CHAPTER 15
Amara
◆
I give up on sleep around midnight, with the storm working the seams of the house the way I work a basting thread loose before I rip a bad fit out, patient and merciless.
Sleep is a fabric I could never learn to cut on the bias; it puckers, it fights the grain, it refuses to lie flat the nights my mind runs loud.
And tonight my mind is very loud, and the sleet has stopped being rain entirely, flung at the glass like a fistful of pins thrown by someone who means it.
Mateo's voice is still in it, from the winter garden this afternoon, I'm done apologizing for the pulse, said while the first gust shook the dead roses on their canes and the year turned over in its sleep.
He pledged me a reckoning. He refused to pretend the wound wasn't there.
You benefited from my father's death, I'd told him, and he held my eyes without flinching, and somehow that steadiness undid me worse than any apology could have, because you cannot mend a tear by pretending the cloth was never torn.
You have to put your finger in the hole. You have to look at where it gave.
So I am awake, and the suite runs too warm, and the four-poster feels like a confessional I have no wish to kneel in, and I get up and put on the old silk robe the color of strong tea and go looking for cold air and find, instead, the two of them.
The conservatory glows even in the dark.
Katya's glasshouse. Her dead orchids stand on their tiers like a congregation that died mid-prayer, frost-killed brown husks on bone-white stems, and among them the one that lived, the waxy blood-dark survivor on its single arching stalk, the only thing still breathing in a room built for breathing things. Tonight the lightning keeps finding it.
The whole glass box lights up white-blue, again and again, the dead ones holding perfectly still in their pots and that one orchid shuddering on its stem with every gust that gets through, trembling like a struck note that won't stop ringing.
And under it, in the half-dark between the strikes, Mateo and Emil.
They go quiet when I come in. It is the quiet of men who have been saying a great deal and have only just heard the door.
Mateo stands by the cold central pillar, the brass watch in his hand, his thumb on its cover, holding it shut.
Emil sits on the long teak bench with his glasses off, holding them by one steel arm, his ash-blond hair gone silver in the strobe of the storm. The ledger is nowhere.
That registers before anything else does. The black ledger is absent from his hands, and Emil without his ledger reads like a sentence missing its verb.
"You're up," Mateo says.
"So are you. " I let the door fall shut behind me.
The sleet is machine-gunning the panes now, a hard stitching rattle that runs the length of the roof and back.
"Both of you. In the dark. In Katya's room.
" I read them the way I read a half-built bodice on the form, where the tension lives, where the strain will tear it if you wear it too long.
The strain is all over both of them, and it is about me, and I have spent my whole life being discussed in rooms I wasn't standing in. "You've been talking about me."
Emil sets his glasses down on the bench beside him, very precisely, the small click of steel on wood. "We have been talking," he says, "about a number of contingencies."
"Don't. " The word comes out softer than I mean and sharper at the end, the way mine always do.
"Don't dress it up as contingencies. I know what this looks like.
I've watched two men in a room decide what's best for the woman before.
I watched my father's lawyers do it. I watched the bank do it.
" The lightning comes again and I watch Mateo's face go white and then dark and his stillness hold. "You're going to make me choose."
Neither of them answers fast, and the silence does the answering for them, and the floor of my stomach drops the way it does at the top of the cove stair when you look down at the black water.
"I won't," I say. "Do you hear me. I won't choose between you. I'd rather walk out into that storm than stand here while you make me pick a man like I'm deciding which debt to pay first."
The power chooses that moment to flicker. The few low lamps along the tiers stutter, brown out, come back weak. In the brown light I watch Mateo and Emil look at each other.
I have spent ten years learning to read people the way I read cloth, grain and bias and where the weave runs thinnest, and I have never seen two men say so much without a syllable.
What passes between them reads as pure recognition, two men arriving at the same conclusion from opposite ends of the bench.
Mateo's gray eyes hold Emil's pale ones, and the thing that crosses the air, when I catch up to it a half-beat late, lands as a single shared vow: neither of us will make her.
