Chapter 19
NAROD
The silence after the lift doors close lasts approximately four seconds.
Then Martin says it, and the question hangs over the conference table like weather.
I take a calm, deliberate bite of my croissant.
The cardamom really is more developed on the second tray.
Narod had apparently discussed optimal proofing times with the baker for twenty minutes on a Wednesday, which I know because he texted me about it with the same precise enthusiasm he applies to liability modelling, and I had read the message sitting at my desk with my chin resting in my hand and a completely unprofessional expression on my face.
I chew. I swallow. I set the croissant down with the, unhurried movement of a woman who has decided she is done performing smallness for anybody's comfort.
"Yes," I say, looking at Martin directly. "He is."
Petra makes a sound that is clearly a suppressed laugh.
Dhruv is nodding with the expression of someone recalibrating an entire professional relationship in real time.
Simon, who has said perhaps forty words to me in three years, blinks once and says, "Good.
" Which, from Simon, I understand to be a standing ovation.
Martin looks at the bakery box. He looks at the fourth slide on the projector screen, where my variance analysis sits in clean, irrefutable columns. He looks at me.
"The numbers are sound," he says, and it costs him something, and I let him pay it.
"I know," I say pleasantly. "Shall we continue?"
"The croissant thing was incredibly hot, Livia," I don't even bother arguing with her.
She's right. It absolutely was.
Three months later, I am wearing a bracelet that weighs approximately as much as my left shoe, and I have never felt more like myself in my life.
It sits on my right wrist, thick, warm and the specific heavy gold of traditional Orc courtship metalwork, which I know now is forged by hand and given not as a declaration of possession but as a declaration of intent, a word in Old Orcish that Narod translated for me with his ears going faintly green and his glasses slightly askew as "I am choosing, every day, to remain beside you.
" The clasp is a tiny, intricate mechanism that Narod's hands are too large to manipulate, which means every morning he watches me fasten it myself with such open, helpless tenderness that I have to turn slightly away to compose myself before I ruin my mascara.
I have stopped wearing the cardigans so much. Not because Narod ever said a single word about them, but because somewhere between the conference room and this morning, I stopped dressing to disappear.
The bracelet catches the late afternoon sun as we walk through the entrance arch of the Orc Cultural Festival and turns into something liquid and blinding on my wrist, and I tip my face up toward the warmth and feel Narod's hand settle at the small of my back, heavy and steady and entirely unhurried.
The festival fills six city blocks of the riverside park.
The scale of it is the first thing that recalibrates you, because everything is built to Orc proportions, the stall tables at chest height on me, the food portions requiring both hands, the drums somewhere in the distance producing a sound that you feel more than hear, a rhythmic, rolling vibration that moves up through the soles of your feet and settles somewhere behind your sternum.
There are food vendors selling slow-roasted meats and spiced grain dishes and something on skewers that smells extraordinary and is sold by a very old female Orc with elaborate silver braids who calls Narod by name, cups his face in both massive hands, says something in Orcish that makes him look faintly mortified, and then looks at me and says, in perfectly clear English, "Finally. "
I like her enormously.
Narod has not worn a sweater vest. He is wearing a loose linen shirt in a dark, warm green, untucked, sleeves rolled to the elbow, and he is standing at his full height with his shoulders wide and easy and unhunched, not performing smallness, not apologising for the architecture of himself, just occupying the space he actually needs, which is considerable, and watches me try the skewer with open anticipation.
"Well?" He tilts his head, the small amber warmth of his eyes catching the light through his wire-rimmed glasses.
I chew. The spicing is extraordinary, deep and smoky with something underneath that I don't have a name for but intend to ask about at length.
"Tell me every ingredient," I say. "I need to know what this is so I can find it again."
His face does the thing. The thing where all the careful, held-in warmth comes to the surface at once, unguarded and completely undone, and it still gets me the way it got me that first night when he sat across a tiny bar table with a cosmopolitan he'd ordered for the colour and asked me three follow-up questions about my spreadsheet methodology that demonstrated he had actually been listening.
He starts listing ingredients and I listen properly, the way he taught me to, and behind us the drums build and the festival crowd thickens around us, a mix of Orcs and humans and various other species all moving through the warm late afternoon light, and I tuck my free hand into the crook of his elbow and we walk.
I have been to this festival twice now. The first time, eight weeks ago, Narod had stood at the entrance with his hands in his pockets and said, very quietly, "You do not have to enjoy this.
I understand it is quite different from—" and I had taken his hand out of his pocket and held it and walked him through the arch and said, "Tell me what everything is," and watched him light up from the inside, and that had been that.
Now I know which stall does the best spiced bread.
I know the metalworker's name is Greta and she has been at this festival for twenty-two years and her bracelets are known across three communities and she made mine specifically, taking my wrist measurement from the paper Narod had brought her and then asking him three pointed questions in Orcish that he had answered with his ears deeply, unmistakably green.
I know the large, scarred male running the axe-throwing demonstration is named Pol, who works in municipal planning and has extremely detailed opinions about urban infrastructure.
I know the old Orcish lullaby they play at dusk from the central stage, because Narod sang it to me very quietly one night sitting on his enormous sofa with my feet in his lap, and even off-key it had done something irrevocable to my cardiovascular system.
We stop at the woven goods stall. I examine a wall hanging with a geometric pattern in deep red and gold.
