8. Noah
Chapter eight
Noah
The Calloway Building ballroom looks the way Gerald Holt wanted it to look, down to the last table.
Expensive. Soft lighting. Tables arranged so the donors with the biggest checkbooks sit closest to the stage. I've been to sixty versions of this event, and they are all the same room.
This is the one Linford's was supposed to cater. I folded the vendor contract into the arrangement myself, in my own office, the night she signed it. I haven't thought about it since.
I think about it now. Somewhere behind that stage there's a kitchen that Karissa was supposed to be running tonight, and instead she's about to walk through the front of the room.
I'm standing at the edge of it when Karissa walks in.
She's wearing something dark green. Long. The stylist's work, I assume, but she carries it like she's worn it before. She doesn't scan the room the way nervous people do. She takes it in once, quietly, finds the bar, and adjusts her path.
I realize I've stopped moving.
"She cleans up," Warren Chu says beside me because Warren has no filter and no shame.
"She was never dirty," I say.
Warren raises his glass. "Fair point."
She handles the first forty minutes better than I expected.
Better than I expected is the wrong way to say that. She handles them better than most people I've brought to these events, and I have brought people who were trained for this. The wife of a senator. Two board members who spent careers being charming on demand.
Karissa does it differently. She doesn't perform.
She asks questions and listens to the answers.
When Audrey Holt starts in on the foundation's literacy initiative, Karissa says, "How are you measuring impact?
" and Audrey blinks, startled, and then talks for seven straight minutes because no one has asked her that before.
A woman I don't recognize drifts into the conversation while Audrey is still going. Silk, good jewelry, the particular smile of someone about to be generous with a person she's decided is beneath her.
"And you own a little bakery," she says to Karissa when Audrey finally pauses. "In Brooklyn. How wonderful. It must be such a nice change of pace from all of this."
It isn't a question. It's a placement. She's telling Karissa where she goes.
I start to move.
Karissa doesn't need me to.
"It's the same pace, more or less. Just less catering.
" She says it lightly, and the woman laughs before she understands she's been answered.
"We did four hundred covers for a wedding last month.
Payroll, cold chain, a bride who changed the cake three times.
You'd recognize the meetings. Fewer zeros. "
The woman's smile holds, but it's working now. "I'm sure," she says, and finds a reason to be elsewhere.
Karissa lifts her champagne a half inch, not toward me, not toward anyone. Just a private acknowledgment that she clocked precisely what that was and handled it without spilling a drop.
I watch her do it and feel something I don't have a clause for.
I've spent my whole career learning to survive rooms like this one. She walked in tonight with none of that training and she's already ahead of me because she isn't surviving the room. She's just in it, and she isn't asking it for anything.
It occurs to me that I have never once seen her look for help.
Not from me. Not from anyone. I file that away as admirable and don't let myself sit with the other thing underneath it, the part that wonders what it would take for her to need someone in a room, and whether I'd be the one she looked for.
His name is Fletcher. James Fletcher, forty-eight, tech acquisition money, twice divorced, and he gravitates toward her the way men like him always do, like she's something he hasn't had yet.
He's been talking to her for six minutes.
I know because I've been counting.
She smiles at something he says. Not her real smile. I've seen her real smile once, in the kitchen at Easton Capital when she tasted the cardamom thing she made. This is the professional version. Controlled. Polite.
Fletcher touches her arm.
I'm across the room in less time than I can account for.
"James." I extend my hand. He shakes it. "Good to see you."
"Noah." He glances between us. "Congratulations on the engagement. She's extraordinary."
"Yes," I say. "She is."
My hand goes to the small of her back.
It's the arrangement. We agreed to physical contact in public, minimal and appropriate. This is minimal and appropriate.
That's what I tell myself.
Karissa goes still for a full second. Then she relaxes into it, just slightly, and I feel that shift through my palm like a current.
Fletcher wraps up the conversation inside two minutes. I don't say anything that should have moved him along. He just goes.
My hand stays where it is a beat longer than the moment requires. I notice. I don't move it.
I run the clause in my head. Minimal and appropriate. Public contact, mutually agreed, in service of a convincing engagement. Every word of it holds. It's a clean argument. I've built my whole life on clean arguments, and I can feel this one not covering the thing it's supposed to cover.
"That was subtle," Karissa says, without looking at me.
"I don't know what you mean."
"You materialized out of thin air and put your hand on me."
"We're engaged."
"Allegedly." She picks up her champagne. "He was harmless."
"He touched your arm."
She turns to look at me then. Something in her expression I can't read. "So did you."
I don't have an answer for that. She lets me off the hook by looking away, which is more mercy than I've earned.
Gerald finds me before I can recover my footing, drink in hand, pleased with himself.
"Whole room's talking about the two of you," he says. "You look almost human lately, Noah. The board noticed. Chu noticed." He clinks his glass against mine without asking. "Whatever you're doing, keep doing it."
"I'll take it under advisement."
"You do that." He drifts off toward the stage, satisfied he's done me a kindness.
Six weeks ago, that sentence would have been the entire point of the night. Proof the strategy was working. I stand there and find I don't care what the board noticed. I care that she called it subtle, and that she was right.
***
The dancing starts at 9:00 p.m.
It's not on the program I approved. Gerald apparently added it because Gerald likes to watch people be uncomfortable in formal wear. A string quartet sets up near the back of the room, and there are couples moving toward the floor, and Karissa says, "I don't—" at the same time I say, "We should."
She looks at me.
"It's expected," I say.
"That's the least romantic sentence in the English language."
"We're not going for romantic. We're going for convincing."
She lets out a breath and takes my offered hand.
She knows how to dance. Not the stiff, learned-in-a-class way. She follows without being passive, adjusts without being led, and she keeps exactly the right amount of distance for the first thirty seconds.
I use those thirty seconds to hold the line.
Her hand is light on my shoulder. Mine is at her waist where it's supposed to be and nowhere it isn't. There's a full and correct amount of air between us, and I am accounting for every inch of it, the way I account for a position I don't want moving against me.
It's work. That's the part I don't say. Standing this close to her and keeping the distance neutral is the hardest thing I've done all week, and I closed a nine-figure fund on Tuesday.
Then someone bumps us from behind, Gerald's brother-in-law, drunk at 9:15 p.m., no surprise, and she steps closer to avoid him, and suddenly there is no right amount of distance.
Her hand tightens on my shoulder.
I keep my face neutral.
I am very, very good at keeping my face neutral.
"You're good at this," she says, low enough that only I can hear.
"Gym helps."
She makes a sound. Almost a laugh. "Right. The 5 a.m. workouts."
"You did your research."
"Sylvia talks."
I make a note to talk to Sylvia. Later. When I can think about something other than the fact that Karissa's hair is close enough that I could—
"Noah."
"What."
"You're staring at the side of my head."
"I'm watching the room."
"You're a bad liar."
She tips her head back to look at me when she says it, which is a tactical error on her part, because now we're close and her chin is up and I can see exactly where her lipstick ends and I stop thinking about the room entirely.
She sees it. I watch her see it.
Her breath changes. Just slightly. Just enough.
I lean in, because I can't not, because something in me has stopped asking permission—
I'm about to close the distance when the lights go out.