16. Dmitri
DMITRI
That same evening, the jet climbed into a sky already going dark at the edges, and Chicago folded itself into a grid of lights below us that got smaller and less complicated with every thousand feet.
I had made the decision to fly to New York within the hour, not because one unfamiliar name on a vendor list was necessarily anything, but because I had spent enough years in this life to know that the difference between paranoia and preparation was mostly a matter of which one found the answer first. Nik had not argued.
Nik never argued with a decision that involved checking something twice.
It was one of several reasons I had kept him this close for twenty years.
"Get me everything we have on the vendor by morning," I'd told Nik in the car to the airport. "Banking history, previous events, whoever put that name on the list in the first place."
"Already started," Nik said. "Beckett's version only shows a name and a contact email. Whoever added them either did it in a hurry or didn't want anyone asking questions about how it got there."
"Which is it?"
"I'll know by the time we land. Give me until morning and I'll know a great deal more than that."
Cora had listened to the exchange without inserting herself into it.
I noticed, because most people filled a silence like that one with reassurance nobody had asked for.
She simply nodded once, committed it to memory with the same quiet attention she gave a floor plan, and let the two of us finish the conversation on our own terms.
Luca claimed the seat facing backward before either of us could take it, on the theory that facing away from where you were headed made takeoff easier on the stomach, a theory he had defended with total conviction and no supporting evidence for as long as I had known him.
He was asleep before we cleared ten thousand feet, head tipped against the leather, mouth open in a way that would have mortified him if he'd been conscious enough to witness it.
"He snores like a man winning an argument," Nik said, not looking up from the folder in his lap. "Loudly, and with total confidence nobody's going to interrupt him."
"Should we wake him?"
"Absolutely not. This is the most productive he's been all day."
Cora laughed, low enough not to actually test Luca's sleep, and turned her attention to the flight attendant setting a tray of snacks on the table between us with the practiced efficiency of a woman who had done this a thousand times and stopped finding it interesting somewhere around the two hundredth.
"Exhibit A," Cora said, lifting a small bag of pretzels like she was presenting it to a jury.
"Salt, crunch, zero emotional risk. A safe, defensible choice for a stressful evening.
" She set it down and picked up the next item.
"Exhibit B, chocolate. Delicious, but a known repeat offender when it comes to melting on important documents, of which I currently have several.
" She weighed both in her hands, deliberating with the exaggerated gravity of a judge who had clearly already made up her mind.
"The court finds in favor of the almonds instead, on the grounds that they require no cleanup and make me look like I have my life together. No further questions."
"Does she do this every time she eats?" Nik asked me, deadpan, like he wasn't sure whether he was allowed to find it funny.
"I don't know," I said. "This is the first time I've watched her fly."
"Lucky you," Cora said, popping an almond into her mouth. "Most people don't get front-row seats to my full legal reasoning. Consider it a privilege."
"I'll add it to the list."
"There's a list?"
"There's a list. It's extensive."
"How long have you worked for him?" Cora asked Nik, apparently deciding boredom had made her bold enough to interview the witness herself.
"Twenty years."
"Is he always like this?"
"Worse, usually. You're catching him on a good week."
"I don't know whether to be flattered or concerned."
"Neither do I," Nik said, not unkindly. "After twenty years, I've mostly stopped trying to decide, and started just keeping a folder on it instead."
Nik went back to his folder not long after that, and Luca stayed exactly where he'd fallen, and the cabin settled into the particular quiet of a plane at cruising altitude, engines low and steady under everything, the kind of sound that made silence feel less like an absence and more like something a person could lean into.
Cora had gone still too, watching the dark shape of the ground far below through the window, and I found myself watching her instead, a habit I no longer bothered pretending wasn't one.
"You've gone quiet," she said, without turning from the window.
"I'm thinking."
"About the vendor, or about something else?"
"Not the vendor."
"You want to tell me, or should I guess? I'm good at guessing. It's basically my entire professional skill set, reading a room and figuring out what nobody's saying out loud."
I looked at her for a long moment, deciding, the way I had been deciding about her since a ballroom full of dust sheets in the spring. Somewhere over Ohio I had stopped debating whether to say the true thing and started working out only how to say it.
"I don't do this," I said.
"Do what? Fly? You own the plane, Dmitri. This seems like something you do fairly often."
"This." I gestured at the small space between our seats, at the tray of half-eaten almonds, at nothing and everything at once.
"Dinners that aren't business. Flights with someone I didn't need to bring along for any professional reason.