Narod stands slightly behind me, one hand resting between my shoulder blades with the comfortable, unconscious placement of someone who has learned the geography of another person, and leans down to read the card beside it.
"The pattern is a protection symbol," he says, quiet enough that it's just for me, his breath warm near my ear. "Traditionally placed at the entrance of a dwelling." He pauses. "I have one at my door. My grandmother made it."
I turn and look up at him, which still requires a committed upward tilt of my chin, and I will never once complain about it.
"I know," I say. "I thought it was decorative."
"It is also decorative," he says, with great dignity.
I am laughing, tipping my forehead toward his chest, when I hear it.
A specific quality of silence, the particular social silence of a person who has seen something unexpected and is processing whether to proceed or retreat, and then the sound of expensive trainers on gravel that I recognise with the accuracy of someone who spent eight months hearing them squeak across a shared kitchen floor.
"Livia?"
The voice is the same. That particular blend of confident and aggrieved, the tone of a man who expects to be welcomed even when he shows up uninvited, which is the only way Chad has ever shown up anywhere in his entire life.
I turn around slowly.
He is standing approximately five feet away on the gravel path, holding a branded tote bag and wearing a company lanyard that reads DIVERSITY & INCLUSION OUTREACH INITIATIVE in the specific font of an organisation that has confused attendance with action.
He has a slightly sunburned nose and the expression of a man who came to a cultural festival expecting to be photographed looking broad-minded and has instead encountered something that is visibly reconfiguring his afternoon.
His eyes move from my face to the bracelet on my wrist to the very large, very present, entirely relaxed hand that Narod has now moved from my back to my shoulder with the calm, unhurried placement of a man who has absolutely nowhere else to be.
Chad's mouth opens. Closes. He looks up, because Narod's face requires a significant upward trajectory from Chad's height, which is average, which Chad has always experienced as sufficient, and which now, contextually, reads as somewhat inadequate.
"Hey," Chad says. To me. Specifically to me, with the deliberate re-orientation of a person choosing not to acknowledge Narod's presence, which I recognise as a Chad Classic, the same selective vision that once looked directly at my quarterly bonus and said, "Is that before or after they factor in the support staff? "
I feel Narod's hand on my shoulder. Steady. Unhurried. Not gripping, not posturing, just present, the same way he is always present, with the quality of attention that means I am the fixed point he is oriented toward and everything else is simply geography.
I look at Chad. I look at the lanyard. I look at his expression, which is doing something deeply unflattering, something that sits between wounded pride and the very recent discovery that the narrative he has been carrying about me, specifically the one where I am the person he generously moved on from, is not the story that is being told here.
"Chad," I say, pleasantly, the same tone I used with Martin in the conference room, the tone that costs nothing because I have nothing left invested in the response it produces.
He looks at me. He looks at the bracelet again. Something moves across his face that I don't need to name or catalogue or carry home with me. It exists, it passes, it is not mine to manage.
"You're here together?" he says, and the question carries more weight than he intends it to, with someone doing rapid, painful arithmetic.
"We are," I say.
Narod says nothing. He does not need to.
He is simply standing at his full, uncompressed height with his shoulders easy and wide and his hand warm on my shoulder, and the quality of his silence is not threatening and not performing, it is simply the silence of a person who is exactly where they intend to be, with exactly the person they intend to be with, and finds the current interruption mildly interesting at most.
Chad looks up at him again. Narod meets his gaze with the mild, attentive expression he uses during quarterly risk briefings, the one that is completely polite and communicates nothing except complete and total calm, which is somehow more destabilising than any alternative.
"Right," Chad says. "Cool. That's." He gestures vaguely at the festival around him, the lanyarded gesture of a man recontextualising his afternoon in real time. "Great that you're, yeah."
I watch him locate an exit strategy. I watch him find it.
"Well," he says. "Good to see you."
It is clearly not, and we both know it, and the beautiful thing, the genuinely, quietly beautiful thing, is that I feel nothing about that except a small, clean sense of completion, like closing a tab that has been open in the background consuming processing power for far too long.
"Take care of yourself," I say, and mean it in the sincere, utterly indifferent way you mean it about a chapter of your life that taught you something useful and then finished.
He walks away down the gravel path, lanyard swinging, tote bag clutched, until the festival crowd absorbs him and he is gone.
Narod waits. He is very good at waiting. He has the patience of something geological. Then, after a moment, he says, in the low, careful voice he uses when he is taking his readings, assessing the data, checking my state before he proceeds.
"Are you all right?"
I look at the woven wall hanging with its protection symbol.
I look at the gold on my wrist, heavy, warm and chosen.
I look up at Narod's face, at the amber eyes and the earnest careful attention and the polished tusks and the wire-rimmed glasses that sit slightly crooked because he nudged them when he was reading the card and didn't notice.
I reach up and straighten his glasses.
"I'm excellent," I say, and I mean that with a completeness and a precision that would satisfy even his standards of measurement. "Can we get more of those skewers?"
His entire face opens up, warm and uncomplicated and entirely his.
"Greta's grandmother's recipe," he says. "I can get you the full ingredient list. She likes you."
"Everyone who matters likes me," I say, and take his hand, and we walk back into the festival together, and somewhere behind my sternum the drums keep their deep, rolling beat, and the late afternoon light turns everything gold.