Nadia #2
Noon arrives with Gianna and two bags from somewhere that produces when unpacked: an amount of cheese that suggests she has opinions about cheese, fruit, bread that is obviously from somewhere that takes bread seriously, and three small containers of something that smells like olive oil and herbs and takes me immediately and involuntarily to somewhere I've never been.
"Amalfi," Gianna says, when I say this. "We have a place there. I try to bring things back when we've been." She sets the containers on the coffee table with the ease of someone who brings the Amalfi coast into rooms regularly. "It doesn't travel well but it travels well enough."
She settles on the couch with the specific quality she has — warmth that doesn't announce itself, the kind that simply fills whatever space it's in and makes the space better without making a point of doing so. She looks at me with the directness I've noticed she applies to most things.
"You were at dinner last night," she says.
"Yes."
"I'm glad." She picks up the bread and breaks it, which is not cutting it, which is a specific choice that I clock. "I've been curious about you."
"Gianna," Mackenzie says.
"What? It's true." She looks at me without apology. "My brother told me things. Finn told me things. I wanted to see for myself." She extends the bread. "Here."
I take it. "What did they tell you."
"That you're exceptional at your work." She picks up one of the herb containers and opens it.
"And that Liam looks at you the way he looked at his phone for two months before he admitted he was looking at you.
" She dips her bread. "Finn noticed. Finn notices things about Liam because Liam spent two years doing the same for him. "
I look at the bread in my hand.
"Does it scare you," Gianna says. Not unkindly. "Being — here. In this."
I look at her. "Yes," I say. "Different parts of it scare me differently."
She nods, like this is the correct answer. "The first time I understood I loved Finn," she says, "I was in a chapel in Hell's Kitchen at midnight lying to myself about why I was there." She dips her bread again. "The lying was easier than the alternative."
"What was the alternative."
"Admitting that the person I was afraid of losing wasn't an enemy anymore." She meets my eyes. "That the category had shifted."
I look at her.
"Categories shift," she says. "It's uncomfortable and then it's just — what's true.
" She picks up her tea. "You're welcome here, Nadia.
That's what I wanted to say. Not because of him.
Because of what I've heard about who you are.
" She pauses. "And because you ate my food last night like it mattered, which is the fastest way to get on my good side. "
Mackenzie makes a sound that is entirely a laugh.
Ailish is looking at the window with the expression she uses when she's moved by something and has decided not to perform being moved by it.
I look at the bread in my hand and I think about categories that shift and Saturdays that don't have to be for anything and a room in a compound where nobody is running an operation.
"Thank you," I say.
Gianna nods, satisfied, and turns to Mackenzie. "The magazines. What are those."
"Film ones. Ailish brought them."
"Any good ones on this month?"
"There's a retrospective on—"
And just like that, the conversation moves, and I am part of it — not managing my position in it, not calculating its operational utility, just in it, in the room, on a Saturday morning in a city that doesn't care that I arrived and which I am beginning, in specific and particular ways, to care about anyway.
The guilt is still there. Dara, and Viktor, and the unresolved things.
But they're not the only things.
That's not nothing.
I eat the bread. I drink the tea. I listen to Gianna have strong opinions about a director whose last film she saw in Italy and which Mackenzie disagrees about and which Ailish navigates with the diplomatic precision of someone who has learned which opinions are worth the conflict.
Outside, the city does its thing.
Inside, the room is warm.
I let the week finish leaving me.
At three, Liam appears in the doorway.
He looks at the room — the bread and the cheese and the tea and the four of us in various states of Saturday — and his expression does the thing it does when he encounters something he didn't predict and finds it better than what he would have predicted.
He looks at me specifically.
I look back.
"There's food," Mackenzie says, without looking up from her magazine.
"I see that."
"Gianna brought it."
"I gathered." He looks at his sister. "How are you."
"Better than you," she says cheerfully. "Your face is still—"
"Thank you, Kenzie."
"I'm just saying."
He comes into the room and sits on the arm of the couch in the way of someone who is visiting rather than staying, the particular posture of a man who isn't sure if he's welcome in a configuration that assembled without him and is reading the room before committing.
Gianna hands him the bread.
He takes it.
He is welcome.
He looks at me again across the room and I look at him and neither of us says anything and neither of us needs to, which is a specific development from two months ago when every exchange between us required architecture and strategy and the careful management of what was actually being communicated underneath what was being said.
"Viktor?" he says, quietly, just to me.
"Another week," I say. "We're clear until Friday. After that the capsule story stops holding."
He nods. He doesn't ask me to explain the capsule story. He has read it the same way I have.
He eats his bread.
The room continues being what it's been all morning, which is full and warm and entirely unremarkable in the specific way of things that are not unremarkable at all but have arrived at something that resembles peace, which is — in the life I've been living — a more radical thing than anything I was sent here to do.
Ailish catches my eye from the window chair.
She raises her tea cup, just slightly, in the smallest possible gesture.
I raise mine back.
Outside, the afternoon does what afternoons do.
Inside, nobody runs anything.
It is, I think, the best Saturday I've had in years.
Possibly ever.