten minutes we stand outside the gallery.
I let four of them go to voicemail. I answer one, which is Cole confirming Conrad's call.
The sixth is a number I don't recognize and I decline it.
Two minutes later, I get another call from a different unknown number, which tells me it's a journalist who has two phones, which tells me someone leaked the arrest location before Ramirez's team had finished processing the scene.
I mention this to Matt. He says he knows, and that he is already talking to Drake about it. Of course he is.
Matt steers me toward Drake's car with one hand at the small of my back — not the public-facing precision of the last two months but something more ordinary, the way you touch someone when there is no one watching whose opinion you are managing.
I get in the back and he gets in beside me and Drake pulls out into traffic and I sit in the backseat and let myself feel the full weight of the last two months.
I give myself five minutes.
I look down at my boots. Flat-soled, low heel, the only pair in my closet I can run in.
I put them on this morning without thinking about it — the same automatic calculation I've been making for weeks now, the same part of my brain that notes exits and counts seconds, except this morning it reached into my closet and made a decision for me before I was even awake enough to notice.
I am only noticing it now, in the back of a car, with Frey in handcuffs two blocks away.
My body has been preparing to run for longer than I let myself realize.
I think about the bruise on my wrist — three days old now, the purple gone yellow-green at the edges, a thing that will fade the rest of the way by next week and that I will probably forget the exact shape of once it does.
I think about my hand on the phone Tuesday night, face-down on the kitchen table, the hours I spent not calling Matt — not because I didn't want him there, but because he'd ended things to keep Elias out of this, and I wasn't going to be the reason that lasted less than a week.
I think about the other reason underneath that one, the one I said out loud to him for the first time that same night — the old reflex, deciding for him what he could handle before he got a say.
I let myself feel all of it. The fear in the alley, which I did not let myself feel at the time.
The sound of his kitchen door closing behind me, more than a week ago now, not a slam, which would have been easier, but something quieter, the sound of someone trying not to make a sound.
The two hours I spent working alone with the lights on, before he showed up anyway.
I let it move through me — not as a list this time, just as weight, just as the thing it actually was while it was happening — and I do not fight it and I do not perform anything, because there is no one to perform for.
Matt is beside me, looking out the window, giving me this.
Five minutes.
Then I put it away.
I'm not going to pretend that I'm finished with any of it. There will be a night somewhere in the next few weeks where it catches up with me, but I'll deal with it when it comes. But I'm finished with it for tonight, and tonight is enough.
Matt's phone rings. He looks at the screen and something changes in his face before he even answers — not alarm, the opposite of alarm, something loosening.
"Hey, bud," he says.
I can hear Elias's voice on the other end, fast and bright, the particular cadence of a kid who has been waiting to say something and has finally been allowed to.
I can't make out the words, but I don't need to — I can read it in Matt's face, which is doing something I have not seen it do before.
Not the small tell I've learned to watch for.
Something wider, something that starts at his mouth and moves all the way up, unguarded, the kind of expression a person doesn't know they're making.
"Yeah?" Matt says. "Tell me about the diorama.
" A pause, and he actually laughs — a real laugh, low and surprised out of him.
"He painted the fish green too? ... No, that's — Elias, that's perfect.
That's exactly right." Another pause, longer, and his voice changes register, drops into something quieter.
"I'm okay, bud. Yeah. I'm coming to get you tomorrow.
First thing." He listens for a moment. "I know.
I missed you too. Go finish your dinner — I'll see you tomorrow. "
He hangs up. He sits there for a second with the phone in his hand, looking at it.
"Diorama go okay?" I ask, even though I already know.
"He painted the fish green." Matt's voice is rough.
He clears his throat. "The whole ecosystem.
Fish included." He looks out the window, and I watch him take a breath that goes all the way down, the kind of breath I imagine he hasn't been able to take in months — not since a photograph of a seven-year-old outside a school landed on his desk and he had to decide, in real time, how much of his life could survive being looked at.
"He's safe," Matt says. Not to me, exactly. Just out loud, like he's confirming it to the air, to himself, to whatever part of him has been holding the opposite possibility since October.
"He's safe," I agree.
Matt nods. He puts the phone away. And for a moment — just a moment, in the back of a car, with the city going by — he lets himself have it.
Cole is waiting at my apartment when we arrive.
He hugs me with both arms the moment we walk in, no preamble — Cole always knows when a moment requires contact before words.
He holds on a beat longer than necessary and I let him, and when he steps back his eyes are bright and he doesn't try to hide it at all.
He's the one person in my life who has never needed me to perform fine, and tonight I don't even have to try.
