Chapter Seventeen Brielle
The supplies don’t put themselves away.
This is something I know now, in the practical, firsthand way that I know things here, which is different from the way I knew things before.
Before, things simply appeared and disappeared from their correct places through some invisible mechanism that I never thought to question.
Food arrived. Laundry returned. The apartment stayed clean. I understood intellectually that people were responsible for these things, but I had never been one of those people, and so the knowledge sat at a comfortable theoretical distance, never requiring anything of me.
Now I know that the paper towels go on the second shelf of the supply closet, not the third, because the third shelf has a slight warp that means anything over a certain weight tips forward, which I discovered last week when an entire case of hand soap did exactly that.
I know that the coffee gets stored above the paper cups and not the other way around because Rory is six feet one and reaches for his coffee before he’s properly awake, and the spatial logic needs to accommodate that.
I know these things because I put them there, and I’ve watched people use them, and I’ve adjusted accordingly.
Jase is still carrying boxes from the car when I start unpacking the cart in the supply closet, and he comes in to find me already two shelves deep and looks at me with the expression he gets when something surprises him in a way he finds pleasing.
“You don’t have to do that,” he says.
“I know,” I say, and keep going.
He sets his boxes down and starts unpacking alongside me without another word, and we work through it in the comfortable quiet that seems to exist naturally between us now, the kind that doesn’t require filling.
By the time we’re done, the afternoon has gotten later, and the station has shifted into its early evening rhythm, quieter and more settled, the loosening that happens when a day winds down without incident.
I go back to the admin office and finish the supply order log and update the expense spreadsheet, and by the time I look up from the desk, the light through the small window has gone the color of weak tea.
My phone is on the corner of the desk where I put it this morning, face down.
I turn it over.
Fourteen notifications. Six missed calls from my mother, which is apparently her number, because it’s always six.
Two from my father, which means my mother has escalated to involving him.
A string of texts from numbers I half recognize, cousins and family friends, and at least one person who I’m fairly certain I’ve met exactly twice at charity events, all of them some variation of are you alright and have you spoken to your mother and we’re all so worried.
Nothing from Richard.
Richard has been silent since I hung up on him, which I expected and which suits me fine. What I did not expect was the tabloid story that Callie texted me a screenshot of four days ago, which I have been looking at intermittently ever since.
MONTGOMERY HEIR MOVES ON: Sources close to Richard Montgomery say the socialite is relieved to be free of his engagement to troubled heiress Brielle Hayes, whose erratic behavior at last week’s society wedding shocked guests. “Richard dodged a bullet,” one insider claims.
Troubled.
Erratic.
I set the phone face down again and look at the ceiling for a moment.
The thing is, a week ago, that story would have undone me.
I would have read the word troubled and felt it settle into some pre-existing groove in my chest, the one my mother spent years carving out, the one that says you are too much and not enough simultaneously, and that the world’s opinion of you is the most important thing about you.
A week ago, I would have called my mother back.
Instead, I pick up the phone one more time, open Callie’s thread, and type: saw it. still don’t care. call me this weekend.
Then I put the phone in my desk drawer and close it.
***
I meet Zack properly for the first time at half past five.
I’ve seen him before, passing in the hallway, the bay, the kitchen, the way you see people in a place you’re new to before you’ve learned their names.
He’s in his early thirties, compact and quiet in the way that some people are naturally quiet, not shy but simply economical with his words, and he comes into the admin office to drop off an incident report and stops when he sees me actually at the desk.
“You’re the one who reorganized the filing system,” he says.
“Guilty,” I say.
He looks around the office with the expression of someone seeing a room they’ve been in a hundred times and finding it different. “I’ve been looking for the March incident reports for two weeks,” he says. “Weston kept telling me they were in there.”
“Third cabinet, second drawer, alphabetical by incident type and then by date,” I say. “March is behind the February divider, not in front of it, because the previous system appears to have been running on reverse chronological order for some months and then switched without explanation.”
He looks at me then goes to the third cabinet, opens the second drawer, and finds what he’s looking for in approximately ten seconds.
“Huh,” he says.
“You’re welcome,” I say.
He takes the report and pauses at the door. “You’re staying, right? Weston said something about you staying on.”
“For now,” I say.
He nods once, with the energy of a man who has decided something. “Good,” he says, and leaves.
I sit with that after he goes.
Good.
Rory appears twenty minutes later for reasons unrelated to filing, which is that he wants to know if I know how to work the scheduling software because he’s been trying to update next month’s rotation for three days, and the system keeps rejecting his inputs.
I do not know how to work the scheduling software, but I spend forty minutes with him figuring it out anyway, which turns out to be mostly a matter of the system requiring fields to be filled in a specific order that isn’t documented anywhere, and by the end of it, Rory looks at me with something close to reverence.
“You’re good at this,” he says.
“I’m good at figuring things out,” I say, which is something I’ve only recently learned about myself and which still feels new in my mouth.
