20. Cassian
CASSIAN
Becca puts the slide deck up at eleven on the upper terrace, and I stand at the head of the long teak table with the projector throwing the property's three-year revenue projection onto a freestanding screen behind me, and I tell five men and one woman, in the cleanest possible language, what they are about to give me thirty-eight million dollars to do.
Roland Vance, three seats down, lifts his coffee cup half an inch.
"Your fiancée flagged it."
"She did."
"At lunch."
"At lunch on Wednesday. She is, when she is not at this villa, the head concierge at the property. Three years. She reads the daily reports. The honeymoon traffic held into October last year — she'd been telling me about it. I, at the time, did not listen."
"Mm."
"I have, since, learned to listen."
There is a small chuckle around the table.
It is the small chuckle of men in their fifties and sixties who have, in their lives, heard many men say I have learned to listen about a wife and have, in their experience, found exactly one such man telling the truth at any given table.
They are not, today, sure which one I am.
I am also not, today, sure. I keep going.
I keep going for forty minutes. I keep going through the Q3 numbers, the staffing forecast, the contingency on the cliff annex.
I drop her name twice more. Once when I cite an occupancy figure.
Once when I close the deck — and on a personal note, my fiancée and I are planning to marry the second weekend in December at the cliff terrace, which I expect will, frankly, be the property's best advertisement for the wedding business model in phase three — and Roland, at the close, sets his cup down and sets his pen down and sets his hands flat on the table and says, "Cassian. Let's close it."
"Now."
"By the end of next week. Becca will have the signed term sheet to your office Monday. We're not going to wait three weeks if you're not making us. Are you making us."
"I'm not making you, Roland."
"Good."
He stands. He shakes my hand. The whole table stands, the way tables do when Roland Vance stands, and Becca — Becca, who is the only person in this room who has, in the last hour, looked at my face with her full attention — comes around the table to me and lowers her voice.
"You did well."
"Thank you."
"I want her at the signing."
"All right."
"Cassian."
"Yes."
"Don't lose her between now and the signing."
"I'm not."
"Good."
She walks to her car. The valet brings the car around. The car goes down the drive. The house is, at twelve thirty, briefly, mine again.
Sebastian finds me in the corridor outside my study at one o'clock, and the look on his face is not the look of a man bringing a calendar update.
"Sir."
"Sebastian."
"A word."
He follows me into the study. He closes the door behind him. He does not sit. He does not, in nine years, sit in this room without being asked.
"Talk."
"She has been in the system."
"Whose system."
"The reservation system. Resort-side. This morning at eight forty-six."
"Maren."
"Yes, sir. Her credentials are still active. I — sir, I was instructed to pull them. I had Reeve walk it down to IT on Friday at two. The badge office didn't process the ticket. They put it in a queue. Apparently the queue was, this week, six days deep."
"What did she pull?"
"Vance's reservation history."
"What did she find?"
"What's in there, sir."
"Sebastian."
"The block on the suite, sir. The August 31 entry. With your initials and the date."
I sit down at my desk. I sit down because I have, currently, a working knowledge of what the August 31 entry says, and what it says is CR / 9/4, and I had, at the time, made the entry myself because Reeve had been on vacation and I had, in three years, learned to keep my own calendar on the days she wasn't there.
I am not, in this moment, particularly admiring of past Cassian.
"She knows."
"She knows about the block, sir. I cannot tell you what she's deduced."
"Sebastian. Listen to me."
"Yes, sir."
"Pull her credentials. Do it yourself, on your phone, in this room. Now. I do not want it in a queue."
"Done."
"Lock the third-floor server. Lock the south wing of the office. If she goes to either, redirect her. Politely. Tell her Reeve has the file she's looking for and Reeve is in Carmel until Tuesday."
"Sir."
"What."
"I want to say, on the record, that I am not — I do not think this will go the way you are betting it goes."
"It's not a bet, Sebastian."
"It is a bet, sir. With respect."
"Pull the credentials, Sebastian."
He pulls them. On his phone, two thumbs, the same small, practiced patience he’s developed over nine years of locking doors on my behalf.
And in all nine of those years, he has never—this is the new variable—looked at me afterward with the expression of someone weighing whether to request a different post.
He doesn’t ask. He puts his phone away. He leaves.
In the study, I take the chair at the desk. The photograph on the bookshelf—the one from the first year—catches my eye.
