12. Nolan
TWELVE
NOLAN
Gerald Ashworth had given me access to the philanthropic portfolio review two weeks ago. A gesture of trust — or Hugh's way of keeping me visible, contained, useful. The philanthropic files were clean. Meticulously clean.
I'd been mapping board relationships in the margins of legitimate work, building a case that looked like diligence and functioned as demolition.
The timeline to a board seat was eight months.
Maybe six, if Gerald continued championing my involvement.
Hugh had mentioned it twice — casually. "Fresh perspective on the advisory committee.
Someone who understands acquisitions from the inside.
" His hand on my shoulder. The warm patriarch, opening another door.
I was close. The architecture was almost complete. Fifteen years of patience narrowed to a sequence of moves I could see laid out in front of me like a chessboard in the final third — the pieces reduced, the paths limited, the endgame visible.
I closed the Helios file and opened the Albright portfolio review I was supposed to be finishing. My fingers moved across the keyboard, entering notes, adjusting projections.
A flash of gold past the glass wall. I looked up.
Soleil was in the lobby.
She stood near the elevator bank with her hand on Hugh's arm, her head tipped back, laughing at something he'd said.
Her curls were loose, windblown from the street, a few strands caught against her cheek.
She wore a camel coat over something dark, and the canvas tote on her shoulder was stuffed with what looked like fabric samples.
A daughter stopping by to see her father on his turf.
Hugh's arm was around her shoulder. He was beaming. She kissed his cheek.
My hands went still on the keyboard.
She kissed that cheek freely, without calculation, warmth offered as a default because she'd never been taught to ration it.
She didn't know those two acts were at war with each other.
She didn't know her boyfriend was sitting 50 ft.
away, inside her father's company, at her father's invitation, using her trust as a system badge.
The thought didn't hit like a revelation. It hit like something physical — slow, rising.
Every morning, I walked into this building with that badge, sat at this desk and smiled at Hugh's jokes. I photographed his financial records while his daughter slept in my bed with her hand on my chest.
I closed the laptop and pressed my palms flat against the desk. The surface was cool, solid. I counted the grain lines in the wood until my breathing leveled.
Through the glass, Hugh squeezed Soleil's shoulder and said something that made her nod. His eyes swept the floor and found me through the glass. He raised his hand and waved.
I stood, buttoned my jacket, and walked out.
The lobby smelled like her before I reached them — rosemary and vanilla, cutting through the sterile air of Lattimore's fourteenth floor like something living had entered a room designed to keep living things out. She turned at the sound of my footsteps. Her face changed.
The brightness was there, but it dimmed. 1°. A light turned down rather than off. Her smile thinned at the corners. Her eyes held mine for a beat, then moved to Hugh, and the warmth she had withdrawn from me she gave to him.
"Daddy, has Nolan been settling in well?" She tucked her hand into the crook of Hugh's elbow. Her chin lifted. "He's been so busy I've barely seen him."
Hugh chuckled. "He's been a godsend. Gerald can't stop singing his praises." He clapped my shoulder. "We're lucky to have him."
"Daddy, tell Nolan we should all have dinner soon. The four of us. Rhys, too, if he'll answer his phone."
Direct address to Hugh. Third person for me. I was standing 2 ft. from her, and she was making me a noun in someone else's sentence. Hugh didn't notice the architecture of it — or if he did, the warm father let it slide. His phone buzzed. He glanced at the screen.
"I've got Harrison in five." He kissed Soleil's forehead. "Stay as long as you want. The café downstairs has that lavender thing you like." He pointed at me. "Take care of my girl."
He walked toward the executive corridor. His stride was unhurried. His shoulders were set. The silver hair caught the light as he turned the corner and disappeared.
The lobby emptied around us. A receptionist typed. An elevator chimed. The hum of the building filled the space where Hugh's warmth had been.
"How's the gallery?" I asked.
"Busy." She was looking at the elevator. Not at me. "Rafael's new series is coming together. Margaux is handling the catalog. I'm managing."
"Soleil."
"I should go. I just came to drop off those fabric samples for Daddy's office renovation.
Catherine's expecting them." She adjusted the tote on her shoulder, still not looking at me.
