Chapter Fifteen #2
At some point, a woman at the next table glanced over, not in the predatory way people sometimes do when they think they recognize a minor local celebrity, but in the way people look at a couple and try to calculate: Is this an established thing, or is this a date?
Her gaze lingered a moment too long for it to be unintentional.
I registered it, and so did Kenneth. He smiled at her, the polite, closed-mouthed kind of smile that says “thank you, please return to your sandwich.” She did, but not before looking at me and, I am sure, reading the entire history of my life off my face.
I did not say what I was thinking, which was that this, right here, was exactly what I had been missing.
Not the sandwich—though, yes, the sandwich—but the unremarkable, shared afternoon.
The fact that anyone could look at us and think: these two have probably done this before.
This is not their first lunch, or their third.
We finished, tossed our wrappers, and headed out, the bell above the door giving a single, defeated clang as we stepped back into the cold. On the walk back, at the crosswalk just before the apartment building, my shoulder bumped Kenneth’s.
Neither of us adjusted our pace.
When we stepped off the curb, Kenneth’s hand found the small of my back—brief, automatic, the kind of gesture I had once thought was an accident and now understood was entirely intentional.
He had done this in an airport, and it had stopped me dead, confused and overtaken by the immediate knowledge that this was what I wanted, and I had never known how to ask for it.
This time, I did not stop. I leaned into it, just slightly, and Kenneth kept his hand there a beat longer than necessary before letting go.
We crossed the street, and I let myself think the thing I had been careful not to for nearly a year. I was done being careful. I was going to let myself have this.
The late afternoon was always my least defensible hour.
Morning was purpose, coffee, numbers, the crisp violence of unchecked email.
Late evening you could hide in Netflix, in spreadsheets, in a list of action items that would never get done but always looked better on paper.
But after four, when the sun managed to claw its way through the distant haze and light up the living room in sideways bands, there was nothing to do but exist with yourself.
Which is how I ended up curled on Kenneth’s couch, phone pressed to my ear, feet tucked up under me like a cat that had never learned dignity, and listened to my mother talk about soup. Not making soup. Consuming it.
Apparently, Carmen had brought a quart of something called “healing broth,” which to hear my mother describe it had the approximate taste profile of warm river water and celery that had been left in the back of the fridge for six months.
My mother hated celery, almost as much as she hated taking pain medication or asking for help, which is how I knew things were bad.
I kept my voice soft, both because I did not want Kenneth to hear me doing “soothing” and because I did not want to break the unspoken rule that only one person in a conversation could be the mother at a time.
“You don’t have to drink it,” I said, which was both a statement of solidarity and the closest I could come to saying, I wish I could do something.
“It was a nice gesture,” she said, in the register she reserved for nice gestures she would prefer never to experience again. “I heard you on the news last week.”
The previous week, a small press piece had gone viral about the so-called “boy genius” behind the art world’s most mysterious financial advisor, and my face had been blurred with comical incompetence.
I had given up trying to explain to my mother that I was not, in fact, a genius, just a person with more time and fewer distractions than my competitors.
I made a noise that was supposed to be a laugh, but sounded more like a cough. “Yeah, that’s—Kyue is, uh, not thrilled about the press. We’re managing.”
I did not mention that I had already mapped out seventeen contingencies in case a certain PI decided to take another run at exposing our client list, or that Kenneth had offered to “handle it” in the tone of someone who had handled a lot of problems in his day.
“You’re eating?” my mother asked, voice shifting to the soft interrogation she used when I was a child and had stopped bringing home permission slips.
“I had lunch,” I said. “It was good. I went out.” I did not say, with Kenneth, because I was not ready to explain what was happening, and also because she would have immediately asked about grandkids and I had enough unanswerable questions to last me until at least Thursday.
She was quiet for a moment, and I felt the weight of what I was not saying hang there between us. Then, simply: “I’m glad.”
