11. Maren
MAREN
Isleep alone.
It is a small thing and a large thing. I go to bed in my own room — my room, the one Sebastian put me in on Sunday, the one with the cool linen sheets and the door I can close — and Cassian does not come to it.
I do not know if I expected him to. I had, all evening, been daring him to in the way you dare someone to do a thing you would not, in fact, survive.
He read the dare. He chose not to take it.
I should be grateful. I am, instead, lying on my back at one in the morning with my arm flung over my eyes and the kind of sleepless ache in my chest that has, historically, only meant trouble.
He says he doesn't want it to end. Fine.
The part of me that wants to crawl into his bed and put my face in his neck and forget the existence of the powder room, of the open transom, of the words walk her down an aisle if you have to — that part of me has made her case.
The other part is doing what the other part has always done, which is keep score.
I keep score until five. Then I get up.
He is in the kitchen at six. So am I. We have, evidently, rebuilt the morning, which is its own quiet humiliation.
He looks up when I come in. He does not get up.
He has the kettle on. He has, also, a folder beside his coffee, and he taps the folder once with two fingers and slides it down the marble in my direction.
"Good morning."
"Morning."
"Sit. We have work to do."
"What."
"Vance dinner. Thursday. I want you up to speed."
I look at him. He is already dressed — slate gray suit, no tie yet, hair still wet from the shower he has, evidently, taken without asking me to be in it.
He is calm in a way I do not entirely trust. He is calm in the way he was calm the first time I sat across from him in his office, which is to say: he has chosen to be calm because he has decided what he wants the day to be, and he is now executing.
"Cassian."
"Sit, Maren."
I sit.
He opens the folder. There are tabs. There are, God help me, color-coded tabs.
"Roland Vance. Sixty-eight, third-generation money out of Pennsylvania, lost a son in the second Iraq war which he does not discuss but which everyone in the room will know.
Drinks scotch, no ice, no soda, nothing with a fruit in it.
Asks one direct question of the spouse at every dinner, and how she answers determines, in his head, whether the principal is, quote, settled.
Last wife of his made the mistake of saying her favorite hobby was charity work and he passed on the deal the next morning. "
"Cassian."
"Becca Lin, his deputy. Forty-one. Harvard, then Bain. Reads people the way you read people, frankly, only she charges for it. Will compliment your shoes. The compliment is not real. She is timing how long it takes you to thank her. Do not thank her quickly."
"Cassian."
"What."
"I am — I'm a concierge. I've taken Vance's reservations for three years. I know what he drinks. I have, personally, removed the lemon from his scotch."
He looks at me. The corner of his mouth does the tiny thing it does when I have surprised him, which I am trying very hard to stop noticing.
"You've removed the lemon."
"Twice. Personally. Because the bartender we had in March did not believe me when I said no fruit, ever, including the rind on the inside of the glass, and Mr. Vance complained on the way out, and I had a talk with the bartender."
"You had a talk."
"A friendly one."
"Maren."
"What."
"I am about to say something that will get us into trouble."
"Don't."
"I won't, then."
He closes the folder. He pushes it across the marble to me anyway. I open it. I read for an hour. He reads, beside me, the Financial Times on his tablet. He gets up at one point and brings me toast without asking, and I eat it without acknowledging that he brought it, and we are, somehow, working.
Wednesday, he puts me in the room.
It is a soft test. I see it for what it is.
There is a working lunch on the lower terrace with two of Vance's advance team — a man named Keaton who handles their property due diligence, and a young woman, Quan, who handles, as far as I can tell, everything else.
Cassian seats me at his right hand. He pours me water.
He answers a question of Keaton's, and then, casually, in the pause where the next question should land, he says, "Maren, what's the occupancy rate looked like through the off-season this year? "
I feel my stomach drop. My spoon stops. Keaton, who has not, until this moment, looked at me as anything other than the man's fiancée, looks up.
"Eighty-three through Eighty-six percent on the standard rooms," I hear myself say.
