11. Kira
Kira
Nico showed up on Sunday with two bags of groceries. He'd already decided I needed feeding whether I'd asked or not. Apparently, when he'd talked to me on the phone twice that week, he'd heard something in my voice I hadn't meant to put there.
"You look like you were good in London," he said, setting the bags on my counter.
"London was a success."
"I didn't say it wasn't." He started unpacking fennel, a good bottle of olive oil, a fish wrapped in paper that he set down gently. "I said you look like it. Those are different things."
I sat on the counter and let him take over the kitchen because that was the arrangement. He cooked and I talked and somewhere in the middle of it I'd say what I was actually feeling, usually before I'd decided to say it.
"We won the round," I said. "Or we're in the running to.
There are two other funds and a committee that could make my whole year.
I did the best work I've done in a pitch to the top guy whose family the money belongs to.
He asked me a question nobody's ever asked me and I answered it in a way that could either win us the deal or end my part in it. "
"And?"
"And it was the most alive I've felt at work in years."
Nico ran his knife through the fennel, quick and even, the sound of it filling the quiet kitchen.
"That's the part you say out loud," he said. "What's the part underneath?"
I didn't answer, and he let me stay with it, which was newer for both of us than it should have been. We'd been circling the things we each were holding back all spring like two people being polite.
"How's Blaine?" I asked, which was a deflection and we both knew it.
"Blaine's good." He slid the fennel into a pan. "The Capitol Hill project got bigger. He's happy, he's busy, he's home late. We're fine."
"That's my line."
"It's a good line. It does a lot of work." He tasted and adjusted without looking at me. "We're both using it a lot lately. You want to talk about yours or mine first?"
That was how Nico did it. He'd walk you right up to the edge of what you didn't want to talk about and then stand there with you, not pushing, just refusing to pretend it wasn't there.
So, I told him a piece of it, but about the man. I wasn't ready to talk about Evan, even though Nico knew there was a man. He was letting me keep that to myself for now.
I took a deep breath and settled into the story I wanted to tell.
"My grandfather left me money," I said. "When I was eighteen. Real money, the kind that was supposed to mean I never had to be afraid of what I needed."
Nico nodded, proving he was listening.
I picked at the edge of the counter. "It's gone and has been for a long time.
Somebody I trusted put it into an investment where it shouldn't have been.
It was all perfectly legal, and by the time I understood what had happened there was nothing left to understand except that I'd handed my whole safety to a man who smiled while he lost my money. "
My nail stopped against the counter's edge. Even just telling it straight, like it was something that had happened to someone else, the old anger came up strong. The money was one thing, but it was the smile that enraged me. He'd counted on me being too young to do the math.
Nico had gone still standing at the stove. When Nico went still, he was deep into paying attention. "You never told me that."
"I don't tell anyone that. I'm telling you because you asked me what's underneath, and that's what's underneath, mostly.
" I made myself stop picking at the counter.
"I decided then that I'd never let anybody hold anything of mine again.
Not money, not the work, not the thing that comes after the work.
I built my business out of that decision and I've been very happy with it.
Now I'm on a deal where I've handed a man access to all of it at once, and I keep waiting to feel afraid.
The problem, Nico, the actual problem, is that I don't."
He turned the heat down and turned around and looked at me. "That's the part underneath."
"Yep."
He didn't try to reframe it. He didn't give me a food metaphor.
He just looked at me with those steady eyes, and then he turned back to the fish and said, "Sit at the table, it's almost ready.
" I understood that he'd decided this was a night for feeding me and not for fixing me, and I loved him for it.
We ate, he told me about a new sous chef who couldn't be taught to salt anything, and I laughed. It was easy. The grandfather story had been told and we didn't need to revisit it.
My phone lit up while Nico was doing the dishes he wouldn't let me touch.
Aspen prep, tomorrow 9. Need your read on the partner list we show them before I take it to the committee. Then, thirty seconds later, a second message. Btw, the success model is the best thing on the pitch. You were right and I've decided to stop being annoyed about it.
I looked at it too long. Nico, who missed nothing, didn't turn around from the sink.
"That the deal," he asked, "or the man?"
"Both," I said. "They're the same phone number."
"Mm." He rinsed a plate. "That's usually how it starts being a problem."
I typed back, I'm always right, you'll adjust. Then I sat with the phone in my hand for longer than the message deserved. I thought about Evan across the lake reading it, whether his shoulders came down when he did, and whether I'd get to see what I now knew to look for.
Nico said they were fine, he and Blaine, fine.
I wondered whether I'd say the same thing about myself and Evan in a month, and whether it would be just as true for us, both of us saying we were fine instead of what was underneath.