Chapter 19
SASHA
Isat on that floor between my two doors longer than I want to admit.
Then, the part of me that has never once known how to sit still got up off the boards and got dressed, because being dressed is being ready, and being ready is the only prayer I know.
I didn’t go to the window.
That was the strange part, moving through my condo like there was a wire strung across it at knee height.
I made the coffee I hadn't made. I stood at the counter to drink it instead of the balcony. And the whole time, some low, cold, reading thing in the back of me kept its eye on the glass without letting me look at it, because a man who doesn’t scare had looked at that window on his way out the door. I had caught it.
I got as far as the counter and I picked up my phone.
I'd let her ring out. I had never once done that, and I'd done it that morning, and the not-doing-it-again was suddenly the most important thing in my life. Because if I sat in this condo one more hour by myself, reading my own walls, I was going to come apart in a way I didn’t have a plan for.
There is exactly one person on this earth I have ever come apart in front of.
She answered on half a ring.
"Sasha."
Not hey. Not there you are. Just my name, fast, the way you say a name when you've been holding the phone in your hand.
"Can you come over?" I asked.
I heard her already moving. I heard keys.
"I'm coming," she said. "Twenty minutes. Don't—" a pause, and I heard her decide not to say don't do anything, because there was nothing to do, and she knew it. She'd heard something in three words that told her that. "I'm coming. Put the kettle on."
"I don't have a kettle."
"Put something on, Sasha. I'm walking out the door."
She made it in seventeen.
I buzzed her up and stood in my open doorway and watched her come down the hall.
She took one look at me—dressed, composed, holding it, the way I hold everything—and her face did a thing, and she didn't say a word.
She just came the last of the way fast and put her arms around me.
I stood in my own doorway and let Isabel Harper Dane hold me up.
Something in my chest that had been clenched since a tightening in a bathtub let go about a quarter turn.
"Okay," she said, into my hair. "Okay. I've got you. Come on."
We went in. She kicked the door shut behind us and got both locks without being told.
I watched her do it and something snagged in me, because it was the exact thing he'd said.
Both locks. But she did it out of a different instinct, an old one, one I'd seen before—Izzy Harper checking the locks is a woman who has learned the hard way that the world comes through unlocked doors.
She sat me down on my sofa. She found the coffee. She poured two and brought them over and sat down at the other end. She turned her whole body to face me and pulled her feet up under her, and she waited.
That was the thing about her. She'd run through the door in seventeen minutes and now she could sit still as a stone and wait, because she knew me, and she knew that if she asked the wrong question first, I'd hand her the built answer.
The smooth one, the one with no seam in it.
So, she didn't ask. She just turned toward me and waited, and let the quiet do the work, the way I do it at the desk.
I looked into my coffee.
"I did something," I said.
"Okay."
"I broke a promise I made myself."
She didn't move. "Which one?"
And that stopped me, because it meant she knew there was more than one. It meant she'd been watching me longer and closer than I'd let myself notice, cataloguing my fences the way I catalogue a guest’s. And she knew I had promises to myself the way a house has load-bearing walls.
"You know which one," I said.
She was quiet a moment.
"The man in the Magnolia Suite,” she said.
I looked up.
"I hold the room, Sash." Her mouth turned, rueful, sad.
"I'm the one who called it in. I know who's in it.
" A breath. "I didn't know it was—I didn't put it together, that you and he—" She stopped.
Started over, gentler. "Two days off. The voice on the phone.
You letting me ring out." Her eyes came up to mine.
"I've been scared all morning it was something bad. This is not the thing I was scared of."
"It might be the thing you should've been scared of."
"Why?"
And there it was. The open door. The thing I'd called her over to say and didn’t know how to start.
I set the coffee down.
"Because he's one of them," I said. "Izzy.
He's one of yours. And I swore—I swore I would never.
I have watched what comes in behind those men.
I have checked in the women who loved them and I have handed them a key and pointed them at the elevator and then stood there and watched the doors close.
I know how it goes, I know exactly how it goes, and I did it, anyway.
I let him all the way in." My voice was doing a thing and I let it.