Her jaw was set in a way I recognized — not anger, not yet, but the scaffolding around it.
The structure a person builds when they're holding something back, and the holding is costing them.
She turned toward the elevator.
I fell in step beside her. She walked to one of the doors and pressed the button for going down. I watched as she avoided my gaze, her fingers tapping against her tote.
"Can we talk?"
"We're talking."
"You're looking away from me. That's different."
Her fingers stopped tapping. She gave a quick glance in my direction, then back at the numbers above the elevator doors.
"Soleil. Please."
Her hand reached for the elevator button again when my fingers closed around her wrist. Not hard. Just enough to slow the momentum. She went rigid. Her pulse jumped against my thumb.
I pulled. Gently. She resisted for a beat — her arm stiff, her weight leaning toward the elevator — and then something gave. I opened the door to an empty office beside the elevator and guided her through it, closing the door behind us.
The room was dark except for the afternoon light coming through the blinds. A desk, two chairs, and a dry-erase board with last month's projections still written in blue marker. Her silhouette stood in the striped light, her arms crossed, her chin raised.
I leaned in and kissed her.
Her lips softened for a second. Instinct. Her hand found my chest — not gripping, just landing. The reflex of a body that had learned where to reach when his mouth found hers. I could taste the lavender from the café downstairs. Her fingers curled against my shirt.
She pushed me back.
"Are you going to apologize again?" Her palm stayed flat against my chest, holding the distance she'd created. Her eyes were bright, hot. "That's what you do, isn't it? Apologize, disappear, apologize. The cycle."
"That's not — "
"You went cold at the restaurant. You sat across from me, and I could feel you leave.
And then you walked me home as if nothing happened.
I closed my door, and I stood on the other side of it knowing something was wrong and not being able to name it.
" Her voice didn't waver. Her hand didn't move from my chest. "So what is it?
What's the thing you keep not telling me? "
The words were forming. They were lined up behind my teeth, heavy, real, closer to the surface than they'd ever been.
Her face in the striped light. The paint on her wrist — cerulean blue, the same stain she always carried, evidence of a life lived with her hands in beautiful things. Her eyes searched mine.
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
The vibration traveled through my ribs. I pulled it out. The screen was bright in the dim room.
Transfer returned — Adira Reeves. $8,000.
The same amount. The same rhythm. Sent on the first, returned on the third. Twenty-four months of this silence that spoke louder than any conversation. My sister's hands adjusting a grocery bag on a Brooklyn street. Her short hair. Her careful eyes.
The openness that had been building shut. I could feel it happen. The air changed. The temperature dropped.
I locked the screen and put the phone in my pocket.
"What?" Soleil's hand dropped from my chest. She was searching my face, her eyes moving fast, tracking the shift. "What just happened? You were right there. I could see it. And then — " She gestured at my face. "This. The wall. The blank thing you do."
"It's nothing."
"It's not nothing. You change. In a second, you just change." She stepped closer. Her hand found my jaw, turning my face toward hers. "Nolan. Talk to me."
My jaw was locked. My shoulders were rigid.
The notification sat in my pocket like a coal — hot, persistent, radiating a heat that reached into the parts of me I'd spent the last two months trying to quiet.
Adira's face. The grocery bag. The twenty-two-year-old kid holding his sister in a hospital room. The vow.
"I can't," I said.
Her hand fell from my jaw. She stepped back. One step. The distance was small, and it was everything.
"I'm not doing this again." She pulled her arm free from where my hand still rested near her elbow. "I refuse. You don't get to keep pulling me close and then walking into some room in your head where I'm not allowed."
She turned toward the door. Her back to me. Her hand was reaching for the handle when the words started — fast, hot, spilling out in a rush that had been building for weeks.
"You make me crazy. Do you know that?" She was gripping the handle but not turning it.
Her shoulders were tight under the camel coat.
"I like everyone. I have nothing to complain about.
I go through life, people are fine, everything is fine, and then you — " She turned her head.
"You make me so insane that I can't even — I don't have the words for what you do to me.
I had words before you. I had balance. I had a whole life that made sense, and you walked into my gallery looking like you wanted to fight a painting, and now I can't — "
I grabbed her.