Chapter 14 #2
It's fast. Half a second, maybe less. A tightening around her eyes and a flattening of her mouth. She taps the counter and I pour again, then picks up her glass and drinks and when she puts it down her face is the flat mask again, same volume, same weather report.
But I saw it. Because I'm standing three feet away with nothing to do but pour drinks and watch faces, and Dahlia just heard the word Custodian and her body reacted before her brain could stop it.
She knows that word. Not from these files. Not from Alexandra's briefing. She knew it before she walked into this compound, and the fact that it's showing up in Kreiss's data is a piece of information that just rearranged something behind her eyes.
Nobody else catches it. Claudio is looking at Charlotte. Charlotte is looking at Dahlia but from the wrong angle. Emilio is looking at me, and when our eyes meet I see it. He caught it too. Not the expression, maybe, but my reaction to it, because Emilio reads me the way I read rooms.
I don't push. Pushing a woman who just arrived to say goodbye to her father about a word that clearly means something she's not ready to share would be the wrong move, and I didn't survive twenty-six years by making wrong moves.
I survived by pouring drinks and keeping my mouth shut and filing information in the part of my brain that Gigi built, the part that stores things until the right moment to use them.
Bam sits through all of it without speaking again. He finishes his whiskey at some point, one long swallow, and turns the glass upside down on the counter.
I watch these people talk and drink and circle the thing they came here to face, and I think about families. Not the blood kind, but the built kind. The kind you assemble from people who showed up when nobody asked them to and stayed when it would've been easier to leave.
Gigi was my family. The whole thing. Start to finish.
And when she died the whole thing died with her and I've been walking around with an empty space where a family used to be, filling it with bar shifts and bottle caps and a stubborn refusal to need anyone because needing people is how you get hurt.
Until Emilio.
That fucker wrecked my lonely hermit crab thing I had going on.
But these people need each other. I can see it in the way Charlotte's hand stays on Claudio's knee.
The way Dahlia's shoulder drifts toward Bam's chest when she's not paying attention.
The way Emilio keeps making sure everyone's glass is full and everyone's talking and nobody's sitting alone with the weight of what's coming.
They need each other and they'd never say it and that's fine because the saying isn't the point. The showing up is.
I'm showing up, too, in my own way. Behind a bar with a rag over my shoulder and a bottle in my hand, the same way I've always shown up, by being useful in a room full of people who are hurting.
It's not the same as being family. But it's the closest thing I've had in years and my chest aches with how much I want it and how scared I am that it won't last.
Claudio and Charlotte leave first. His arm around her shoulders, her head tilted into him. They say goodnight. Charlotte squeezes Dahlia's hand on the way past and Dahlia lets her, which is a big deal from a woman who hasn't let anyone touch her all night except Bam.
Dahlia stands, and the tiredness hits her all at once. Her shoulders drop. Her eyes go heavy. Coming home and a dying father and a bar full of whiskey and whatever the word Custodian did to her insides is doing a number on her.
"Good bar," she says.
"It's getting there."
"Same time tomorrow?"
"I'll be here. I'm apparently a permanent fixture now."
She almost smiles and nods her head. Then she walks out, and Bam follows her, his boots heavy and even, and the sound of them fades down the corridor until it's gone.
The bar is quiet. Emilio is still at the end of the counter. He hasn't moved. His glass is empty and he's holding it the way I hold the bottle cap, not for what's in it but because his hands need a thing.
"You saw it," he says.
"Dahlia? When Charlotte said Custodian?"
"Yeah."
"She knows that word. From before. From somewhere that isn't these files."
He nods. "I'm not asking her tonight."
"Obviously not tonight, asshole. Her father's dying."
"Tomorrow?"
"Let the poor woman grieve, he might pass tonight. Or tomorrow, either way, she needs time. The Custodian thing can wait until she's ready." I wipe the counter. "But she needs to know we saw it. At some point. She needs to know we're not stupid."
"She already knows you're not stupid. She sized you up in the first ten seconds and decided you were worth talking to. That's not nothing. Dahlia doesn't talk to people she doesn't respect."
"She called you a disaster."
"That's her love language."
I snort. I put the whiskey back on the shelf and start washing the glasses. Emilio comes around the bar and picks up a towel and dries beside me, and we stand there doing dishes in silence and it's so fucking domestic I could scream.
"Hey," I say.
"What’s up, vixen?”
"I don't belong here."
He sets a glass down. "We've been through this… you belong with me."
"Not in the big dramatic way. I mean in the quiet way.
I'm standing behind a bar pouring drinks for your family while they get ready to bury the man who built all of this, and I've known these people for three weeks.
Three. I'm not a wife. I'm not a sister.
I'm not even a real girlfriend. I'm the bartender who heard a thing and stuck around because she had nowhere else to go and the guy she's sleeping with has a nice smile. "
"I do have a great fucking smile, don’t I."
"Asshole."
"What." He turns to look at me. Hands wet, towel over his shoulder, his face doing the thing it does when the joking stops, and the person underneath shows up.
"You think belonging is about how long you've known people?
Charlotte's been here six months. Alexandra less than a year.
Dahlia just walked back in after three years away.
Nobody in this compound has a tenure that matches the shit they've been through together. Time isn't the metric. Showing up is."
"I’m literally pouring drinks."
"You hold the room together. You held it together tonight.
Dahlia sat at that bar and drank and talked because you made it safe enough to do that.
You made it normal. You gave her a stool and a glass and a woman across the counter who wasn't going to give her a speech, and that's the only reason she stayed longer than ten minutes. "
I don't say anything. I wash the last glass and hand it to him and he dries it and puts it on the shelf.
"Your grandmother," he says. "Gigi. She raised you behind a bar."
"She raised me everywhere. The bar was just where I learned the most."
"And what did you learn?"
"That the person holding the bottle is the most important person in the room. Because she decides who gets numb and who has to sit with it." I turn off the water. "Gigi said that. I was fifteen. I thought she was talking about alcohol. She wasn't."
He's quiet for a second. Then he leans over and kisses the side of my head. Not my mouth. My head. The temple. A small, warm press that isn't asking for anything.
"Come to bed," he says.
"Close up first. Bottles capped, stools pushed in, rag folded."
"You run a tight ship."
"Gigi didn't raise me to leave a dirty bar."
We close up. It takes three minutes because the bar is small and I'm fast and Emilio does what I tell him. I turn off the light and he holds the door. We walk down the corridor toward his room, and I don't even pretend I'm going to mine.
His hand finds mine in the hallway. Fingers laced, palms flat together, his grip warm. “For the record… you’re not just a bartender. You’re my girl, which means you stay. If you don’t want to stay, that’s fine, but I’m coming with.”
My heart almost breaks out of my chest, and I’m at a loss for words for the first time, so I just squeeze his hand and memorize those words.
Aurelio is dying. His daughter is three floors up trying to sleep in a bed she hasn't slept in for three years.
A mountain of a man is standing guard outside her door because that's how he says I love you.
Alexandra is somewhere with a laptop and Kreiss's files and a word that made Dahlia's face crack for half a second.
And I'm walking down a dark corridor holding hands with a man I've known for three weeks who makes me feel like the empty space where my family used to be might not stay empty forever.
Gigi would say I'm an idiot.
Gigi would also say it's about damn time.