He grins. He has a good grin, wide and uncomplicated. “Same thing,” he says.
By the time Jase returned from Costco with enough supplies to survive a minor apocalypse, the afternoon had slipped into evening.
The kitchen fills up at seven.
Not all at once. These things never happen all at once. Max comes in first, because he’s been at his desk since this morning, and I’ve learned that he surfaces for food with the reliability of someone who treats meals as a logistical requirement, which is not romantic but is somehow very him.
He goes straight to the refrigerator and takes stock of it with the focused assessment he brings to most things.
Jase appears shortly after, having apparently showered at some point in the last hour, and immediately tries to take over whatever Max is doing at the stove, and Max moves him out of the way with the patient efficiency of someone who has been doing this for years.
“You always do this,” Jase says.
“You always burn the onions,” Max says.
“Once,” Jase says. “I burned the onions once.”
“Twice,” says Evan from the doorway, and Jase points at him.
“Nobody asked you.”
Evan drops into the chair across from me at the kitchen table with the easy looseness of someone whose shift ended an hour ago and who has decided that the rest of the evening belongs to him.
He’s in a plain dark t-shirt, and his hair is still a little damp, and he props his chin on his hand and looks at me across the table with an expression that is partly general contentment and partly something more specific that I have been noticing more frequently over the past few days.
“How was Costco?” he asks.
“Life-changing,” I say.
“She’d never been,” Jase calls from the stove, where he’s been permitted to stir something under close supervision.
“I gathered,” Evan says. “We were all waiting for that.”
“You were not,” I say.
“We absolutely were,” he says. “It was only a matter of time. You can’t live here and not go to Costco. It’s practically an initiation.”
Zack comes in from the hallway and pulls out the chair next to me without ceremony, which tells me the filing system has bought me some social currency with him.
Rory follows, and they settle themselves at the table, and the kitchen becomes loud in a comfortable way, full of overlapping conversations.
Max sets a large pan in the center of the table without announcing what it is, and everyone reaches for it immediately with the coordinated chaos of people who have eaten together enough times to have developed an instinctive understanding of the logistics involved.
I watch this for a while before I reach for anything.
I see Jase pour water for everyone at his end of the table without being asked, because he always does, because it’s the kind of thing he notices.
Evan intercepts the bread basket before Rory can take the last piece and hands it to me instead, not making a thing of it, just doing it.
I watch Max eat quietly, and I catch him glancing at me twice in the space of five minutes.
I look back at him the second time.
He looks away first, which is new.
Across the table, Jase is in the middle of a story about a supply run two years ago that apparently ended with a cart full of groceries abandoned in a parking lot and a minor diplomatic incident involving a neighboring station that I cannot fully follow, but which has Rory and Zack laughing hard enough that Rory has to put his fork down.
I am laughing too, I realize.
Actually laughing, the kind that comes from somewhere real, that doesn’t require any performance or calculation or consideration of whether it’s appropriate.
The kind that happens because something is funny and you’re somewhere that lets you be the version of yourself that laughs when things are funny.
My mother’s dinners were never like this.
They were beautiful, her dinners, in the way that things designed primarily to be looked at are beautiful.
The right flowers, the right China, the right seating arrangement, the right conversation topics, all of it assembled with the precision of a stage set and the warmth of one.
You ate, and you performed, and you went home, and you felt full and somehow also empty, the way you feel after eating something that had no nutritional value, just the appearance of it.
This table is not beautiful in that way.
The pan in the center has a handle that’s slightly loose and wobbles when someone reaches for it.
Rory has his elbows on the table despite the fact that someone, probably Max, has asked him not to every single meal for years, based on the look that gets exchanged when it happens.
The conversation goes in six directions simultaneously, and nobody follows any of them to a conclusion before starting a new one.
And I feel, sitting here in the middle of it, more fed than I have in years.
Evan catches my eye from across the table and raises his glass slightly, a small private acknowledgment of something, and I raise mine back, and he smiles, and it’s easy and uncomplicated on the surface and something else slightly underneath, and I file that something else away for later.
Jase finishes his story. Everyone recovers.
Max refills the water glasses that are running low, making his way around the table, and when he gets to mine, he pauses briefly before filling it, and I look up, and he looks at me for exactly one second with an expression that doesn’t have a name but that I am starting to be able to read.
I am, I think, in a significant amount of trouble.
The good kind.
The best kind, actually, the kind I used to read about in books and think was invented, the kind that shows up without announcing itself and refuses to be organized into something manageable.
Outside, Brooklyn does what it always does, indifferent and alive. My phone is in a drawer in the admin office. The tabloid story exists somewhere on the internet where I don’t have to look at it. My mother’s six missed calls are exactly where I left them.
And I am here, at this table, in this kitchen, with these people, and I am full in every way that matters.
I reach for the bread basket.
Evan gets there first and hands it to me.
I take it without saying anything, and he smiles again, and across the table, Jase catches this and looks between us.
I look at my plate.
I am, I think, in a very significant amount of trouble.