I open the lower right drawer. I take out a clean sheet of paper. At the top, I write contingency. Underneath, in a column, I write three things:
Public statement: amicable, mutual, no comment.
Vance: hold December narrative through close; frame as private decision post-signing.
Mother: silence.
I look at the page.
I fold it. I put it in the inside pocket of my jacket.
I do not know, currently, whether I have written the page because I am about to need it, or because writing it is the way I am, currently, taking the temperature of a room I cannot, anymore, walk through without burning my hand on a wall.
Cocktails are at six on the lower terrace. I am, when she comes down, already there, with my hand on a tumbler and Roland's deputy laughing at something Graham has said. Maren is in pale green silk. Her hair is up. The diamond is on her hand. The small gold chain is at her wrist.
She crosses the terrace. She crosses it the way a guest crosses a terrace, which is to say with the small considered angle of a person who is, in fact, looking for a host and has decided, in the last two steps, that she has found one.
I put my arm around her waist as she reaches me. I draw her in against my side. I kiss the top of her head — staged, light, the kind of kiss her mother will, from the other end of the terrace, see and store. I keep my hand at her waist.
She does not lean.
She does not lean and she does not stiffen.
She simply does not, in any direction, give.
She is, against my hand, the temperature of a wall.
Her shoulder under my palm is rigid. Her hand, when I lace my fingers through hers, is cold.
Her face, when she looks up at me, is the face she put on at lunch yesterday and again at dinner — the bright, professional, four-hundred-guests face.
The smile, in particular, is not for me.
"Maren."
"Cassian."
"Drink?"
"I have one."
"All right."
Roland comes over. Roland tells her she is radiant.
Maren thanks him. Maren thanks him with the warmth that I know, now, she has, in three years, given to two thousand strangers, and she does not, at any point in the next twenty minutes, do the small tilt of her cheek into my shoulder that has, in two weeks, been the small unconscious tell I have been counting on.
Delilah lifts her glass to me from across the terrace, bright and unbothered, not yet told to hold the florist. I refuse to look at Sebastian. If I do, I’ll catch the look he gave me in the study at one o’clock, and I cannot afford to take that hit a second time.
Owen catches me by the arm in the corridor at quarter to eight, between the cocktails and the dinner I have no desire to sit through.
"Cassian."
"Owen."
"A word."
"Now?"
"Now."
He is in shirtsleeves. The tie has come off, which is — for Owen — a tell.
He pulls me into the small alcove with the portrait of my grandfather, the same alcove I pulled his sister into on Sunday night, and his hand on my arm is tighter than the handshake on Sunday, and his face, when I look at it, is the unreadable face of a young man who has, evidently, decided that the until Sunday he agreed to in the library is, in his estimation, expired.
"Cassian, I will be brief."
"Owen."
“This whole thing looks strategic. From here. From where I’m standing tonight—on a terrace where you announced a wedding date to a fund before saying it to my sister—this looks planned, not real.
I’m telling you because I’m her brother, and I’ll be the one she calls in the morning, and I want to give you the chance, right now, to prove I’ve misread this. ”
"Owen."
“Don’t. Cassian. Don’t. I’m not asking you a question.
I’m giving you a warning. My sister is not—she is not Mom, and she is not me, and she is, in particular, not a woman who is going to tolerate being a tool.
She is the kindest of us. She is also the one who, when she finally figures a thing out, does not negotiate.
She leaves. I have watched her do it twice.
Once to a college boyfriend, once to a friend in eighth grade.
She does not yell. She does not make a scene.
She goes. And when she goes, she does not, Cassian, come back.
So if you have anything to tell her tonight—tell her tonight. Not Sunday. Tonight.”
"Owen. I hear you."
"Do you?"
"Yes."
"Good."
He lets go of my arm. He goes back to the dinner. The portrait of my grandfather, in the alcove, watches me with the small, set, disappointed face that all of my grandfather's portraits have, regardless of the room they are hung in.
I take the folded paper out of the inside pocket of my jacket. I unfold it. I look at the column. Public statement: amicable. Vance: hold December. Mother: silence.
I add a fourth line.
Maren: Tell her tonight.
I look at the words for a long moment before folding the paper and sliding it back into my pocket.
When I sit down at the dinner table three minutes later, I leave it there.
I don’t pull her aside afterward either.
I tell myself I’m waiting for the right moment, but the truth is simpler and smaller: I’m lying to myself, and I know it.