14. Evan
Evan
Gabriella drew Kira to the far railing near the end of the dinner. I kept my face on the committee member telling me about his daughter's gap year. I gave him even, interested answers. I did not go over there. It was harder than it should have been.
Two women I respected, standing alone in the dark. Every part of me that had spent the whole day insisting this was an ordinary deal wanted to cross the deck and stand close enough to hear.
I stayed where I was. I asked the committee member which country the daughter had loved most and let him talk, and I ran the deck's numbers in the back of my head the way other men hum.
None of it held me. My attention kept sliding down the length of the party to the railing, where whatever was happening was happening quietly, the way the things that mattered usually did.
When Kira came back, she had something about her she hadn't had before.
I'd spent these weeks learning her face against my own better judgment: the small ease that came into it when the work went well, the set that arrived in her jaw when the situation turned on her and she decided not to let it show.
This was the set. She'd maneuvered it down almost to nothing, and I only caught it because I'd been studying her longer than I needed to. Whatever Gabriella had put out there had gone in clean and deep.
I didn't ask. We had a rule about not doing this when we weren't alone, and reading her that closely across a dinner table was already too close to breaking it.
"You're quiet," she said, sitting.
"I'm always quiet."
"You're differently quiet." She picked up her water and didn't drink it. "It's fine. Ask me later."
She knew I'd been reading her. She always did, which was another problem.
Gabriella found my eye on her way back into the warmth of the dining room and the noise of the party.
She didn't smile. She let me see that she'd seen all of it: the two of us, what it was, and how it would impact the committee when it reached the end of its evaluations.
Then she moved on, gracious and in no hurry, already a step ahead of everyone in the room including me.
It was the most insight I had gotten all night, and she delivered it without a word, which was something only the very good could do.
It wasn't only Gabriella. Twice during the meal I'd felt Farah's attention from across the table, noticing the space between Kira and me like an issue she meant to come back to.
In London I could have told myself I'd imagined it.
Here, with the field this narrow, imagining things was a luxury I couldn't afford.
With the field down to two, the thought I'd held at arm's length since the trail that afternoon came back. This time, I couldn't push it away. At that point, the committee started deciding which principal it could back for the next ten years.
My returns were the equal of hers. What wasn't equal was the part Farah could jot down in a margin and never once be asked to justify: that one of the principals in the two funds left in the running was sleeping with the strategist whose name was on his deal.
Gabriella had come to Aspen alone and would leave alone. She'd never have to say a word. She'd only have to gently highlight the comparison and let the committee arrive at it themselves, the way they arrived at everything, without anyone needing to say it out loud.
The responsible move was distance, and distance was what I was best at. I'd always managed the exact amount of space that kept things from turning into a liability, and I could have left that space between us tonight with an early goodnight and a note about the morning.
I didn't. That wasn't what frightened me. What frightened me was the size of the trade, laid out as plainly as a term sheet with every number already filled in, and how I looked at it and chose the other side anyway.
In twenty years, I hadn't once made that trade. Wanting had never been stronger than the business before. It was now, and I could feel it winning. I took it with my eyes open, which was the behavior I'd flagged in everyone else as the first move of a serious mistake.
We still had the Dubai session to build.
That was true, and it was also the excuse I used to get us both into the elevator and down the long hushed hall of the lodge without either of us having to say the real reason.
She stood on her side of the elevator and I stood on mine, and the space between us kept us behaving.
Behaving was starting to feel like the biggest thing in any space we shared.
We went to her room because the files were on her laptop. The hotel had set out a small table for guests who meant to work, and we took opposite sides of it. For a while, we worked on the approach we'd been sharpening since the flight out. Trust as the whole argument for Dubai, instead of control.
She was extraordinary at it as always, better than anyone I'd ever put on a deal.
Her hands moved over the trackpad and her notes while she talked, and I followed them.
Her hands were the place her thoughts showed before the rest of her caught up to it.
For a while it was almost enough to make me forget the rest. Work had always been the safest place for me.
"Read me the open again," she said. "The short one."
I read it back. She listened with her chin on her hand, deciding whether it was good or only clever, and when I finished she shook her head.
"It's true, and it'll bore him." She was already typing. "Tariq doesn't want to be told we trust the family. He wants to watch us act like we already do. Give me the reporting clause."
I read it to her.
"Cut the first sentence," she said. "It apologizes."
"It qualifies."
"It apologizes. He's not going to hand two billion dollars to a fund that opens by covering itself." She held her hand out for the laptop, moved two sentences, cut a third, and turned it back to me. "There."
