24. Chapter 24
Isla
Iam at the foundation's rescheduled gala three weeks after the arrest, wearing a red dress and my own name without a script attached to it, and Matthew Beckett is at my side because he wants to be.
This is a new thing. It's going to take some getting used to.
The room reacts to us the way rooms always react to us — attention, whispers, a murmur that moves through the crowd like weather.
I've been in rooms like this my entire life and the attention has never once bothered me, but tonight there's a different quality to it.
They have read the story. The arrest, the trust challenge, the Page Six photos from the gallery steps with his arm around my waist. They're looking at us to see if the real version matches.
The real version is better, I think. But I suppose I'm biased.
I let them look. I have nothing to hide and my dress is amazing — red, the kind that makes a room adjust slightly when you walk in, which I have needed for approximately two months and am enjoying now.
A journalist from a society column corners me near the bar. She is good at her job, which means she doesn't ask me about Frey or Conrad or the trust challenge. She asks me whether the engagement was ever real.
I consider this for a moment.
"It started as an arrangement," I say. "It became something else entirely. Now it's something that matters."
She looks at Matt. "And for you?"
He looks at her with the expression of a man who has decided exactly how much of himself this conversation is going to get. "I'd say the same."
She writes something down. She looks back at me. "The foundation's work has received a significant amount of attention this cycle. Is that something you intend to leverage?"
"The foundation does what it does regardless of who's paying attention," I say. "The attention is nice. The work is the point."
She nods. She thanks us and moves on, and I watch her go with the satisfaction of a woman who has given a journalist exactly nothing to work with while being entirely quotable.
Matt, standing close enough that I feel the warmth of his arm against mine.
He's wearing the expression that I've been cataloguing for three months — not quite neutral, not quite a smile, the expression of a man who is paying attention to everything and commenting on almost none of it — and it's a very effective expression and I'm extremely aware of how much I like it.
"That was diplomatic," he says, when she is out of earshot.
"I'm a deeply diplomatic person," I say.
"Is that why you smashed a photographer's camera with your heel?"
"That was strategic. And he was a dick."
Lina finds me near the silent auction tables at eight-thirty.
She hugs me the way she hugs me when there is a lot to say and not enough room to say it — properly, both arms, the kind that requires both of us to ignore the event happening around us. I hold on for a moment.
"Forty percent," she says, when we step back.
"What?"
"The foundation raised forty percent more this quarter than last year." She says it with a straight face and a slight glint that means she has been waiting to deliver this information and has timed it precisely. "Press coverage driving awareness to the Wrenwood Foundation's mission."
I look at her. "You're telling me my stalker was good for the foundation?"
"I'm telling you that you are extremely good for the foundation and that the coverage just happened to follow you around." She picks up a glass of champagne from a passing tray. "The stalker was incidental."
"You are insufferable," I say.
"I love you too."
She meets Matt properly for the first time tonight — they have technically been in the same room before, crossing paths in my apartment, then the gallery and briefly on the sidewalk after, but this is the first time there has been space for an actual introduction.
She shakes his hand. She looks at him with the expression she reserves for people she is assessing seriously.
He looks back at her with the expression he uses when he has already assessed someone and found the person worth his attention.
"You seem like you're good for her. But if you hurt her," Lina says, pleasantly, "I will be quiet and polite about it and you will never know when it's coming."
He considers this. "Noted," he says.
"Good." She looks at me. "I like him."
"You just threatened him."
"I can like him and threaten him. Those aren't mutually exclusive." She picks up her champagne. "He didn't flinch. That's the important part."
She nods once, satisfied, and excuses herself to go bid on what appears to be a weekend in Vermont. I watch her go.
"She means it," I say.
"I know," he says. "That's why I like her."
Conrad arrives at nine.
I didn't expect him. He has a seat at this event — the foundation and Wrenwood Hospitality have been intertwined since before I was running it — but given everything, I assumed he would have the sense to stay away. The fact that he didn't is its own kind of information about where he is.
He crosses the room toward me with the careful posture of a man who knows he is on uncertain ground.
He doesn't try to pull me aside or get me alone or stage the conversation in a way that would give him any kind of advantage.
He stops in front of me — in front of me and Matt and Lina, who has reappeared from the Vermont bidding with her champagne and is watching Conrad with the polite attentiveness of a woman who has heard everything and forgotten nothing — and he doesn't try to manage the room.
"I behaved in a way that was indefensible," he says. Not an opening to a negotiation. Not a preamble to something else. Just that, delivered plainly, in front of witnesses. "The trust challenge was deserved. I hope that at some point you will be willing to have a conversation."
He does not ask for forgiveness. He is too intelligent to ask for what he has not earned. He asks for a conversation, which is the smallest possible request and, coming from Conrad Wrenwood, the most honest one I have ever heard him make.
I look at my father. He looks back at me with the expression from the voicemail — tired, careful, hope held at a distance.
I think about the breakfast table and Frey in the east corridor and the trust document delivered like a notification, and I think about the voicemail I have listened to four times and the door left slightly ajar.
"I'll think about it," I say.
He nods. He does not push. He says good evening to Matt, who receives it with the contained civility of a man who has not forgotten anything and has chosen, tonight, to keep it.
He says good evening to Lina, who receives it with a smile that would pass for warm if you did not know her.
Conrad leaves the same way he came — carefully, watching his footing.
I don't know what to do with that. Not yet. It was more than I expected from him, and I am not going to let that mean more than it means, and I am not going to let it mean less than it means either. I am going to let it be what it is, which is a beginning, if anything at all.
Lina looks at me. I look at her. Matt is quiet beside me, his hand finding the small of my back — not a gesture, just there — and the room continues around us.
"That was more than I expected," Lina says.
"Me too," I say.
Matt is quiet for a moment. Then: "Do you want to leave?"
I look around the room. The gala, the foundation, the forty percent, the board members I should thank and the donors I should acknowledge. All of it real, all of it mine, all of it still here tomorrow.
"Yes," I say. "Yes."
We leave early. Not because the gala has been hard — it has not been hard, it has been exactly what it needed to be — but because neither of us needs to be here and the event has done what it needed to do and we would both rather be somewhere else.
In the car Matt takes my hand without looking at me.
The easy way someone does it when they have stopped counting the gesture.
I look at our hands in my lap and I think about a conference room three months ago and the woman I was then — every piece of armor in place, prepared to hate the man across from me, entirely wrong about almost everything that came next.
I am deeply grateful to have been wrong.
I don't say any of this out loud. Instead I just squeeze his hand and he squeezes back and the city moves past the windows.
After a while he says, without preamble: "What do you want your days to look like? Now that you get to decide."
I look at him.
It's a simple question. It shouldn't stop me the way it does.
But in twenty-six years of people asking what I want — from the foundation, from the trust, from Conrad, from the arrangement — no one has asked it without something attached to it.
No agenda. No framework. Just: what do you want your days to look like?
I open my mouth and close it again.
"I don't know yet," I say.
He nods. He is not disappointed. He is not logging it or marking it for follow-up. He looks like a man who asked the right question and is content to sit with the fact that the answer exists somewhere, even if it's not ready yet.
"Take your time," he says.
I look out the window. Friday night in the city — everyone lit up and going somewhere they chose to go. I think about what I would choose. I think about it for the rest of the drive and I am still thinking about it when we get home, which feels like the beginning of something rather than the end.