22. Evan
Evan
It had been a full day since Kira told me there was a leak, a day of final diligence and the committee's follow-up questions, all of it going well. I'd spent every hour of it deciding nothing about the one thing that mattered.
Ian found me while I was losing a fight with my own bow tie.
He had a tablet under one arm and the look he got when he'd already solved something I hadn't started worrying about. He set the tablet down, turned me by the shoulder, and had the tie fixed in about four seconds.
"The additional plan materials are due to the committee tomorrow at noon," he said. "I'll build the package tonight while you're out. I've got all of it, the investment plan, Ms. Ashford's working models, the governance appendix. It'll be clean for your sign-off at breakfast."
"You don't have to do it tonight."
"I'd rather do it while it's quiet." He picked the tablet back up. "Go. You've earned one night where the deal runs itself."
"I don't know what I'd do without you."
"Retire," he said. "And be miserable." He left to go build it, and I felt gratitude for the one person who had never once let me down.
Kira had told me there was a leak. I'd said okay, and asked Ian to look into Reyes and any unusual activity on the servers. And then I'd spent the rest of the day not deciding what else to do about it, which was its own kind of decision.
She was right. She was always right about things like this, and Tariq had put his thumb on the one weakness we'd buried. People didn't do that by accident. Someone on the team was feeding Gabriella our work. I knew it the way I knew weather.
But there was a gala tonight, and Kira was in the next room getting ready for it, and the leak would keep until morning. So, I decided to leave it where it was for the night.
I could hear her through the wall, on the phone with Nico, laughing, arguing about San Francisco in the fond way she saved for him. I didn't announce myself. I'd started doing that lately, stealing thirty seconds of her when she didn't know I was there.
Then she hung up and called out that if I was going to lurk I could come make myself useful and zip her.
Her dress was deep green and beautiful on her. I got the zip to the top of her spine, and she lifted her hair out of the way, and the plain ordinariness of it struck me more than anything at the party would.
"You're quiet," she said to the mirror.
"I'm deciding how to walk into that gala full of some of the richest people on earth with you on my arm and not look like a man who won a prize he hadn't earned."
She turned around. "Look exactly like that," she said. "Tariq trusts a man who knows what he's holding."
The gala was on the top floor of a tower that was bigger than it needed to be, glass and light stacked into the sky.
Two hundred people moved through it who between them could have bought a small country, each carrying the easy certainty of a person who believed they were the most important one in the room.
Heads turned when we came in. Not openly, nothing in that world was open, but the people noticed us and made up their minds about what to think of it.
Straits Capital's principal and the strategist half of them had heard about and few had met, arriving together, not bothering with the professional distance.
I felt Kira notice it and decide not to care, and I matched her. It meant something to walk in like that, on display, and I didn't mind doing it.
A man I half-recognized caught my elbow before we'd cleared the door, some fund-of-funds principal who wanted to talk investment allocation at a party, and I gave him the persona I kept for people like him, easy and interested and saying exactly nothing.
Kira extracted me inside a minute. "So sorry," she said to him, warm as sunlight, "I have to steal him, we're being summoned," and steered me off toward nothing at all.
"We weren't being summoned," I said.
"He'd have kept you an hour. You had the look."
"What look?"
"The one where you're being polite and dying inside." She lifted two glasses off a passing tray and handed me one. "I've decided to protect you from your own manners tonight."
We danced once, badly because neither of us knew how, and it was the best part of the night.
"You're leading," I said.
"I'm aware of it. I can't help it."
"I know. It's almost charming."
She set her cheek near my jaw.
Everyone on that floor was playing something, wealth or ease or an interest they didn't feel.
In the middle of it all, the most real thing in the building was Kira with her mouth against my collar telling me I was a bad dancer.
I'd been in more situations like that one than I could count.
I had never once brought something real into the middle of the fake.
After the dancing, she worked the floor like she was defusing small bombs, quick and warm, and came back every few minutes with something dry about whoever she'd just left.
"The shipping heir has never been told no," she said. "You can see it on him, like a man who's never once been rained on."
"And the deputy?"
"Terrified of his boss and calling it indigestion." She lifted her glass a half inch. "This is the easiest hard work I've ever done."
