22. Kane
Sunday morning.
I wake before she does.
This is not unusual. I haven’t slept past six since my residency, a decade of early sites and contractor calls that permanently rewired me.
What’s unusual is waking and not immediately reaching for my phone. Not immediately running the day’s sequence in my head. But lying still for a moment, aware of the weight of another person in my bed and finding, with some surprise, that I don’t want to move.
She’s on her side, facing away from me. Her hair is spread across the pillow in a way that would take forty minutes and a team of people to recreate and costs her nothing in her sleep.
One arm folded under her cheek. The gray henley has ridden up at the back, baring a strip of her hip, and I track it with more attention than I’d admit to. The duvet is mostly hers. Demonstrably, entirely, without any apparent awareness, hers. I have a six-inch strip along the edge.
I let her have it. She doesn’t know she’s taking it. That seems relevant.
I look at her for a moment, this bewildering woman, and feel the word arrangement go quietly obsolete.
Not an arrangement.
I’ve known this for longer than I’ve been willing to name it.
I get up, carefully. She doesn’t stir.
The kitchen is Sunday-quiet, the city outside still soft-edged with morning. I start the coffee and set the grinder running. Then the paper bag from the bakery four blocks over, the one that has the almond croissants she mentioned once, in passing, and which I apparently filed away.
Marcel would find this hilarious. But Marcel is not here.
I arrange the croissants and bagels on a plate when I hear it: the sound of someone waking up in a bed that isn’t theirs. A small sound. Then a longer silence. Then the soft fall of feet on hardwood.
She appears in the kitchen doorway.
Hair everywhere. The henley covering enough. Eyes still half-closed, one cheek creased from the pillow, blinking at the kitchen like she’s establishing coordinates. She sees the food spread on the counter, then me, and opens her mouth.
Her phone buzzes.
She looks down at it, reflex. Her face changes immediately, not dramatically, but I know her face. The half-asleep softness of a moment ago replaced by the look she gets when she’s reading a situation.
“Sloane,” she says. Not a question.
“What does she want?”
“To bring me coffee.” Vera reads the screen. “She was going to come to my apartment.” She looks up at me. “She thinks I’m home.”
I watch her type back. One-handed, quick, she composes these deflections faster now than she did weeks ago. That is not the kind of thing I should be tracking. I notice it anyway.
“What did you say?”
“That I’m already up, already have coffee, slow morning.” She sets the phone face-down on the counter. “She said she hopes mystery man is treating me well.” A pause. “She added a winky face.”
The guilt arrives in her expression before she’s finished the sentence. She’s not performing it, Vera doesn’t perform guilt. It moves through her face and she lets it, briefly, before she files it away. I cross to her. Pick up the almond croissant and hold it out.
She looks at it. Then at me.
“Kane. That is not going to fix—”
“I know. Eat it anyway.”
She takes it. Tearing the croissant apart like she’s finally given herself permission. Her face eases, fractionally.
“How did you know about the almond croissants,” she says.
“You mentioned them a while back.”
She stops chewing. “And you remembered?”
“Yeah.” I pour her coffee. Add the splash of cream, one packet of sugar, and set it beside her. “You said they were the best thing the bakery does and you only let yourself have one a month.”
She stares at the croissant in her hand. Then at me.
“You’re an unsettling man,” she says finally.
“Sit down, Vera.”
She sits. And we eat, her tearing the croissant apart with focused pleasure, me watching her steal pieces of my bagel when she thinks I’m not looking.
I let her take the bagel piece. She doesn’t know I’m letting her. That also seems relevant.
We’re still at the counter when my phone rings.
Not buzzes. Rings. I glance at the screen.
James. Weekend concierge.
I answer.
“Mr. Sinclair.” His voice is the careful register of a man who has worked this building long enough to know when to be tactful. “Your sister is here. She mentioned she knows you’re home. I wanted to call rather than send her up directly.”
“Give me two minutes, James. Then send her up.”
“Of course.”
I hang up. Look at Vera.
She has gone completely still on the barstool. Coffee mug halfway to her lips.
“Sloane,” I say.
She sets the mug down with a precision that is not her natural setting. Then slides off the barstool.
“Bedroom.” I say, already scanning the counter. Her mug in the wrong position. I move it to the cabinet. “Leave the door almost closed. She won’t go in.”
“You don’t know—“
“I know my sister.” I rinse Vera’s plate, stack it. Straighten the barstool. “Trust me. Go.”
“My shoes are by—”
“I’ll handle it. Go.”
