4. Liliana #4
So I left. I slipped out of the receiving line when my mother turned to greet a senator, and I climbed and climbed until I ran out of stairs, up to the rooftop terrace my father used to love, the roof garden with its trellises and its potted trees and its long view over the sleeping winter grounds.
It was freezing up there. Empty. The first air I’d been able to breathe all day.
Or I thought it was empty.
A rustle came from the far corner, near the pergola, a scrape and a muttered curse, and my heart lurched into my throat. I froze, certain for one wild second that I’d stumbled onto a burglar, or a ghost, or my own unraveling mind.
Then a man came down out of the trellis in a controlled fall, all long limbs and flailing dignity, landing hard on the stone with a grunt and a word my mother would have fainted to hear at a funeral.
He was in a black suit like everyone else, but nothing else about him matched the crowd downstairs. His tie was loose. His dark hair had gone every direction. And cradled against his chest, yowling its outrage to the heavens, was a very fat, very furious gray cat.
“Okay,” he told the cat, breathless, setting it down. “You’re welcome. Ungrateful little monster.”
The cat took two disdainful steps, spotted me, and changed its entire personality. It trotted straight over and wound itself figure-eights around my ankles, headbutting my shins, purring.
I crouched without thinking and ran my hand down its back, and it pushed up into my palm, warm and solid and alive, and my chest that had been clenched tight for days loosened by the smallest degree.
“Oh, so this is how it’s going to be,” the man said, watching the cat abandon him for me. “I nearly break my neck for you and the second a beautiful girl shows up, I’m nothing. Unbelievable. This is the thanks I get.”
The corner of my mouth lifted unconsciously, the first pull of a smile in days, and it startled me. A stranger, at my father’s funeral, and somehow he was the only thing in the whole estate that didn’t make me want to crawl out of my own skin.
“Why were you in the trellis?” I asked.
“Because that idiot animal was up there crying its lungs out, and I couldn’t stand it.”
He brushed potting soil off his very expensive jacket.
“Not that it deserved the rescue. This thing is enormous, by the way. Have you seen the size of it? I watched it clear an entire tray of the good canapés off the buffet twenty minutes ago, the crab ones, and then it hauled all that stolen weight straight up a trellis that it had no business climbing and got itself completely stuck.”
“So you climbed a trellis.” I crossed my arms, amusement tugging at me despite everything as I looked at him, this rumpled stranger covered in potting soil. “At a funeral. In a suit?”
“When you put it that way, it does sound insane.” He considered. “In my defense, a cat crisis felt more honest than another glass of wine.”
Then he paused, considering the cat, which had settled smugly against my ankles without a care in the world.
“You know, it occurs to me now that the thing has nine lives and I have the one. Statistically, it was always going to be fine. I climbed a trellis in dress shoes to save the one creature up there with better odds than me.” He shook his head.
“So really, between the two of us, I’m not sure which one’s the bigger idiot. ”
At that, I laughed.
It came out of me before I could stop it, cracked and rusty, startling in the cold breeze. The first real laugh in what felt like a hundred years. It surprised us both.
He went still, watching it happen on my face as if it’s a moment he wanted to catch and keep, and then he smiled. Slow and delighted, just a little crooked, as though I’d handed him a prize he hadn’t expected to win.
“Guess it’s worth it after all,” he said softly.
We stayed up there longer than I meant to.
“Tristan, by the way.” He dropped onto the low wall a careful, respectful distance from me, forearms on his knees. “Everett. In case you want to file a formal complaint about the noise.”
“Liliana.” I scratched the cat behind one ear and didn’t offer more than that.
I didn’t have to. I watched the name land, watched him place me, the recognition moving quiet across his face. Of course he knew the Astors.
Everyone in our particular corner of the world knew everyone. The same galas, orbiting each other for years without ever quite colliding. Old money knows old money. He knew whose funeral this was. He knew exactly which daughter he’d found hiding on a rooftop.
But he didn’t say any of it. He didn’t reach for the sorry-for-your-loss, didn’t rearrange his face into that careful, pitying softness everyone downstairs had been wearing at me all afternoon.
“So you’re up here for the same reason I am,” he said instead.
“Which is?”
“Couldn’t breathe down there.” He said it simply, as if it was obvious, as if it wasn’t the truest thing anyone had said to me in days. “Too many people.”