"And this morning, he put a gun in the back of his pants and told me to stay off my balcony and walked out that door and wouldn’t promise me he was coming back. "
Izzy went very still.
"He told you to stay off the balcony," she said.
Careful. Even. And I heard it—I heard the thing move behind her voice, the same thing I'd heard behind his, the practiced calm coming down over something that was not calm.
She knew something. Of course, she knew something. She'd married the whole of it.
"Izzy."
"I'm listening."
"You did that, too, just now. That thing with your voice." I looked at her. "You went smooth. Both of you. He does it and you do it and I do it, and I’m so tired of being the last one in the room to find out what everybody's being smooth about."
She set her coffee down.
"Is this about Byron?” I asked.
The name went across the room like a dropped glass. I watched her go still with it.
Because I knew about Byron. Of course, I knew about Byron.
She'd told me herself, a while back, sitting on this same sofa with a bottle of wine gone half-warm between us—that the father the Danes had buried, the ghost at the center of all that money and all those brothers, had turned up alive. That he hadn't been dead at all.
She'd told me because it had knocked the earth out from under her marriage for a while, and she'd needed somebody who wasn't a Dane to say it to. I was the somebody, the way I'm always the somebody. I'd held it. I'd never once repeated it.
"You know I know," I said. "You told me yourself."
"I told you he was alive." Her voice had gone careful again, and this time she didn't fight it, because we were past the part where she could. "That's what I told you. That's all I told you."
"And there's more."
"There's more."
"Is he the reason?” I watched her face. "Whatever's got all of you this week. Him?”
And then Isabel Harper Dane did a thing I had not seen her do in all the years I've loved her. She stopped managing me.
"You're right," she said. "I do know things.
And I'm not going to be able to tell you all of them today.
I need you to hear the reason, because the reason is not the one you think.
" She leaned in. "It's not that I don't trust you.
My God, Sasha. You're the most trustworthy person I have ever known in my life.
It's that some of what I know is the kind of thing that's dangerous to carry. Not old-secret dangerous. Now dangerous. This-week dangerous. And you've been carrying the heavy things for years already, and nobody ever asked you if you wanted to. I’ve known that, and I’ve let it happen, because it was convenient, and because you were so good about it. "
The room went quiet.
There it was. Out loud. The exact shape of the thing I'd been swallowing for years, said back to me by the one person who'd been on the other side of it. It landed so square that I couldn't breathe for a second.
"You knew?” I asked.
"I knew."
"You knew, and you let me—"
"I let you. Yeah." She didn't flinch from it.
"I told myself you didn't mind. I told myself it was just Sasha being Sasha, so good at the desk, so steady, handles everything.
And it was easier to believe that than to look at what I was actually asking of you.
Which was that you scrub things. Cover things.
Lie to people with badges and never once ask me why.
" Her eyes were wet now, and she let them be.
"I put that on you and I never said thank you like I meant it, because if I'd said it like I meant it, I'd have had to admit what it was. "
I had spent a long time waiting to be angry about this. Now that it was here, laid out between us, I couldn't find the anger anywhere.
What I found instead was worse. It was grief, and it was old, and it had two names on it.
"My mother did it, too," I said.
Izzy went still.
"For decades. She scrubbed and she covered and she used the back stairs and she never let them see her.
She was so good about it, and nobody ever asked her if she minded either.
And I stood there and watched her do it my whole childhood and I swore—" my voice broke and I let it break, "—I swore I was going to be the one who got out from behind the counter.
And instead, I moved twenty feet down it and I'm still scrubbing folios in the dark, except now I do it in heels and I own a condo, and I called it a promotion. "
Izzy came down the sofa and got hold of my hands.
"Sasha."
"I'm not crying."
"You can cry. God, you can cry. I have never once seen you do it and I have known you—"
"I don't."
"I know you don't." She held on. "That's what I'm saying.
You don't. In all these years. And I never asked myself why the strongest woman I know can't let one single thing spill in front of another person.
I think I know why now, and it's breaking my heart, because I think somebody taught you that being seen needing something is how you lose the room. "