Chapter 16
SYLVIE
VESPER AND I are standing on a curb in Georgetown at half past. This restaurant is the most uninviting building I’ve ever seen.
This is a marketer’s worst nightmare. Just a black door in a brick townhouse, a brass plate the size of a playing card that says “ANNEX” in letters you’d need to be standing on the step to read, and a man in a gray suit whose only job on this earth is to already know your name.
He knows Vesper’s. He does not know mine, and he looks at my boots for slightly too long, and then he opens the door anyway, because her presence clearly has more authority than the dress code.
“Thank you, Robert,” she murmurs as we pass through.
Inside is uncomfortably elegant. I count quickly in my head: twelve tables.
Twelve, in a room that could fit forty, which means the empty space is the point.
Scarcity. Coffered ceilings. Oil paintings of dead men in high collars, lit like relics.
Every window swagged in fabric so heavy it kills the daylight entirely, so the whole room glows the color of weak tea.
There’s a fireplace going in August because clearly ambience outranks the common sense of weather.
It smells like lilies and old money and, faintly, like bacon, which is the only comforting part of all this.
And the women. God, the women. Two categories, and I catalogue them before we’re four steps in.
Category one: the pantsuits. Sharp shoulders, blowouts set at nine a.m., phones face down beside their forks, negotiating something over eggs.
Category two: the kept ones. Softer. Prettier.
Louder. Rings you could see from space, laughing at things that aren’t funny, the whole table furnished with somebody else’s success.
Then, there’s us. Me and Vesper.
Vesper’s wearing her usual today: always in black or navy, a suit cut so precisely it never bunches or shows her ankles. Her heels are all under two inches.
Then, there’s me. Looking like the before shot of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.
Black leather skirt that is uncomfortably short.
Black tank with straps thinner than angel hair pasta.
Boots with thin stilettos that I’ve bled in.
Had she told me where we were going, I might’ve changed.
But here we are together, Vesper looking like my sophisticated pimp.
We make our way farther into the room and when the woman in cream sees me, she actually stops chewing. I normally love attention, but not like this.
Fuck, I’m embarrassed. Only because, I think…Callen would be embarrassed? Maybe he likes a classier girl. I can do classy. I can do high collars and longer skirts. I would just need to go get those things first.
Vesper doesn’t notice the room’s discomfort, or doesn’t care, and I genuinely can’t tell which is worse.
We’re led to a table that’s already set for us.
Two male hosts stand behind our chairs. They don’t leave until we’re seated, pushed in, and they’ve offered to fill our water glasses with “sparkling” or “flat.”
We’re left alone with two menus which is the first time I get insight to the restaurant name. Sort of. The front of the leather-bound menu is in such a wispy script, I can’t even read it. All I know is it starts with a “B” and ends in a “Y.” Beltany, or Bellany perhaps? It’s impossible to tell.
Vesper doesn’t open her menu. She sits with her legs crossed, quietly surveying me as if I’m the one who called this odd meeting. After a momentary staring contest across the table, I drop into my menu, secure my elbows on the table, and lace my fingers under my chin.
To Vesper’s credit, this place looks incredible.
The menu is one of the frustrating ones where everything is a top choice and the only reasonable way to handle ordering is to word-vomit whatever dish you remember when the waiter comes to the table, pen and pad in hand.
I shut the leather book, ready to wing it.
“You don’t strike me as a brunch person,” I say to Vesper.
Something moves across her face. Not quite discomfort. The ghost of it.
“I never understood it, to be honest.” She frowns at the menu she hasn’t opened. “Breakfast and lunch foods on the same menu. It’s confusing. Choose a meal and commit to it.” A pause. “But my ex-husband loved brunch.”
And then she’s gone. Two full seconds, maybe three, and Vesper Whatever-Her-Name-Actually-Is is not in this room. Her eyes have gone somewhere over my shoulder and into a different dimension. Her mouth slackens in a way I would not have believed her face was capable of.
“You were married?”
The shutter of her stoicism comes down so fast I almost hear it.
“I meant all this as a gesture.” She smooths a napkin, that does not need smoothing, on the table. “I wanted to apologize.”
“For what?”
“I’ve had a long few months of people I trust turning out to be untrustworthy.
” She says it flatly, with zero emotional commitment.
