14. Theo
— ? —
Theo
“You’re sure about this?”
Nora turns from the mirror, and for a moment I forget how to breathe.
The dress is emerald green, simple and devastating. It makes her look like something ancient and powerful: a goddess of vengeance dressed for war.
“I’m sure.”
I step forward to zip her up.
Metal teeth part under my fingers, and the whole warm line of her spine is suddenly mine to look at, and I make myself go slow.
Slower. We have a gala to survive and a husband to destroy, and if I put my mouth where I want to put it we will attend neither.
She’s still married, some last honest bookkeeper in me notes. On paper.
To a man whose hand you’ll shake in an hour. The paper buried her, I answer. I count the vertebrae I’m not allowed to kiss yet and zip her into armor instead.
“Breathe,” she says, amused, watching me in the mirror.
“Working on it.”
“You look beautiful.”
“I look like a weapon.”
“Same thing.”
The charity gala is at the Hendersons’ estate, one of those old-money events where everyone pretends to care about ocean conservation while comparing yacht sizes.
Brielle chaired the planning committee, naturally. The woman would claw her way into hosting her own funeral.
Tonight, we stop hiding.
***
We arrive together.
I feel the room shift when we walk in - every eye in the place tracking our progress from the door to the bar. Theo Hartley, who everyone knows loved his best friend’s dead wife, walking into a party with his hand on another woman’s waist.
If any of them recognize her, they don’t show it. The face is too different. But the whispers are already starting.
Who is she? Where did he find her? Does Adrian know?
Adrian definitely knows we’re here. I can feel his gaze from across the room - hot and hostile and confused all at once. Brielle is beside him, her hand white-knuckled on her champagne flute, her face a mask of controlled terror.
“Shall we say hello?” Nora asks.
“Let them come to us.”
They don’t. For the first hour, Adrian circles the party like a shark, never quite approaching, never quite looking away. Brielle whispers something to him repeatedly, and each time he shakes his head.
Nora dances with me. Laughs at my jokes.
“You’re holding me too close for a nanny,” she murmurs against my jaw.
“You’re dancing too well for one.” I turn her through the crowd, and her dress catches the light, and half the room pretends not to watch. “Waitresses and nannies don’t waltz like this. Where did you learn?”
“Finishing school.” Her eyes glitter up at me. “For ghosts.”
“He’s watching us,” she says. She hasn’t looked over once. She doesn’t need to; she reads rooms the way other people read menus.
“He’s been watching since the champagne.”
“Good.” Her fingers tighten in mine, one degree, two. “Turn me again. Slower this time.”
“You’re using me as a weapon, Miss Eve.”
“I’m using you as a dance partner.” The pause. The trial. The verdict - one wicked half-smile. “The weapon part is a bonus.”
I turn her again. Slower, the way she asked.
The band slides into one of those long, unhurried numbers that old-money orchestras keep in reserve for exactly this hour of the evening, when the champagne has done its work and the couples on the floor stop performing for the room and start performing for each other, and Nora comes out of the turn closer than she went into it.
Deliberately closer. Her body settles against mine with maybe an inch of daylight between us, which is one inch more than my self-control was built to handle.
“That’s not regulation distance, Miss Eve.”
“Report me.”
My hand is at her waist where a gentleman’s hand belongs, and then - slowly, in full view of the entire ballroom and God and her husband - it isn’t.
It slides to the small of her back. Then lower, to the top of the emerald silk where the zipper I closed an hour ago sits like a dare, and I feel the shiver go through her whole body, and I feel her decide not to stop me.
Her husband is forty feet away, the last sane part of me points out. Her husband is watching. Everyone is watching.
Good, answers the rest of me. Let him watch. Let him choke on it. Let him see what it looks like when a man touches her like she’s precious. It’ll be educational. It’s clearly not a thing he ever learned.
“You’re playing with fire,” she murmurs. Her lips barely move. To the room, we’re two people discussing the weather.
“I’ve been on fire since the zipper.” I bend my head, and my mouth finds the shell of her ear under the cover of the turn, and I tell her - quietly, precisely, in complete sentences - exactly what I thought about while I was closing that dress.
What I intend to do when I open it. Where my mouth is going to start, and how long I plan to take, and what I want to hear her say when I get there.
Her step falters. One beat. The first time in ten years I have ever seen Nora miss a step at anything.
“Theo.” My name comes out of her like a struck match.
“You said slower.” I turn us again, unhurried, my hand splayed across the silk at the base of her spine. “I’m being thorough.”