Any of it. I haven't done this in longer than you've had a business card with your own name on it. "
She didn't say anything right away, and she didn't reach for a joke to fill the space. I noticed immediately, because filling a silence with something clever was pure instinct for her, the same way reaching for silence itself was pure instinct for me.
"How long is that, exactly?" she asked finally, quiet, careful with it.
"Long enough that I stopped counting somewhere around the point it would have started to embarrass me.
" My hand found the water glass on its own and gave it the same restless quarter turn it always did when the rest of me sat too still.
"I've ended things before they had the chance to matter enough to cost me anything.
A friendship. A woman I should have treated better than I did.
Both times I told myself I was protecting something.
Mostly I was protecting myself, and I called it the same thing for years because that was easier to live with.
" I paused, turning the glass again, watching the last of the daylight give out beyond the window.
"It's a tidy system, if you don't look at it too closely.
Nothing gets close enough to leave a mark, so nothing ever costs you anything either.
I built an entire life on that math and never once stopped to ask what it was actually buying me. "
"And now?"
"Now I flew a private jet across two states to make sure a stranger on a guest list wasn't a problem, and somewhere over Ohio I realized I wasn't doing it for the guest list."
"I don't let people stay long enough to find out if they're the ones who'll leave first," she said, quiet, matching the register I'd set instead of turning it into something lighter.
"That's most of the reason I built the company instead of dating anyone seriously for three years running.
Easier to control a seating chart than a person's plans.
" She looked at me then, steady, with none of her usual reflex to soften a thing with a joke.
"I don't think I'm scared of that with you, and that scares me more than anything else tonight has. "
Cora reached over and took my hand, and she didn't let go of it, not when the flight attendant came back through with coffee, not when Luca stirred and resettled himself with a fresh, competitive snore that made Nik glance up with weary resignation, not when Nik took in the two of us, hands joined over the armrest, and looked back down at his folder without a single word, which from Nik was as close to a blessing as I was ever going to get.
We stayed like that for most of the descent, her hand in mine, neither of us filling the quiet with anything it didn't need.
It was not a silence I had to manage or outlast, the way I had managed every other one for most of my life.
It was just a place to sit for a while. I had not known, until that exact moment, that I had ever actually wanted one.
Somewhere beneath the clouds, the city was still going about its evening, with no idea it had just become the one place I actually wanted to land.
New York came up underneath us in a wash of lights that made Chicago's grid look modest by comparison, whole avenues of it strung together like something built specifically to be looked down on from exactly this height, and the landing was smooth enough that Luca slept through most of it, waking only when the wheels finally hit the runway with a jolt that startled him upright, blinking, already asking Nik what he'd missed.
"Nothing you needed to be awake for," Nik told him, which was not technically a lie.
"I wasn't asleep. I was resting my eyes with commitment."
"You were snoring loud enough to set off a car alarm somewhere over Pennsylvania."
"That was turbulence."
"It had a rhythm, Luca."
Luca opened his mouth to argue further, thought better of it, and settled for straightening his jacket with as much dignity as a man could manage while still working the sleep out of his own voice.
The car from the airport into the city was quiet in a way that felt loaded rather than empty, weighted with the same stillness that had sat between us on the plane.
Cora watched the city slide past the window, buildings stacking taller and closer together the further in we drove, and I watched her do it, memorizing the particular way she leaned her head against the glass like the city still had something to say to her after all these years of living inside it.
"You're staring," she said, without looking away from the window.
"I am."
"Most men pretend they're not doing that."
"I stopped pretending things around you a while ago."
She smiled at that, small and private, the kind she didn't perform for anyone else in the car, and reached for my hand again like it was the most natural thing in the world. By now, somehow, it was.
The car stopped outside her building, and neither Nik nor Luca said anything as we got out.
Both had clearly drawn the correct conclusion, and both had the sense not to comment on it.
I walked her up, past the buzzer panel that still hung open from whatever repair had never come, nobody in the building to notice either of us, up a narrow flight of stairs that smelled faintly of someone else's dinner, to a door she unlocked with a hand that wasn't quite steady.
She paused there, key still in the lock, and looked back at me instead of turning it right away.
"You don't have to come up," she said. "I know it's late, and Nik's probably already three reports deep on the vendor by now."
"I know."
"That wasn't a no."
"I know that too."
She held my gaze a moment longer, some private decision settling itself behind her eyes, taking its time, the same way she handled everything that actually mattered to her, and turned the key.
Her apartment door closed behind us. Neither of us reached for the light.