“PALADIN was absorbed into the FBI, briefly. That did not end well. Before that, we were commissioned by the President himself.” Her eyes flick up.
“Also not a happily-ever-after. So my guard is up. And I forgot the whole point of this for a moment.”
“What’s the point?”
“Mind your manners. Elbows off the table, please.”
I slide my elbows down. I do it automatically, like a scolded child. That part is agitating, but when she doesn’t acknowledge my obedience it makes me feral.
“The point,” Vesper explains, “is not to win at a game of character judgment. When I brought Linc in, and Cricket, and Lance for that matter, they were children in every way that mattered. I’ve been treating you like one of them, and you are not.
You’re a grown woman who has almost certainly seen more, done more, and survived more than you would know how to convey to me. ”
She folds her hands before resting them in her lap.
“But that doesn’t make you the enemy. And I’m done treating you as one. So, for the quickness of my judgment, I am sorry.” She takes a deep breath and releases it like it’s a challenge. “Your mother would be disappointed with me.”
Here’s the thing.
Her judgment was correct. Her judgment was a bullseye from four hundred yards in a crosswind.
I am precisely what she thought I was. I came here to take something from the people who matter most to her.
In fact, I have taken it, I am still taking it, yet here she is sitting across a linen tablecloth in a room full of lilies apologizing to me for being right.
“It’s fine,” I say.
“It isn’t.” She reaches into her jacket. “I’ve been thinking hard about how to make it right.”
She sets a small black satchel on the tablecloth and pushes it across the table with two fingers.
I don’t want to open it. That’s the first thing I feel. It’s not curiosity or greed, but a bright, flashing sign of Don’t Do It flashing through my mind. Nobody has ever handed me something across a table that hasn’t cost me greatly.
“Open it,” Vesper urges.
Ah, dammit. I do. I split open the top of the bag and dump it out in my hand.
Two diamonds tumble into my palm. Old cut.
Square. The kind of brilliance the best money can buy.
And just like that I’m catapulted to the past, just a child, sitting in my mother’s room, begging her to let me try on her jewelry.
Fiona had her ears pierced, but not me. I was too scared.
All the air goes out of my lungs.
Mom promised as soon as I worked up the courage, these gems were mine. She never got a chance to give them to me.
“My mom’s.” My voice comes out broken. “She wore these every day.”
The room keeps going. Somebody laughs across the restaurant. Silver on porcelain. A cork comes out of a bottle with a little pop. Movement is all around, and yet I can’t even swallow, can’t form the next coherent thought.
“There’s an old myth about being buried in diamonds,” Vesper offers.
I don’t look up. I can’t. If I tear my eyes away from these earrings, they might float away, never to be seen again.
“In some countries it’s because it’s a siren’s call to grave robbers. But your mom used to say heaven won’t take you if you’re dripping in diamonds and riches. You have to go barefoot. Humble. With nothing on your back, and no malice in your heart.”
The breath I take comes in three pieces. Heave, heave, heave.
“My mother told you that,” I manage with certainty.
“She did.” When I finally look up, Vesper is smiling, and I think it’s the first real one I have ever gotten from her. “She told me a great many things. Did Cricket tell you—”
“About the car accident?” I turn the diamonds over, letting them catch the fire-glow. “About how it wasn’t an accident at all? Yes. She told me.”
“Okay. Do you have any questions I could answer?”
My knee begins to bounce underneath the table and I’m powerless to make it stop. Instead the long linen moves with little ripples, tattling on me and my nerves.
“What was your connection to my mom? I don’t understand it.”
Then Vesper does the thing that drives me out of my mind.
She goes silent. She knows what she wants to say, but she’s building a response, brick by brick, checking each slab carefully before she sets it.
I am fast. I am fast at everything, speaking most of all, and I say ninety words for every ten I mean.
Vesper weighs each one on a scale before she’ll let it leave her mouth.
It disarms me every single time, and I hate it.
“Erin was a friend to me when I did not deserve one,” she answers finally. “She trusted me. And I did not protect her when she needed me most.” Her eyes hold mine, dry and steady. “I carry a great deal of guilt about that.”
“You should.”
She doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t blink. She wasn’t fishing for absolution and she isn’t going to pretend I’ve wounded her. Something in my chest actually shifts, because I have never once met a person who could take my callousness and simply hold it.