9. Liliana #2
“The press.” Her jaw sets into the expression that has terrified boardrooms and senators.
“The things they are printing about you are going to stop. I still have a great deal of influence in this city, and I intend to use every ounce of it to make the ugliest of it go away. You will not argue with me about this. Let me do this one thing for my daughter.”
I open my mouth to protest, then close it, because there is genuinely no point, and also because, God help me, it’s kind of nice to have Aurelia Astor’s terrifying influence pointed at my problems for once instead of at me.
“Okay,” I say. “Thank you. Really.”
She nods, brisk and satisfied, and moves toward the door. And then she pauses, and turns back, and does the most awkward thing I have ever seen my mother do. She opens her arms.
It’s stiff. It’s uncertain. She holds them out at a slightly wrong angle like a woman who has genuinely forgotten how, and I cross the room and step into it, and we hug, badly, both of us a little rigid, neither of us quite sure where to put our chins.
It is the least graceful embrace of my entire life.
It might also be the best one she’s ever given me.
“Eat a proper meal,” she says into my hair, because she can’t help herself, and I laugh wetly against her shoulder, and for one small moment the loneliness lifts clean off my chest and I can breathe.
I have dinner on the table by the time Danica’s key turns in the lock that evening, and I’m absurdly proud of it, a whole roast chicken and the sauce I finally finished and actual vegetables, the first real meal I’ve made since my life fell apart.
“Okay, that smells incredible.” Danica drops her bag by the door and toes off her heels, and I can see the exhaustion of a long workday hanging off her, but she smiles at the spread on the table. “Oh my God, look at you. Domestic goddess. I’m keeping you.”
“Finally, someone gets to eat the food I make.” I wipe my hands on the towel, grinning. “Do you know how long I cooked for a man who never showed up? Two years of me plating dinner for one and scraping it into the trash. So sit down. Eat it while it’s hot. Appreciate me.”
“I appreciate you so much.” But she doesn’t sit. She hovers by the counter with her bag still half on her shoulder, and there’s a careful, tiptoeing quality to her that I clock immediately, because I’ve known my cousin my whole life and she is a terrible actress.
“What?” I set the towel down. “You’ve got a face. What’s the face?”
“It’s nothing. It’s dinner. Let’s eat.”
“Danica.”
She sighs, the whole thing deflating out of her, and sets her bag down slow. “Okay. Don’t shoot the messenger.” She winces. “Tristan’s outside.”
The name lands in my chest like a stone dropped down a well.
“Outside.” My voice comes out flat. “Outside where?”
“Outside outside. On the street. In front of the building.” She grimaces.
“He was there when I got home. He, um. He said he’s not leaving until you agree to talk to him.
He said to tell you he’ll wait as long as it takes.
” She holds up both hands. “I told him you didn’t want to see him.
I told him to go home. He just said okay, very politely, and then went right back to standing there like a very handsome lamppost.”
I walk to the front window before I’ve decided to, and I pull the curtain back an inch, and there he is.
Down on the sidewalk across from the building, hands shoved in the pocket of a hoodie, shoulders hunched against the evening cold.
He’s not making a scene. Not pounding on the door or calling up to the windows or doing any of the dramatic things a man in his position might do.
Just standing there.
Waiting. Looking up at the building like he can will me down through the walls.
“Your place seems easy to find,” I say, and I mean it as a joke, but it comes out hollow.
Because here’s the thing I don’t say out loud.
He found me in about a day. And the reason he found me in about a day is that there is almost no one left for me to run to. Danica’s is the only door I have. Once, my whole life was full of people, friends, a whole social world, a best friend I told everything to.
And now Hallie’s gone, revealed as a wolf who spent years in my kitchen, and my mother is a brand-new fragile thing I can’t lean my full weight on yet, and the truth is my circle has shrunk down to one cousin’s guest room.
He didn’t have to be a detective to find me. He just had to know how alone I am.
“Do you want me to call someone?” Danica asks quietly. “Have him moved along?”
“No.” I let the curtain fall. “No, don’t do that, it’ll end up in a paper. Just leave him be.”
I turn back to the table, to the meal getting cold, to the small life I’m trying to build in the wreckage. “He’ll leave when he gets tired. They always do.”
Danica looks at me for a long moment, like she wants to push back on that last part, then decides against it.
“Okay,” she says gently, and sits, and picks up her fork. “Then let’s eat. You made a chicken, and I am going to do it justice.”
We eat. It’s good but I barely taste it.
***
I go to bed at a reasonable hour like a functional adult, and I do not look out the window, and I do not think about him, and I am very, very proud of my restraint for approximately four hours.
Then it’s two in the morning and I’m staring at Danica’s guest-room ceiling. Then it’s three, and I’ve turned my pillow over six times.
Then it’s that gray, in-between hour before dawn when the whole world feels thin and unreal, and I give up, and I throw back the covers, and I pad to the window, and I tell myself I’m only checking.
Just checking. Just to confirm he’s gone, so I can finally sleep.
Tristan isn’t gone.