16. Cassian
CASSIAN
She is not at dinner.
It is the first thing I register when I come in from the property tour with Quan, and it is the first thing I do not say anything about. Sebastian is at the door of the dining room with a small folded paper in his hand. He passes it to me. I do not open it in front of the table.
"Where is she?"
"Headache, sir. She asked her mother for tea."
"Did she eat lunch?"
"No."
"Did she eat anything since the kitchen this morning?"
"Toast, sir. With you."
"Mm."
I take the head of the table, pour Delilah’s wine, ask Graham about the crossword, and leave the folded paper from Sebastian untouched in my pocket. I don’t reach for it. I register it the way I register an unwound watch—weighty, inert, demanding attention I refuse to give it.
Delilah is, by her own standards, restrained.
She mentions December twice, the cliff once, and a woman named Marguerite who, evidently, does flowers and lives in town, and she does it all in the soft, conspiratorial undertone of a person who has decided to let the men talk and is, instead, drafting in her head.
Sienna is on her phone. Owen is on his second glass of wine, which is unusual for him, and he is watching me.
He has been watching me, intermittently, since Friday afternoon.
I have not, yet, given him anything to use.
I excuse myself between the second course and the third.
"Apologies. A call from Vance's office I cannot push."
"Cassian, of course."
"I'll be back before dessert."
"Of course."
I won’t be back before dessert; she knows it as well as I do. Delilah touches my hand in passing, the gentle, approving gesture of someone with evening plans penciled in and no intention of missing them.
The hallway is dim. Sebastian falls in beside me without speaking, the way he does, and I open the folded paper as we walk.
The note is in his hand. Three lines.
She did not take the tea, sir. The cup is still on the side table by the window. She is seated. She is awake. She has been at the desk for an hour without the lamp on.
I stop walking.
"Sebastian."
"Sir."
"Has she been in the office today?"
"Yes, sir."
"When."
"Twelve fifteen to twelve thirty-one."
"You watched her."
"I watched the door, sir."
"Did she take anything?"
"No."
"Did she touch anything?"
"The folder on the desk, sir."
"Which folder?"
"The Vance file."
"Mm."
"I should have told you sooner, sir."
"You should have told me at twelve thirty-two, Sebastian."
"Yes, sir."
I stand in the hallway with the paper folded in my hand and that cold, familiar pressure under my ribs—the one I haven’t allowed in since I was nineteen—and I can’t stop myself from tallying what’s in the file.
The timeline. The September dates. The note in my own hand — Maren refs implied — that I wrote on a Wednesday, two days before her family's reservation, because Roland's deputy had asked, on the September 4 call, whether there was anyone in the picture he should be aware of for the dinner, and I had, without thinking, said possibly, because the conversation in the kitchen with Henri had not yet happened and the conversation in my office with her had not yet happened and I had, even then, been turning a small, half-formed idea over in my hand.
I had written implied. I had underlined implied. I had not, at that hour, intended any specific woman. I had been, in the cleanest sense of the word, lying to a deputy on a call.
She has, of course, no way to know that.
She has only the date, in my hand, on a sheet of paper, before the date she sat down at her family's chef's table and said my name.
"Sir."
"I know, Sebastian."
"What would you like me to?—"
"Nothing. Tonight, nothing. I will speak to her tomorrow."
"Sir, the Vance call at seven?—"
"Will happen on time. Go home, Sebastian."
"It's nine, sir."
"Go home, Sebastian. I am asking you as a man, not as your employer. Go home."
He goes home.
I stand outside her door at eleven.
I do not knock. I have, in my hand, a small plate from the kitchen — a piece of bread, a cut pear, a wedge of soft cheese, the kind of thing a person eats when they have had no dinner and are not, in their pride, going to ask.
I leave the plate on the small console table next to her door. I write nothing on the napkin. I go.
In the morning the plate is gone. I do not know whether she took it inside or whether one of the staff cleared it before sunrise. I do not, this once, ask.