She goes. I hear the bedroom door settle behind her, and turn to do the fastest structural assessment of my own penthouse I have ever performed.
Her shoes by the front door. I pick them up, open the coat closet, set them on the floor behind my weekend boots.
Her clutch on the arm of the couch. I pick it up. Look at it. Look around the room. There is nowhere to put a woman’s clutch that doesn’t look like a woman left her clutch here. I stuff it between my charcoal overcoat and the side wall of the closet and close the door.
I sit at my desk. Open the Moretti revisions. Arrange my face into someone who has been here all morning.
The elevator chimes.
Sloane steps out with a paper coffee tray and a white bakery bag, the place on Clement Street, their cardamom rolls. I can smell it from across the room. She looks at me with her head tilted.
“You’re working.”
“Yes.”
“It’s Sunday, Kane.”
“Buildings don’t care about Sundays.” I lean back from the screen. “You could have called.”
“I called three times this week. You answered once.” She sets the tray on the coffee table and drops onto the couch like she owns it. “I texted Vera but she’s having a slow morning, so you get me instead.”
“Lucky me.”
She pulls a cardamom roll from the bag and tears it in half. Her eyes track around the kitchen with the same instinct Vera has, reading rooms, reading details.
She studies me. “Are you seeing someone?”
There it is. Faster than I expected.
“Good morning, Sloane.”
“Kane. I’m asking. Just to make sure you’re okay. You know Lisa, from my office? She’s still looking for a nice man.”
“I’m not looking to date right now.”
She rolls her eyes. The full rotation. “Lisa is nice, by the way. And she actually understands what you do, which is more than I can say for most people you’ve ever—“
“Sloane.”
“Fine.” She sits back. “Fine. I’m dropping it.” She picks at the roll. “But you did the thing.”
I look at my screen. “What thing.”
“The jaw thing. You do it when you’re managing what you say. Like you’re editing before you speak, you tighten, right here.” She touches her own jaw. “You’ve done it since you were sixteen. You did it when you broke Dad’s watch and spent three days deciding how to tell him.”
“I don’t have a jaw thing.”
“You absolutely have a jaw thing.” But she lets it go. She always does — notices, names it, gives you room to not respond. She has more patience than she looks like she should have.
“Not looking to date right now,” she repeats, mildly, to her cardamom roll. “You’ve been saying that for years.”
“And I mean it every time.”
“Mm.” She drinks her coffee. I look at the load distribution numbers on my screen.
A silence opens. Not uncomfortable. The Sinclair sibling kind, the one we’ve had since we were children, where neither of us needs to fill it.
“How’s Vera?” I ask.
I didn’t plan to ask it. It arrives in the room before I’ve decided to put it there.
Sloane looks up. “Vera?”
“Yeah, you mentioned her when you came in. Said she’s having a slow morning.” I keep my eyes on the screen. “Is she alright?”
“Oh.” Sloane settles back. “She’s fine. Good, I think. She’s been different lately. Happy, but somewhere else. She is seeing a guy named Gerald.”
She pulls apart another piece of roll.
“She won’t tell me anything real about him, which is making me insane because we tell each other everything, but I’m trying to respect that it’s new and she wants to be careful.”
I keep my eyes on the screen.
Gerald.
My gaze moves, without my permission, to the windowsill. The small terracotta pot. The succulent sitting in it with complete indifference to the conversation currently being conducted in its name.
She named me after a cactus.
I look back at my screen. Something in my chest that has no business being there presses against my ribs.
“Gerald,” I say. Carefully. “Sounds like a solid name.”
Sloane nods, already reaching for her coffee. “Doesn’t it? Very dependable.”
I say nothing. I do not look at the windowsill again.
“I’m glad she’s happy,” I say. The words are completely true and completely insufficient. I say them flat, like I haven’t spent the last weeks learning the smile she gets when she’s surprised by something good.
“Me too.” Sloane smiles at her coffee. “I’m going to take her to lunch this week.
Force a proper sit-down.” She looks up. “You should try getting along with her sometime, you know. For my sake. The Sinclair-Beckett Smackdown is funny but she’s going to be in my life forever.
It would be nice if the two of you could be in a room without starting an argument. ”
“Sloane.” I set down my pen. Look at her directly. “There’s something I want to—“
My sister’s face opens with attention.
The words are there. All of them. The whole shape of the conversation I’ve been running in my head for days, the lead-in, the explanation, the Vera and I, it started at Eclipse, I should have told you sooner. I can see exactly how to build it. I know the structure. I know which wall to touch first.
I open my mouth.