Chapter 24 Results
Bianca couldn’t stay in one room. From before dawn she drifted the corridors, straightening robes on their hooks and refolding towels that were already folded, touching the building the way you touch a feverish child’s forehead, needing to lay hands on something even if it wasn’t a person.
It was worse than the first test day, because everyone remembered the first. The house pretended to function with a desperation that would have been funny if it hadn’t been so tender.
Poppy, whose running mouth was the soundtrack of the front hall and who could not as a rule abide a silence, had gone wordless, which was an alarm all by itself, and instead tipped the entire front-desk drawer out onto the counter and sorted every paperclip and stamp and spent rubber band into tidy little regiments, a drawer no one had touched in years, because her hands needed something small and exact to grip while the morning hung over all of us.
Ute stress-baked something tall and golden and refused, absolutely refused, to name it, on the grounds that naming a cake before a test result was exactly how you jinxed a test result.
“What is it,” Simone asked her, white around the mouth, hovering in the kitchen because she couldn’t bear to hover in her suite.
“It is a Tuesday cake,” Ute said, not looking up from the icing. “It celebrates Tuesday.” And that was all anyone got, because Ute was not about to let a dessert cost a woman her child.
Yuki ran the assay in the grey dawn, and then she ran it again, start to finish, a second time, because she would not let the result exist in the world until it had proven itself twice, and on a day like this she would have run it five times if the protocol had let her.
It proved itself twice.
Marlene walked the long corridor with the envelope.
Simone received her standing, in the panorama suite, dressed with deliberate care in her best suit, every line of it in place, because she had decided she would meet either verdict on her feet and dressed for it, win or lose, and she had asked for one thing only, which was that I stand beside her while she heard it.
So I stood beside her. Marlene held out the envelope, and her own hand, I noticed, was not entirely steady either, the whole house’s hope on one slip of paper.
Simone opened it.
Read it.
And Simone Devereux, empire-builder, the woman who had arrived with fourteen pages of penalties and a heart in a vault, sat down on the floor of a six-figure suite in her best suit, all the way down onto the carpet, and put her hands over her face, and laughed until she cried.
“Positive,” she got out, between the laughing and the crying, looking up at us, undone, radiant, wrecked. “It’s. It took. It’s positive.” She laughed again, helpless. “I’m going to be a mother. At thirty-nine in November. I’m going to be somebody’s mother.”
Her first call was not her mother.
It was Yuki, summoned over the intercom by Poppy, whose flawless dead-calm receptionist voice cracked clean in half on the second word and gave up entirely, so that what went out over the house system was just Poppy, openly weeping, saying, “Yuki. Yuki, come up. She wants you, she wants you first, come up,” and Yuki came up at a run, the only time I ever saw her run, and Simone pulled her down onto the floor and held her, the first call before her mother, exactly as promised, the chart-keeper and the CEO crying on the carpet, and the hug ran long enough that the rest of us found things to study on the far wall.
The celebration was the house at its best.
The Tuesday cake was publicly, ceremonially renamed, and Ute permitted it, which was its own benediction. Poppy produced champagne flutes and Marlene filled them with sparkling elderflower, no alcohol anywhere near the newly pregnant woman or, by solidarity, anyone.
“The house’s first dry toast,” Marlene said, dry herself, but glowing in a way I’d never seen on her, lit from somewhere new. “Get used to them. There will be a great many more of these now, if the new donor keeps his appointments.”
And Simone gave a toast, standing, flute in hand, CEO-crisp and utterly transformed, the same voice that had recited penalties on her first day deployed now in service of something it had never carried before.
“I came up this mountain,” she said, “to acquire a specific outcome on a specific schedule, with penalties for non-performance. I have reviewed the results.” She paused, and her composure wobbled, and she let it.
“I am leaving with the outcome I contracted for, and with materially, substantially more than the agreement specified. I’m reliably informed there’s a word for the surplus.
” She raised the flute. “I’m told it’s called a family.