The Vance call is at seven. Becca is on. Roland is on. They have, in the night, come back with a question I did not see coming.
"We'd like to move."
"Move."
"Up. Forward. Roland would like to close before the end of the month."
"That's three weeks, Becca."
"I know."
"That is — that is faster than your firm has, historically, closed any deal. By, I think, six weeks."
"I know. Roland likes the property. Roland likes the leadership. Roland — Cassian, I will be direct — Roland liked the dinner."
"Mm."
"He likes a settled house. He has said so twice this week.
He has asked me, twice this week, whether the wedding date is on the calendar yet, which is — which is, frankly, not a question I am used to him asking.
He is, I think, half courting your fiancée and half courting the optics of your fiancée, and he wants to put the term sheet under your hand before either feeling cools. "
In my study, I take the chair at the desk and let my eyes settle on the small framed photograph of the property the year I bought it.
"Becca."
"Yes."
"Tell Roland we will close in three weeks."
"Cassian—"
"Tell him. Tell him by ten. Send the papers."
"Done."
"And Becca."
"Yes."
"Tell him the wedding is December second."
There is a small pause on the line.
"You sure."
"I'm sure."
"All right."
She hangs up. I sit with the line dead in my hand. I sit with that small chamber under my ribs I haven’t let myself feel since nineteen, and beside it the cleaner, colder one I’ve lived in ever since.
I just spent sixty seconds using my engagement to close something.
Whether I tell her… I haven’t decided.
She comes down to the lower terrace at noon for the first meal she has taken with the family in eighteen hours. She is in white. Her hair is up. She has, around her wrist, the small gold chain I put there on Monday morning, which I had assumed she would have, by now, taken off.
She has not taken it off.
I notice. I notice the way I have, since Sunday, been noticing.
"Sweetheart."
"Cassian."
"Sit."
"I'm — I'll sit at the end."
She sits at the end.
I do not move her. I do not, today, reach for her knee under the table.
I do not pour her water before she lifts her glass.
I let her sit at the end with a piece of bread she does not eat, and I keep my voice in the conversation with Graham about the stock market, and I watch her, through the fronds of the centerpiece, with the small clinical attention I’ve honed over thirteen years of watching investors.
She is watching me back.
It is a different watching. It is not the watching of Wednesday morning, which was the watching of a woman waiting for me to do a thing she could fault me for.
It is the watching of a woman who, twenty hours ago, opened a folder on a desk and read a date, and is now reading me against it, line by line, like a contract.
I catch the moment she realizes I’m lying to Graham about a man she knows perfectly well I can’t stand.
I see her make a joke for Sienna that lands on Sienna and has, behind it, a small calibrated edge that I would, two weeks ago, not have known that she could see at all.
I see her see me set my hand, after a long sentence, against my own glass, and I see her track, with her eyes, the small unconscious motion of my thumb against the stem — the same motion my thumb made, on Wednesday morning, against her wrist on the kitchen counter — and her face does not change, but her mouth, very briefly, does the small thing Sienna's mouth does when she is, herself, being watched.
She knows.
She does not, yet, know what she knows. She does not know about the September 4 call, about the implied underline, about Becca on the phone this morning.
But she knows enough to know that she has not, until now, had the trick of seeing me, and that since yesterday she has it, and that she is going to use it.
I do not address it.
I do not address it because I am, currently, three weeks from a closing and seven weeks from a wedding I have just put on a venture firm's calendar, and the man she has fallen in some part of the way for has, this morning, made another decision without her, and the man I am, when she is in the room, is not yet equal to the man I am, when Becca Lin is on the line, and I have not yet figured out which of those two men is going to walk into her bedroom tonight and tell her the truth.
I lift my glass.
"To Friday."
"To Friday," Graham says, into his crossword.
Maren raises her glass from her place at the end of the table. No toast. No glance in my direction.
But she drinks.
I file it.