My throat tightened. I looked back down at the cat so he wouldn’t see it.
“I came up for a breather,” I admitted. “Just a few minutes. Before I have to go back and be pitied some more.”
“Then take the few minutes.” He tipped his head back against the pergola post and looked up at the sky, unhurried, giving me the quiet instead of trying to fill it.
After a moment, with a sideways glance at the enormous gray creature now kneading my lap, he added, “The two of us will keep you company. Quietly. And I swear to stay off the trellis this time.”
And there it was again, that traitor smile, pulling at my mouth against every instinct I had to stay wrapped in my grief.
Under the moon, he made me laugh three more times, and each one felt stolen. He never once told me he was sorry. He talked to me as a person and not a tragedy, and it was the kindest thing anyone had done for me in days.
Then my mother’s voice drifted up the stairwell, calling my name, threaded with that particular note of controlled displeasure, and the spell broke.
“I have to go,” I told him.
“I know.” He pushed off the wall and scooped up the enormous cat, which allowed it with regal disdain, and lifted one fat gray paw to wave at me. “Say goodbye, criminal.”
He made his voice ridiculous and small for the cat. “It was nice to meet you. Your secret rooftop escape is safe with us.”
A warm, helpless smile broke over my face, the realest thing I’d felt all day, and I carried it with me toward the stairs.
I went back down. I didn’t get his number, and he didn’t ask for mine. Part of me wanted to see him again, wanted it with a sudden fierceness that startled me on the worst day of my life.
But I didn’t.
At least, not for months. Not until yet another suffocating situation.
It was spring by the time my mother marched me to a charity gala on the arm of a man she’d hand-selected, the son of someone important, an investment something-or-other with a firm handshake and the personality of a tax form.
He talked about his portfolio through the appetizers and his golf handicap through the entrees and I sat there in yards of couture, nodding, dying quietly, thinking that this was the rest of my life. This exact table, this exact conversation, forever.
Then the lights dimmed for the entertainment, and a performer walked out onto the small stage with an acoustic guitar, and I heard the voice before I turned to look.
I knew it before I saw him.
“And it took root the day you turned my way,” he sang, low and warm into the hush of the room, “been blooming helpless ever since…”
Tristan Everett stood in a pool of light with his eyes closed, singing a song I had never heard before, a song nobody had heard yet, and when his eyes opened they found me across that crowded room as if they’d known exactly where I was the whole time.
He didn’t look away.
He sang the next line straight at me, and that boyish, crooked smile ghosted across his mouth mid-lyric. My heart forgot its rhythm entirely and stuttered back to life at the wrong tempo.
“Are you even listening to me?” my date said, too loud, his hand landing on my bare knee under the table. “I’ve been talking about the Aspen place for ten minutes.”
I moved his hand off my leg. He put it back, heavier, leaning in, his breath sour with wine, telling me how lucky I was that our mothers had thought to introduce us, how good we’d look together, how he wasn’t usually into the quiet type but he could work with it.
Every word made my skin crawl a little further off my bones.
“Excuse me.” I was on my feet before I finished saying it. “Restroom.”
I didn’t go to the restroom. I fled, weaving through the tables toward the edges of the room where the light gave out, just needing a wall to put my back against and air that didn’t smell of his cologne.
When I rounded a corner, I walked directly into a wall of black suit.
“Easy.” Hands caught my shoulders, steadying me, and I looked up into a face I’d spent months telling myself I’d imagined. “We really have to stop meeting at parties neither of us wants to be at.”
“You,” I said, stupidly.
“Me.” Tristan’s mouth curved.
He’d traded the stage lights for the shadows at the edge of the room, and up close he was looking at me with a weight that made the noise of the gala fall away, as if there was nobody in the building he’d rather have crashed into.
“I’d say this is a good surprise.” His mouth tipped up as he looked down at me, and there was no surprise in it at all. Just a slow, spreading satisfaction, as if his patience had finally paid off. “I was starting to think I’d have to crash every party in the state before we crossed paths again.”
Up close, out of the stage lights, I could actually look at him, and it was a mistake.
He’d loosened his collar and pushed his sleeves up his forearms, and there was a warmth coming off him. A rumpled, unhurried ease that made the stiff gilded room behind me look like a stage set.