He shakes Matt's hand. Not the polite handshake of a man being introduced to his sister's boyfriend — the kind that comes from watching someone do their job well under impossible conditions, from four weeks of shared calls and forwarded documents and the trust challenge filed because of what they built together.
Matt receives it without comment, which is correct.
The three of us sit at my kitchen table.
Cole walks us through the legal mechanics: both trusts release on a forty-eight-hour processing timeline.
Conrad retains full control of Wrenwood Hospitality and the family office — this is the part of the settlement that cost us something, keeping him in place, but it's the cost of a clean resolution and we both agreed it was worth it.
In exchange, Cole and I have signed a settlement agreement: no legal action against Conrad over Frey, no press about Conrad's role.
"He keeps his company. He loses his financial leverage over both of us, permanently.
The rest of what he holds — the family name, the board relationships, the Wrenwood brand — stays his. "
I think about six months of Cole working quietly, building the mechanism, waiting for something clean enough to act on. I think about what it means that my brother did this for us both without being asked.
"Thank you," I say. "For all of it."
He looks at me. "You'd have done the same."
"You've been doing this for six months."
"You've been doing this your whole life," he says. "This was the least I could do."
Matt is looking at the kitchen counter, giving us the moment, which I appreciate more than I can say.
"It's done," Cole says.
I look at the kitchen table. It is everything I wanted and it feels quieter than I expected — not anticlimactic, not flat, just quiet. Like a sound that has been running for months finally stopping, and the silence that's left is not empty but is its own kind of full.
"Yeah," I say. "It is."
Cole mentions, before he leaves, that Conrad said he called me this morning. Not Cole — me. I look at my phone. Sure enough, I have a missed call from my father and I had not noticed, which tells you something about how today went.
"You don't have to listen to it tonight," Cole says.
"I know," I say. I open the voicemail anyway.
Conrad's voice on the recording is not the boardroom voice. Not the quarterly-projections voice or the one he uses when he has a folder and an agenda.
"Isla. I know you won't pick up. I know why.
" A pause. "I'm not going to tell you I was right, because I wasn't. I went further than I should have and I kept going when I should have stopped, and that is something I am going to have to sit with.
" Another pause, longer. "I hope you're safe. I hope — be well, Isla."
I listen to it twice.
The second time I notice things I missed on the first pass.
The pause before be well that sounds like a man who started a different sentence and stopped himself.
The flatness of his voice when he says my name at the end, not the boardroom inflection, just my name, like he is saying it to himself in a quiet room.
The thing I feel is not forgiveness. It is not nothing either.
It is something complicated and without a clean name, the feeling of a door that has been closed for a long time being left slightly ajar — not by my hand and not by his, just by the way things accumulate and shift and eventually arrive somewhere neither person planned for.
I do not know what to do with the door yet.
I am going to leave it there for now and come back to it.
"I don't want to talk to him. Not yet. Maybe not for a while." I tell Cole.
"I know. It's okay." And I know he won't push.
After Cole leaves, Matt and I are alone for the first time since the gallery.
He sets a single piece of paper on my kitchen counter. I look at it. Then I look at him.
It's the Match Maven engagement contract.
The termination clause is initialled on his end, in his handwriting, with the date in the corner.
I think about the first time I read this document, sitting across from Celeste in the conference room, reading it line by line while the most infuriating man I had ever seen arranged himself in the chair across from mine and nodded once at Celeste like he had already decided how much of the room he was going to occupy.
That was two months ago. I've known him for two months.
"Celeste confirmed the dissolution this afternoon," he says.
I look at the paper. The arrangement that brought us together is formally over.
There's a line at the bottom for my initials, which he has left blank, and I understand from this — from the blank line and the way he set it down without preamble, and the way he's standing across my kitchen island with his hands loose at his sides — that he isn't telling me what this means for us.
He's just giving me the facts and waiting to see what I do with it.
Two months. I've known him for two months.
In that short time, I've learned his coffee order and the sound of his footsteps in the hallway and which floorboard in the loft creaks, and I know what he looks like when he is containing something and what he looks like when he has let it go, and I know that the line is blank because he decided, somewhere between the gallery and my kitchen counter, that this was the only honest way to do it.
I look at the contract for a long moment.
I look at him.
"Do you want to stay for dinner?" I say.
Not because the script says so. Not because Ivy is watching. Not because any arrangement or leverage or managed timeline requires it.
Just because I am asking.
Something moves in his expression — not quite a smile, something wider than I've seen before, something I don't have a name for yet. He looks at the contract on the counter and then at me.
"Yes," he says. "I do."