My lawyers,” she said, and her voice broke on the joke and she pushed through it anyway, “will be hearing about it.”
I glanced at my phone, once, in the middle of all of it, out of the old habit that calms me, the reciting of figures.
The completion bonus had posted. And the number that had ridden up the mountain with me in a duffel a couple of months before, €19,212.40, the final-demand figure I’d known to the cent because knowing it to the cent was the only control I’d had over my whole life, was gone.
Zero. Cleared. The debt that had defined me, paid in full.
I looked at the number for one second. Then I put the phone back in my pocket without telling anyone, and went and got another slice of the renamed cake, because the cake was warm and the people were mine and the number was, in the end, just a number.
She summoned me that night with the old formality, as a joke, the last night of her booking.
A printed agenda slid under my door, as the agendas had come all season, except this one had a single line item on it, and the line item read: The thing that was never on any chart.
Inside her suite, candles. The fire lit. And in the fire, curling and blackening and going to ash, her old contract folder, the fourteen pages of penalties and metrics and confidentiality clauses, the armor she’d arrived in, burning.
And Simone, on the bed, in nothing at all but my stolen flannel work shirt, the soft worn one I’d been missing for a week and had assumed Poppy had taken, the one Poppy had been framed for and was, by the look she gave me at breakfast, absolutely furious about.
“Poppy didn’t take your shirt,” Simone said, watching me clock it, supremely unbothered. “I took your shirt. I let her take the blame because watching her splutter about it was the most entertainment I’ve had since the cake. I’m keeping it, by the way. It’s settled law. Don’t bother.”
She held out a hand.
“The program is finished,” she said, as I came to her.
“The thing I paid for is done, it took, it worked, there’s a baby.
Tonight isn’t on any schedule. Nobody prescribed it.
There’s no window, no card, no signature, I owe nothing and you’re owed nothing.
” Her dark eyes were steady and warm and completely certain.
“Which is exactly why I want to give you the one thing the program never once required. The thing that was never going to be on a chart. Freely. Because I want to, and because for the first time in a decade I’m doing something for no reason except that I want to.
” She drew me down. “Slowly. I’m in command of my own surrender tonight. You’ll follow my pace. Understood?”
“Understood.”
It was slow, all of it, from the first touch, because she’d decided it would be and because she was pregnant and certain and luxurious with it, the armor worn open, a new key on her entirely, softened and lit and in total command of her own undoing.
She let me worship her first, a long preparation written as exactly that.
I unbuttoned the flannel shirt off her one button at a time, the way I’d opened a white coat the night before, and pushed it open over the full heavy bust and the dark luminous skin gone somehow even more radiant with the certainty in her now, the new ease on her, pregnant and sure and lit from inside.
I laid her back into the pillows and took my time, my mouth at her throat, the slope of her breasts, the soft plane of her stomach where the future was, and lower.
“You don’t have to,” she started, the old reflex, the woman who didn’t let herself be given to.
“I want to. Lie back. You’re in command, but I’m allowed to want.”
She let that land, and then she let her knees fall open, and I banked two finishes in her before we came anywhere near the main event.
The first under my mouth, slow, my tongue dragging through her slick folds and circling her clit while I sealed my lips around it and sucked, her hands fisting in my hair and her hips rolling up against my tongue, a long luxurious build with no clock on it, until she came with a low broken sound and her thighs shaking around my ears, her cunt flooding wet against my mouth.
The second on my fingers, two of them buried deep and curling against the front wall of her while I kissed the inside of her thigh and rubbed her clit with my thumb, her breath gone ragged, the woman who’d timed everything letting herself be taken apart twice over with no schedule anywhere in the room, no card, no window, nothing prescribed, only wanted.
“That’s two,” she breathed, wrecked, a ghost of the counting habit, smiling at the ceiling. “On the record. Now the thing I actually called you up here for.”
Then she gave herself to me in a manner the program had never once put on a chart, on her own terms, as ceremony and never as conquest.