I did not trust myself to speak, so I changed the subject to Carmen’s grandchildren and the upcoming follow-up with her doctor, and the new blanket I’d had delivered to her apartment because the heating in her building was criminal.
We signed off after a few more minutes, and I stayed on the couch, the phone cooling slowly in my hand, the room so quiet I could hear the hum of the dishwasher two rooms away.
It was only then that I noticed the study door had been open, just a hair, for most of the call. I padded across the apartment and leaned in the doorway.
Kenneth was at his desk, sleeves rolled to the elbow, reading something on a legal pad. He looked up when I entered, and at that moment he was so entirely himself—steady, unflinching, not in a hurry to speak or to fill the air with words—that I realized he had probably heard everything.
“She says hi,” I offered, defaulting to the safety of neutral ground.
“Tell her hi back,” Kenneth said, and I believed he meant it. He uncapped his pen and set it down beside the pad, folding his hands in front of him, a gesture I recognized from a thousand meetings. It meant that something important was about to happen.
“She’s going to want to have you over for dinner.”
“Good,” he replied, instantly. “It’s about time that I officially meet my mother-in-law.”
I hesitated, a pause long enough for both of us to know I was thinking. “You don’t have to say that.”
He held my gaze, and there was nothing in it but certainty. “I know. I want to meet her properly. I want her to know I’m not a situation she needs to worry about.”
I felt something break, not in a bad way, but in the way an old, too-tight joint gives way and suddenly you have a full range of motion you didn’t know you’d been missing. I smiled, for real. “She already knows that.”
Kenneth stood, came across the room, and stopped in front of me. He cupped my face, gentle, both thumbs at my jaw, and kissed me once, slow and deliberate, with the focus of someone solving a problem and the ease of someone who did not need to prove a damn thing to anyone.
I brought my hands up and gripped the front of his shirt, holding him close, because I could, and because it was the first time in my life that doing so felt not just allowed but wanted.
When we broke apart, I rested my forehead against his shoulder, and he put his arms around me, strong and sure, and we stood like that for a long minute, the sun throwing angled light across the back wall, the city going on and on outside, the rest of the world held at bay by the simple fact of being held.
That night, I took the longest shower of my life, which was saying something, because I had survived grad school and more than one nervous breakdown. I was still wrapped in a towel, barefoot on the stone tile, when I saw my phone light up on the bathroom counter.
Kenneth was standing in the open doorway, phone in his hand, expression composed in the very specific way it got when he was trying to decide how to break bad news.
“Hey,” I said, instantly on alert.
He crossed to me, handed me my phone. “Miles called,” he said. “You should see this.”
It was a forwarded email, with an attachment and the subject line: VANCE—NEW RETAINER. The body was three lines, direct as a bullet: Got confirmation. Rosamund Vance left the Pryce case two weeks ago. No formal statement. She’s now on retainer with Carolyn Thomas. Sorry, kid.
I stared at the screen, the words swimming in a slow, sick spiral.
I knew the name: Vance was a monster in court, famous for drawing blood on cross, the only person alive who had ever gotten Aldous Pryce to shut up for longer than ten seconds.
She had quit, with no press. She was now working for my sister.
I looked up at Kenneth. “She didn’t stumble into Pryce,” I said, the truth settling into my gut like a stone. “She knew. She always knew how to get to me.”
He nodded. There was no comfort he could offer, and none that I would have taken. But he put his hand on the back of my neck and left it there, grounding, real, and it was enough.
“We’ll figure it out,” he said, eventually, and I let myself believe it, just for a minute, because to do otherwise would have meant giving in entirely.
We stood there, two grown men in a bathroom, the city lighting up below, my mother probably microwaving another cup of healing broth in a building across town.
The rest of it—the old pain, the unfinished fights, the sense that happiness was a thing you owed the world before you could claim it for yourself—could wait.
For now, there was this. Warmth, and the hum of the city, and the undeniable fact that I was not alone.
I could live with that.