Mateo's thumb comes off the watch. He leaves the cover closed. He slides it into the pocket of his trousers, the careful-signal stowed away, because there is no one watching here but the dead flowers and the living one, and us.
"No one," Mateo says, "is going to make you do anything. " A pause that lands like a stone dropped down a well. "Understand me on that. This room belongs to your word alone."
"Then what is it. " My pulse is up. I hate that it's up. I came down here for cold air and I am warm to my hairline.
Emil rises from the bench. He crosses to me without hurry, every step measured, and stops close enough that I can smell the cedar-and-paper of him under the green cold of the glasshouse.
"It is," he says, "an unsolved problem. I have run it many ways.
" His voice stays even, clinical, but I've learned his tells by now, the way the consonants get cleaner when he's holding something at the edge of his control.
"Every model in which we ask you to choose ends badly.
For you. For us. For the house. " His eyes travel my face like he's reading a column of figures and failing to find the error he expected.
"I dislike unsolved problems. I have disliked this one for weeks.
Tonight I find I do not want to solve it the easy way. "
"And the easy way is."
"Making you pick," Mateo says from the pillar. "The easy way is one of us steps back."
The sleet hammers. The orchid shakes. I look from the eldest, the wall, the man who buried everyone he ever protected and pledged me a war this afternoon, to the coldest, the one who let kotyonok slip from his mouth in the library and tried to strike it from the record and couldn't, and I understand that I am standing in the exact center of the thing I was always most afraid of, and somehow it feels like an opening instead of a trap.
It feels like a room with the walls taken out.
"I want to be clear," I say, and my fingers have already closed over the small dented thimble that hangs at my throat, my mother's armor for the working finger, worn bright at the crown by forty years of pushed needles.
"I'm not asking either of you to step back.
I'm telling you to stop asking me to choose, which is a different demand entirely. "
"Agreed," Emil says. "Two separate demands entirely. " And then, with the particular gravity he gives the few words he means most: "I need the word, Amara. Whatever happens next in this room, I need it spoken, and I will honor a no the way I would honor a court order. Yes or no."
The honesty of it. That is the thing about Emil nobody warns you about. He could lean in, make it inevitable. Instead he holds his careful foot of distance and hands me the whole of the choice on an open palm, the way you pass someone shears, handle first.
I look past him to Mateo. Mateo, who does not waste words, says only, "Say yes, Amara. Or say no, and we'll walk you back upstairs and stand watch and never speak of it. Both are real. I need you to know both are real."
The storm throws itself at the glass. Far out past the cliff the foghorn goes, low and seaward, the one cold note the whole warmth of this house is built against. And I think: I have been the one waiting in the cold corridor while the deal got done without me.
I have been the bargaining chip, the symbol, the soft new wife brought in to prove something to men who never asked what I wanted.
And here, in a dead woman's glasshouse, in a storm, two men this city has learned to fear are waiting on a word from me as though the whole house turns on it.
"Yes," I say.
It comes out steady. It comes out mine.
Emil's breath leaves him slow. Mateo crosses the room.
Mateo reaches me first. His hands come to me open and unhurried, the way they always do, asking rather than seizing.
He takes my face in both hands, the burn-scarred right forearm warm against my jaw, the smooth pale ridge of old fire under my ear, and he kisses me like a verdict handed down, slow and total and absolutely certain, and I make a sound into his mouth that would have embarrassed me a month ago and doesn't now.
His thumb moves over my cheekbone. His patience is its own kind of violence. He kisses me until my knees forget the job they were hired for, and then he draws back just far enough to say, against my lips, "Look at me."
I look at him.
"If anything is too much," he says, "you say so the instant it happens, while it's happening. " His gray eyes stay fixed on mine. "You are the whole reason this room exists, the center of every choice in it. Do you understand me."
"Yes," I say again, and feel it go through me like a needle through three layers, clean, all the way down.