It was better. It was better like it was always better once she'd touched it, the whole argument turned just slightly so it was suddenly facing the right direction.
"Better," I said.
"I know." She didn't look up. "Say it like you're not surprised."
"I stopped being surprised in London."
"You could try it sometime, being surprised. People find it charming."
"I'll take it under advisement."
"That's a no," she said, smiled, and went back to the screen. Neither of us said what the look actually had in it.
Then the couple in the next room stopped bothering to be quiet.
It wasn't loud, it was worse than loud. It was unmistakable, a rhythm coming through a wall the lodge had built too thin to block it. We kept our eyes down on the screen.
Kira read me a line off the deck I'd already read.
I answered a question she hadn't finished asking.
We started being too careful with every word and movement on our side of the wall.
On the other side, two strangers went on with each other.
We moved a single bullet point around a slide about governance as though it were the most absorbing work either of us had ever done.
I'd had deep conversations with this woman in four cities now, counting New York, though that was on a terrace and not at a table. In two of them we'd ended up sounding like the couple next door. Now I needed to keep my hands to myself, and I could have managed it, if the couple had stayed quiet.
The sound was just there in the background, and still it changed everything in the room.
It put the one thing we'd said we wouldn't do, and in fact weren't doing, in the middle of the table and we both noticed it.
We leaned over the laptop and pretended not to hear what was going on in our own heads.
That was when I understood what I felt had stopped being attraction. Attraction I could manage. I'd managed it for weeks. Attraction was a fact about the body, and I'd never had trouble outvoting my body.
This was different, and much bigger. I'd shut this door years ago and called it focus, and kept it shut so long I'd half forgotten what was behind it. What I felt for her had outgrown anything I'd planned for, and it wasn't going anywhere.
I wanted to know what Gabriella had said to her at that railing.
I was angry, actually angry, at Gabriella, for putting that stillness in Kira's face.
My shoulders came up and set and I let them.
Bracing was the only posture left to me when I was at the edge of something I'd sworn I'd never go near again.
I knew where my head would go before it went. It went to Adrian. It always did, when someone got too close to me.
I'd brought him into Sentris over Knox's quiet objection because he was my friend and I trusted him. He built the relationship with our most strategic client. Then he left, cleanly, on paper no lawyer could touch, and took the client with him.
It cost us the biggest deal on the books and did real damage to the round behind it. There was nothing to do at the end of it but survey the wreckage and learn from it. Knox never once said he'd told me so. That was the worst of it.
So, I'd built systems to protect myself instead.
Access lists, compartments, need-to-know, twenty years of it, all built to keep anyone from getting close enough to cost me anything.
Kira had walked straight through all of it.
She had the same personal and professional access I'd handed Adrian, and everything I'd built to stay safe pointed to one direction: step back now.
Under all of that, quieter, with no system anywhere behind it to make it safe, was the part of me that wanted the opposite. It wanted to stay.
She reached across the table to point at something on my screen, and her hand came to rest an inch short of mine. Neither of us moved. I could have moved my hand. It was the smallest, easiest motion in the world, and I'd never wanted anything the way I wanted to leave my hand exactly where it was.
She turned her head and looked at me. "Do you think we should change this one, too?"
I looked back at her without an answer.
"You okay?" she asked. "What's going on with you?"
"Nothing. I'm fine. A lot going on in my head."
She held my eyes a moment longer, deciding whether to let me have it. "Okay."
We both turned back to the screen and let the silence sit.
I wanted the inch gone. I wanted to turn my hand over and take hers and see her face vulnerable and unguarded again. I wanted the couple through the wall to keep going and the night to run long past making sense, and to set the two billion dollars aside for as long as it took.
The inch held. We both held it, our eyes fixed on a screen neither of us was reading. The wanting rose all the way up in me and I did nothing at all. Doing nothing took more effort than anything I'd done in years.
She was the one who sat back first. The inch opened to a foot, and the foot to the width of the table.
She said something light about the hour.
I agreed with it, and I got myself out of that room before either of us would have to be braver than we'd already been.
I stood in the hall outside her door for too long anyway.
Twenty years I'd spent making sure no one got near enough to cost me anything. She was already inside the perimeter. I'd held the door for her myself, one step at a time, and I told myself each time that a door held open on purpose wasn't the same as a wall breached.
Now there were two funds left, Farah with her notes, and a rival who'd finished the analysis before I let myself start it, and every last one of them could see exactly what I'd allowed through the walls.