"Higher on the suites, which surprised us; we'd been pricing them aggressively because the previous year was soft, but the package the marketing team put together with the spa drove a — fourteen, fifteen percent lift on the long-stay bookings.
Sixty-day average. The honeymoon traffic actually held into October, which it normally doesn't here. "
Keaton blinks.
"That's — very specific."
"I read the daily reports."
"You read them."
"It's my job."
Quan’s smile isn’t the calculated one I was told to expect. It’s real, quick, the kind that appears when a person quietly upgrades their opinion of you.
"Cassian." Keaton turns. "You didn't tell me she worked operations."
"She didn't, until this conversation."
I look at him. He looks back at me. He is, behind his coffee cup, not quite smiling.
The lunch goes on. They ask me three more questions — two I can answer, one I cannot, and I say I cannot, cleanly, without embellishment, and Quan nods like that is also a correct answer.
By the time they are gone, my hands are shaking under the table, and I have not, I realize, eaten the small salad in front of me.
Cassian does not stand right away.
"Maren."
"Mm."
"Look at me."
I look at him.
He is looking at me the way he was looking at me by candlelight in the library on the night of the storm, which is to say: with the door open, briefly, and his hand on the frame.
"You were excellent."
"I—"
"No. Take it. You were excellent. I have brought women into rooms with Roland Vance's deputy who could not have done what you just did.
You answered the question you knew. You did not invent the question you didn't. You used the word soft about a market.
Becca's going to ask about you tomorrow. I will tell her you are mine."
"Cassian."
"What."
"That was — I didn't — that's just my job. I'm not — that wasn't a performance. That's the front desk binder."
"I know."
"Then why are you?—"
“Because, Maren.” He places his cup on the table, eyes steady. “Three years I’ve had you on my staff, and I’m only now understanding I’ve underestimated you entirely.”
"Don't."
"Don't what."
"Don't do this to me at lunch."
"I am doing it after lunch."
"Cassian—"
"All right." He lifts his hands. He is, he does not entirely succeed in hiding, smiling. "All right, Maren. Eat your salad."
I eat the salad.
That night, after dinner, after my mother has gone up and my father has gone to bed and Owen has — strangely, out of character — clapped me on the shoulder on his way past as if I have done a thing he is proud of, Cassian finds me on the lower terrace in the dark.
I am sitting in one of the wide chairs. I have a glass of wine I have not drunk. I have my shoes off, and my feet are tucked under me, and I am looking at the water, which is doing the slow black-and-silver thing it does when there is no moon.
He sits in the chair next to mine. He does not reach for me. He puts his glass on the small table between us, and his hand, after a moment, finds my ankle where it is tucked under me, and rests there. Not gripping. Just there. The pad of his thumb against the bone.
"Maren."
"Mm."
"You did well today."
"You said."
"I am saying again. Not in front of Keaton. Not in front of your family. Just — to you. You did well today."
I look at him. His face is in shadow on one side. His eyes catch the small light from the path lamps, and they are very still.
"Thank you."
"There's something else."
"What."
“I don’t know how to do this part of it.”
"What part."
"The part where I do not, in my head, replace you did well today with she will perform on Thursday.
Those sentences do not — feel the same to me, Maren.
I am telling you that. I am telling you because you have, all day, been waiting for the second sentence, and I do not want you to wait for it tonight. "
I look at him. I look at his hand, on my ankle, which is doing the small unconscious sweep his hands do when they are touching me without his attention.
I look at the way the line of his shoulder fits, in this chair, against this terrace, on this property he built out of nothing because at twelve he decided to.
"Cassian."
"What."
"Don't be sweet to me right now."
"I am not being sweet, Maren. I am being honest."
"That's the same problem."
He doesn't answer.
His thumb keeps doing the thing.
After a while, my hand drifts down into my lap and finds his, and his fingers slide between mine, and I do not pull them back.
I sit there with him and the wine and the dark water, and I do not say anything else, and neither does he, and it is the closest I have come, since six fifty-one yesterday morning, to letting it be true.