26. Chapter 26
Isla
I'm standing in the kitchen of our apartment in Brooklyn six months after a real proposal and three months after a real wedding, watching Elias explain to Lina why Percy is the best dog that has ever lived, and I'm so happy it almost doesn't feel real.
Not the presented-happy I have been doing since I was old enough to understand what was expected of me at parties.
Not the tabloid-happy that photographs well and means nothing.
This is the kind that's quiet and inconvenient and sits in the chest like something that has finally found the right room.
Lina is listening with complete attention, which is either genuine interest or the kind of sustained generosity that is indistinguishable from it.
With Lina it is usually both. Percy is asleep on the couch behind them, one paw hanging off the edge, entirely unbothered by the tribute being delivered in his honor.
He is a Rottweiler and he weighs sixty-three pounds and Elias has been sleeping with him since the first night, which Matt allowed without comment because Matt also sleeps better with Percy in the room, a fact he hasn't stated out loud and doesn't need to.
We got him from a shelter where Lina volunteers.
She had been sending me photos of dogs for three months — casually, without pressure, in the way Lina does things she has decided are going to happen — and then one Tuesday she sent a photo of a puppy sitting in a kennel looking like he owned it, and Elias saw it over my shoulder and said that's the one with the certainty of someone whose mind was already made up.
When we went to meet him, Elias looked at him for thirty seconds.
"He looks like Percy Jackson," he said.
There was a beat. Lina, who was there for the occasion, looked at the puppy and then back at Elias with complete seriousness.
"I totally see it," she said.
Elias has been essentially in love with her ever since, which I consider a reasonable position.
Lina arrived tonight with wine and the energy of a woman who has information she has been holding for a week and is ready to deploy.
She'll tell me whatever it is when Elias goes to bed.
I have learned to wait for Lina. She has learned, over twenty-some years of friendship, that I will not ask, and that this is not indifference but its opposite.
She looked around the apartment when she arrived. She looked at the bookshelves and the kitchen island and the rain jacket on the hook by the door and the shoes Elias had left in the hallway, and then she looked at me and she smiled, which was its own kind of sentence.
We moved into a place that is bigger than Matt's loft and smaller than my old Manhattan apartment, with a room for Elias and a wall of bookshelves he helped organize by subject matter and then by color within subject matter, which is an approach I find both deeply incorrect and genuinely impressive.
He's very proud of it. I have not touched it.
The kitchen island is large enough that two people can work at it without elbowing each other.
We do this almost every night — Matt with whatever he is running for Apex Elite, me with whatever the foundation needs, a bottle of wine between us, the quiet that has become the sound of my life.
Elias appears periodically to deliver updates.
Percy follows him everywhere and has recently learned to sit, which Elias treats as evidence of exceptional intelligence.
I kept my heels. I also acquired, without intending to, a pair of flat sneakers that live by the back door for the mornings when Elias and Percy and I walk to the park before Matt's first call. I do not mention them to anyone. Some things are private.
The Wrenwood Foundation's annual report is on the counter.
This year's numbers are the strongest in the foundation's history — driven partly by the press attention that followed a period I would not choose to repeat and partly by a funding restructuring Cole pushed through once our trusts were no longer subject to Conrad's approval.
We control our own money now. Conrad still controls Wrenwood Hospitality and everything that comes with it — the board relationships, the family name in certain rooms, the weight of the Wrenwood brand — which means he is not out of our lives, exactly. He is just no longer the only door.
We had dinner last month. The three of us — me, Conrad, and Cole — at a restaurant I chose, ninety minutes, careful and civil and not as terrible as I had anticipated.
Conrad did not manage the dinner. He sat across the table and he was tired and genuinely interested in the foundation numbers and he asked once about Elias, which cost him something to ask, and I answered honestly.
I'm not there yet with my father. I'm further along than I was, and I'm doing it at my own pace, and no one is telling me what the timeline should look like.
My mother is at a different spa. I haven't called. I'm not ready, and that's also fine.
Matt asked me how it went when I got home.
I said okay, genuinely okay — not the version where okay is a lid on something that is not okay, the real version.
He said good. He didn't push or ask follow-up questions and he handed me a glass of wine and sat next to me on the couch and that was the end of it, which is exactly what I needed.
That's the thing I keep returning to, that I didn't know I was looking for: someone who knows the difference between when I need to be asked and when I need to be left alone, and who has learned which is which without me having to explain it.
It took him about three weeks. I was briefly furious about it, because some defenses are easier to maintain when they have not been quietly and methodically dismantled by a man who takes notes.
Matt comes up behind me while I'm watching Elias and Lina and puts his arms around me, his chin near my temple. He is quiet for a moment.
"She's going to be there all night," he says quietly. "He has twelve more points."
"I know." I put my hands over his. "I'm not stopping it."
He makes a sound that is close to a laugh. I feel it against my shoulder.
This is the version of him that almost no one sees and that I get to keep: the man who laughs in his own kitchen, who reads to Elias in a voice he does not use anywhere else, who shows up to things before he is asked and stays longer than he needs to.
Last week he bought me a rain jacket. A practical one, the right kind for the weather, in a color he knows I like.
He presented it without commentary, the way he gives me most things — as if it's obvious rather than deliberate — and I didn't say anything about it because I didn't have to.
This is also the version of me that I'm still getting used to: the one who doesn't have to say anything about it.
Who doesn't have to manufacture gratitude or deflect with a joke or hold the thing at arm's length so no one can see how much it means.
I've been practicing. Matt is patient in a way that makes practice possible, which is a thing I didn't know I needed until I had it.
I turn around and look at him.
"I didn't expect this," I say.
"What?"
"Any of it." I look at him. "The way it turned out."
He looks back at me with the expression I have been cataloguing for eight months, the one that is not quite neutral and not quite a smile. Then he says: "Neither did I."
He says it the way he says things that are true — simply, without elaboration, in the tone of a man who has already decided and is content with the decision. I take it and hold it, the way I hold most of the things he gives me that I do not know how to put into other words.
Lina leaves with promises to return for dinner Thursday and the information she was holding, which turns out to be about a new restaurant in the West Village that she has already made a reservation for, because Lina never delivers news without a plan attached.
Elias is at the table drawing something elaborate that he informs us is a security map of the apartment. Percy's at his feet. Matt examines the map with complete seriousness.
"This corridor is a vulnerability," he says, pointing.
"I know," Elias says. "I'm still working on it."
"The back window also needs coverage."
"Dad. I know."
"I'm just saying."
"You always say." But he's not annoyed. He is eight years old and his father is taking his security map seriously, which is all he wanted.
I stand in the kitchen and watch the two of them — Elias pointing out the corridor vulnerability again, Matt nodding with the attention of a man taking this seriously, which he is, completely, because this is Elias and Elias gets taken seriously — and I think about a conference room eight months ago and a woman in full armor who walked in looking for a way out of a corner.
She thought she was there for a business arrangement.
She thought she could manage the terms, maintain the distance, keep the whole thing at the level of a transaction.
She had a list of things she did not want: a real engagement, a real partner, anything she could not walk away from cleanly.
She was wrong about all of it, as she has been wrong about most of the things that turned out to matter.
What she found was not what she was looking for. It was better. It was considerably messier and considerably better, and she would not trade a day of it.
I pour two cups of coffee. I bring Matt his. He takes it the way he always does — without looking away from the security map, one hand closing around the mug and the other finding mine.
I hold on.
Everything we built started as a transaction and became the truest thing I've ever been part of. Every morning I wake up and choose it, and so does he, and that is the whole story. It is, in fact, a very good story.
I am deeply grateful to have been wrong.