Chapter 22 #2
Ricky was watching her. He was performing casual—hands in pockets, weight shifted, the posture of a man with nowhere in particular to be. But his eyes kept finding her face, and each time they did, something brief and unmistakably unguarded moved through him.
“Enjoy the evening,” Hank said.
He moved on. Behind him, Zsa Zsa said something low, prompting Ricky’s real laugh again—completely enamored.
Chad found him fifteen minutes later. Flushed. Wine glass he’d been nursing for an hour.
“Diana introduced me to a woman from the Phillips Collection. I forgot how to speak. I may have told her I liked her shoes.”
“Did you?”
“Like her shoes? They were fine. That’s not the point.” A sip of wine. “I lose the ability to function around anyone with museum credentials.”
“You’re functioning now.”
“This is controlled panic.”
“In Washington, those are the same thing.”
The genuine smile—quick, cracking through. Then his eyes moved across the room and stopped.
Ricky and Zsa Zsa. Still talking. Ricky’s phone was in his hand, unused.
“Huh,” Chad said.
“You know her?”
“I know Wilson. Demarco’s kid.” Chad was watching Ricky with the bartender’s eye. “Ricky’s been different about this one. Quiet. He’s never quiet.”
Chad watched them a moment longer. Whatever he was thinking, he kept it to himself. The slight press of his mouth was the only tell.
“He’ll figure it out,” Chad said.
He turned back. “You’ve been to the back room.”
“I have.”
“And?”
Hank looked at him. Paint under his fingernails. The blazer he hadn’t wanted to wear.
“You titled it Henry,” Hank said.
“That’s your name.”
“Nobody calls me Henry.”
“I know.” Steady. “That’s the point.”
Hank opened his mouth. The sentence he wanted—about what it felt like to see himself through Chad’s eyes, to stand in that room with that painting—kept arriving in fragments and dissolving before he could catch them.
“Thank you,” he said.
Chad heard what was underneath it.
“You’re welcome.” He bumped Hank’s shoulder. “Now I have to go talk to a man from the Post and pretend I’ve always been this confident.”
“You know what you’re doing.”
“I absolutely do not.” He straightened the blazer. “How do I look?”
“Like an artist.”
Something crossed Chad’s face—quick, vulnerable, there and gone. “Nobody’s said that to me before.”
“Get used to it.”
Chad looked at him one beat more. Then he turned and walked back into the crowd—the stride, the shoulders—people turned toward him as he passed.
Hank stayed in the third gallery. Emergence on the far wall. The Botanic Garden study beside it. Henry to his left.
The crowd would thin. The caterers would clear the glasses. The Post piece would run, or it wouldn’t. The red dots would multiply, or they wouldn’t.
The paintings held the walls, patient and steady, doing the work they were made to do.
The gallery emptied slowly. Hank watched it happen from the second room—the gradual thinning, coats retrieved, goodbyes at the door.
Diana was working the last of the guests with the steady efficiency of a woman who’d been doing this since before the wine ran out.
Martin shaking hands near the entrance. Frannie and Shelby exchanging numbers by the window, which was either the best or worst thing that had ever happened to Hank’s life.
Ricky and Zsa Zsa had left twenty minutes ago.
Ricky had his hand on the small of her back as they walked out, and Hank had watched him pause at the door and look back at Chad across the room—a quick look, half grin, the roommate’s version of I’ll tell you everything later.
Zsa Zsa hadn’t looked back. She’d walked out into Georgetown like she owned it.
By nine-fifteen, only the inner circle remained. Shelby found Hank near the coat rack and pulled him into a hug that lasted longer than her usual.
“Early flight tomorrow,” she said into his shoulder. “I’ll see you in two weeks.”
“Christmas.”
“Christmas. Tell Chad—” she pulled back. Looked at him. Whatever she’d been about to say, she changed her mind. “Tell him I said the show was extraordinary. And that the blazer was the right call.”
“I’ll tell him.”
“I know you will.” She touched his cheek. The gesture was quick, habitual—something left over from a marriage that had ended and a friendship that hadn’t. “Goodnight, Hank.”
“Goodnight, Shelby.”
He watched her leave. The door closed behind her, and the gallery was quiet.
Chad was in the third room. Hank found him standing in front of Henry, arms crossed, head tilted, studying it with the expression he wore when he was seeing something he wanted to fix.
“Don’t,” Hank said.
Chad glanced at him. “Don’t what?”
“Whatever you’re about to criticize. Don’t.”
“The upper right is muddy.”
“It’s perfect.”
“It’s not perfect. The transition to shadow is—” Chad stopped. Uncrossed his arms. “Fine. It’s not terrible.”
“High praise.”
“From me? The highest.”
“Who bought First Kiss?”
Chad’s mouth twitched. “Nobody bought First Kiss.”
“There’s a red dot.”
“There is a red dot.”
“Chad.”
“I put it on before the doors opened. Diana almost killed me.” He was suppressing a smile. “A woman from Bethesda asked about it twice.”
“You faked a sale of your own painting.”
“I protected an asset.” The smile broke through, then softened. “It’s ours, Hank. It was always ours.”
They stood there. The two of them, alone in the small room, the three paintings on the walls and the sounds of Diana’s staff beginning to clear glasses somewhere in the front of the gallery. Chad’s shoulder touched his. Not a lean. Just proximity.
“Good night?” Hank said.
“Good night,” Chad said.
They stood there a little longer. Then Chad reached over and took the wine glass out of Hank’s hand and set it on the floor against the wall because there was no table in the room—the residual instincts of a bartender in a Georgetown gallery. He took Hank’s hand.
“Let’s go home,” he said.
“Yeah,” Hank said. “Let’s go home.”