Epilogue
Sofia
Two years later, Las Vegas still smelled the same.
Smoke and cologne and money and underneath it all.
I walked through the Golovin Casino’s main floor on a Wednesday evening. I did not carry a tray.
I stopped at the edge of the floor and looked at it.
The girl who had worked this floor was still me.
I did not want to lose her. She had known things that the current version of me was at risk of forgetting if I was not careful—the arithmetic of survival, the cost of a week’s rent in four-hour increments, the weight of a tray at the end of an eight-hour shift.
Those things were worth keeping. They were the things that made the charitable work real rather than performative, that kept me honest in rooms where it was easy to stop being honest.
I kept her, deliberately, the way you keep the true versions of yourself that inconvenient circumstances had the courtesy to reveal.
“You’re doing the look again,” Viktor said behind me.
I turned. He was in his customary black, and he was looking at me with the expression I had come to know as his version of tenderness, which was not soft exactly but was warm.
“What look?” I asked, putting my hand in the hand he extended.
“The one where you’re doing three things simultaneously and I can see two of them,” he answered, pulling me into him with our connected hands.
“Only two?”
“I’ve learned not to push my luck with the third.”
I laughed.
I looked at him for a moment. We had been in the same penthouse, and outside, we were two powerhouses that couldn’t be looked down on. Our playful banter and arguments didn’t diminish our public composure, it gave us a hidden language no one else understood but us.
“I’m going to be late,” I said.
“The foundation board meeting.”
“You remembered.”
“I remember everything.” He said it without self-congratulation—it was simply accurate, Viktor’s memory being one of the things I had stopped finding unnerving and started finding useful. “The Castellano grant proposal.”
“And the Henderson community center funding.” I picked up my bag from the chair by the door. “We’re voting tonight.”
“Vote yes on the community center,” he said.
“I was going to.” I looked at him. “Were you planning to tell me how to vote?”
“I was planning to share an opinion.” The smile that wasn’t exactly full appeared on his face. “You are free to ignore it.”
“I am aware of my freedoms,” I said. “You worked very hard to ensure I knew them.”
“One of my better decisions.”
I looked at him for a moment with the specific regard that two years had made possible. He looked back the same way. Viktor had learned to be looked at without managing the looking, which was one of the truest things he had ever given me.
“I’ll be home by nine,” I said.
“I’ll be in the study,” he said. “I’m deciding on the Reno expansion. I want your read on the market analysis before I finalize it.”
“That’s asking, not telling,” I noted.
“I am capable of asking.”
“You are improving,” I said.
I kissed him.
He held my face briefly when I pulled back, the same as always, the thumb along my jaw. I let him.
“Go,” he said.
I went.
*****
The foundation board met in a conference room at the Golovin entertainment complex—legitimate, visible, the kind of room that had glass walls, name placards, and an agenda distributed three days in advance.
Seven board members, four of them women, two of them people whose names I had looked up in the course of building something I wanted to be worth building.
The Henderson community center passed seven to zero.
Afterward, I stood in the elevator with my folder and my phone.
I thought about what the community center would mean for a neighborhood that looked, in some of its streets, like the Henderson I had grown up in.
The one with the careful man in the garage workshop.
The one that ran on the kind of hoping that Las Vegas was not designed to sustain.
The foundation could not fix the system.
I was not na?ve enough to believe it could.
But it could put a community center in Henderson, and the community center could offer the thing that had been most absent in the landscape of my own childhood: a place that was not provisional.
That was there tomorrow and the tomorrow after, and did not require anything from the people who needed it except their presence.
I thought about my father.
Not the wound version—I had been working, with the specific effort of someone who had learned that grief required tending rather than managing, toward the person version.
The man with the workshop. The one who fixed things.
I thought about him sometimes in the foundation meetings, in the particular way of honoring someone by doing work they would have understood.
He would have had opinions about the community center. He would have wanted to see the architectural plans. He would have asked about the load-bearing walls.
I took the elevator down and walked through the casino floor and out into the Las Vegas evening.
Two years ago, I had stood on a sidewalk outside the Monarch Club and looked at the neon in a puddle and felt the full weight of everything I had done pressing down, and I had not known which side I was on.
I knew now.
*****
Viktor would be in the study. The Reno expansion analysis would be open on his desk.
He would want my read, which meant he would listen to my read, which meant the next hour would involve the particular productive friction of two people who fundamentally disagreed about the appropriate first resort in most situations and had learned that the disagreement was the point.
We were not uncomplicated.
We were not clean.
Hell, our world was not a clean one.
We were two people who had found each other at the worst possible time in the worst possible way and had stayed anyway.
I turned north toward the building.
The city glowed behind me, and I did not look back at it.
I was already home.
*****
THE END.