“There’s a whole room-”
“A room full of people watching a nanny dance with a family friend.” Another turn.
Her thigh slides between mine and neither of us corrects it.
“Only one person in this room knows I’m dancing with the love of my life.
Well.” I glance toward the bar, where Adrian has stopped pretending to listen to the senator. “One and a half. He’s working on it.”
“You’re enjoying this.”
“I’m enjoying you. This-” the room, the crowd, the husband coming apart by the bar-“is just the venue.”
She tips her head back and looks up at me, and there’s color high in her cheeks that has nothing to do with the champagne, and her pupils have gone wide and dark, and her fingers have curled into my lapel like she’s forgotten they’re evidence.
“When we get home,” she says - low, even, each word placed like a card on a table-“you’re going to make good on every single thing you just said. In order.”
Heat goes through me like a dropped match.
“In order,” I agree, wrecked.
“And Theo?” The pause. The trial. The verdict - and her smile this time is slow and filthy and entirely for me. “Skip the part where you’re gentle.”
I nearly stop dancing. I nearly stop breathing - and across the ballroom Adrian sets his glass down hard enough that I hear it over the band, and Brielle’s hand closes on his sleeve, and the whole night tilts one degree closer to the cliff we’re all pretending not to see.
Nora feels it too. Her spine straightens under my palm - the weapon coming back online - but her hand stays fisted in my lapel one second longer than the music requires, and that one second is mine.
I file it away with the laugh and the pause and every other piece of her I’ve been collecting for ten years.
We shouldn’t be doing this here, the sane voice tries, one last time. Not at her gala. Not in front of him.
But she chose the dress. She chose the dance. She chose slower - and two years ago the whole world stood at her grave and chose to stop looking for her, and I will be damned if I spend one more evening pretending she isn’t the only thing in any room she enters.
Let them look. Let him look.
He had his turn.
I’m still recovering when the old woman appears at my elbow, and everything goes wrong at once.
“Theodore Hartley, as I live and breathe.” Mrs. Henderson, church committee, garden society, forty years of knowing everyone’s business before they do, beams up at us and extends a gloved hand toward Nora. “And who is this lovely-”
“Eve,” Nora says. “I look after the Walkers’ daughter.”
And Mrs. Henderson’s smile stops.
Not falls. Stops - the way a clock stops. Her gloved hand stays extended, forgotten, and her head tilts, and behind her glasses something old and sure begins to surface like a body in a lake.
“Your voice,” she says slowly.
The music keeps playing. Nora’s hand, still in mine, has gone cold.
“Ma’am?”
“Your voice, dear. Not the sound of it, the shape. The way you set words down.” She presses a hand to her chest. “I ran the church raffle for thirty years. I’ve heard one other woman in my life read a sentence like that - she did the Christmas lesson, beautiful reader, the one who-”
“Mrs. Henderson.” I step in, smooth as I can manage with my heart in my throat. “You promised me a dance in 2019 and never delivered. I’m calling it in.”
“Theodore, honestly-”
“Before the band quits on us.” I’m already handing my champagne to a waiter, already sweeping the old woman toward the floor, and over her silver head I catch Nora’s eyes - go - and she melts into the crowd like smoke, like practice, like a woman who has spent two years being no one.
Mrs. Henderson dances well for eighty and interrogates better.
“That girl,” she says. “The nanny.”
“What about her?”
“You’re in love with her.”
“Mrs. Henderson-”
“Don’t ‘Mrs. Henderson’ me, I’ve known you since you were in short trousers.
” She fixes me with a look that has broken stronger men at bake sales.
“You look at her the way you used to look at-” She stops herself.
Softens. Pats my arm. “Well. Never mind who. We don’t say her name at parties. It upsets the hostess.”
The word drips with forty years of church-committee acid, and despite everything, I laugh.
“You never liked Brielle.”
“I never trusted Brielle. There’s a difference, dear.” She glances across the ballroom to where our hostess stands rigid by the bar, watching Adrian, watching Nora, watching everything. “A woman who cries that beautifully at a funeral has practiced. You mark me.”
Oh, I mark you, I think, turning her gently under the chandeliers. You have no idea how hard I mark you.
The thought is ugly and possessive and I don’t put it down.
I return Mrs. Henderson to her circle and find Nora waiting at the edge of the floor with two glasses.
“He can’t figure it out,” she murmurs against my ear. “He knows something’s wrong, but he can’t place it.”