"Your turn," she added. "The woman by the bar, in the emerald."
I looked. "Old money. Bored. She's been to four of these this month and she's deciding whether we're worth remembering."
"Better. And?"
"And she likes you. She keeps looking at your dress and pretending she isn't."
Kira smiled into the glass. "I'll make a reader of you yet."
Farah found us by the windows. She didn't ask about the deal, she asked Kira how she was finding Dubai and asked me whether I'd slept. She carefully watched us answer. I understood the questions were the whole interview and the fund had nothing to do with it.
"You two are easy together," she said at last. "That's rarer than good returns. Half these partnerships can't share a car by month six."
"We've found a good rhythm," Kira said.
"I know." Farah's smile was thin and not unkind. "That's the column I'm filling in." And she moved off to fill in someone else.
Tariq found us a while later, near the glass.
"Forgive a personal observation," he said.
"Those are the only kind worth hearing," Kira said.
He almost smiled. "It's rare, what the two of you have. I hope you know what you're holding." A deputy leaned in with something urgent, and he was gone.
Kira looked after him. "He wasn't talking about the fund."
"No. He wasn't."
"That's the third person tonight to warn me about you," I noted.
"I assume that would be Ian, Tariq, and now you're doing it to yourself. I can see it," she said lightly, while watching my face. "You get a look, like you're figuring out what something you're afraid to want will cost you."
"I want it," I said. It came out faster and plainer than I'd meant. She heard that too, and she let me leave it there.
Gabriella held the far corner in a silver dress, and when she caught my eye she lifted two fingers off her glass. I went because you didn't ignore Gabriella Hudson.
"Whatever happens with the mandate," she said, "you built something worth building." Her eyes went to Kira across the room. "I mean the woman. Not the fund."
"I know what you meant."
"I know you do." She smiled. "That's what makes you hard to run against now. You've got something to lose."
I almost liked her. She would let a person get right up to the edge of her meaning.
Later Kira and I found a corner and two more glasses.
"If you win," she said, "what do you do?"
"Win the fund?"
"Win all of it. The mandate. The rest." She watched me over the rim. "What does that house look like?"
"I don't know. I spent so long building the walls I never drew what went inside them."
"That may be the saddest thing you've ever said to me. It's also the most hopeful. An empty house is just one you haven't furnished."
"I've been thinking I might like the kitchen." I smiled.
She knew what Medina was. She knew I didn't cook. She looked at me a second too long.
"I've been known to burn water," she said.
"And now I'll ask you the same question."
"What do I do if I win?" She thought about it. "I don't know either. I've worked alone so long I'm not sure I remember how to want something else."
"You're doing all right at it."
"I'm learning from someone." She bumped her shoulder into mine. "Emotionally repressed. Good instincts."
We stepped out onto a balcony to breathe, the night warm and carrying the smell of the sea.
"Can I tell you something stupid?" she said.
"Always."
"I keep waiting for the part where it gets hard again. Where one of us ruins it." She looked out at the lights. "And it just doesn't."
I didn't tell her I'd been waiting for the same thing. Saying it out loud meant it could turn real, and the real part had a leak in it. So, I put my hand over hers on the railing and let her believe I was only agreeing.
"It doesn't," I said.
Near midnight, the chill returned. Kira was laughing at something a deputy said, her head tipped back, unguarded in a room full of people who ate the unguarded for a living, and the counting started up in the back of my head on its own.
The short list of people who could see the whole thing.
Her name had to be on it because she saw more than anyone.
I felt it start to turn.
Then she found me across the floor and smiled, only at me, and I turned it off. Not solved, off. I chose her over the list because the other thing was heavier than I wanted at that moment.
We left together, my hand at the small of her back, past people who noticed, and I didn't care. In the car she put her head on my shoulder and the gold city ran past the glass and I sat still so I wouldn't wake her.
Every instinct I had told me to stay awake, to run the list, to find the leak before it found me. What I did instead was sit in the dark with her against my arm and feel, for the first time in longer than I could name, like a man with nothing he needed to guard.
I knew which of those two men was the smart one. I couldn't make myself be him.