CHAPTER 31
Sebastian
The supervised sessions happened in Ada’s atelier, twenty minutes on Tuesdays and Saturdays, a lawyer’s clause governing them and Ada in a chair by the window pretending to read.
I had negotiated hostile takeovers for less than the right to sit on a floor and be surveyed, and I would have signed anything.
The floor was the thing no one warned me about.
You cannot be the Blade of Vale Group on a floor.
There is no altitude, no long table, no distance across which a man can be terrible.
There is only the rug and the small serious person on it who does not care what your name opens in Paris.
Theo sat with a tin of pencils fanned around him like an operating theater, and he did not look up when I lowered myself across from him that first session, and I understood that I would have to be earned from nothing: the way you earn a scent, molecule by molecule.
I learned him the way I had once learned her. It was the only skill I had worth anything here.
I learned that the lions were a whole civilization (a king lion, a small lion, and a lion who was “the one who runs away”) and Theo drew them with the pencil pressed nearly through the page, and if you asked the wrong question he went quiet and turned his shoulder, guarding, the way I guarded a number I wasn’t ready to say aloud.
So I stopped asking. I learned to wait. I learned that if I colored the orange one’s mane badly enough, he would sigh (a small, exasperated, wholly unselfconscious sigh) and take the pencil from my hand and show me, our fingers touching, and that this correction was the most anyone had given me in years.
And then, without warning, the sharp questions.
Why my eyebrow had a line in it. Whether I was strong.
On the third session, with those grey eyes (my eyes, cold in every mirror I’d ever owned and unbearably warm in his round freckled face) he asked whether I had a little boy, and I had to look very hard at the orange lion before I could answer, because the honest reply was I am learning that I do, and I have already cost him three years, and you cannot say that to a person who is three.
“I know a very good one,” I told him instead, my voice doing the careful thing it always did with him, carrying something full across a room without spilling it. “He draws the best lions I’ve ever seen.”
He thought about that, then nodded, satisfied, and handed me the green pencil, a promotion, and went back to work.
I was not a different man on that floor.
That is the lie I want to tell, that Vale Group was a costume and this the truth.
It wasn’t that clean. It was that on the floor there was nothing to protect, no name to defend, no story I had to keep taller than the facts, and so the thing underneath all of it came up into the light and turned out to be this: a man who wanted, with a violence that frightened him, only to be allowed to stay.
I felt her watching, and I never looked.
That was the discipline of it. But I could feel Ada in the window chair the way you feel the pressure drop before weather, the book gone still in her hands, and I knew (because I had once known everything about her, and the knowing had never fully left) that she was unsettled.
That she was watching her son hand a dangerous man a green pencil and finding, to her own fury, that she wanted to believe it.
I did not make her pay for it. I had made her pay for enough.
I colored inside the lines she’d drawn and let it be the only apology I was permitted.
The session ended the way they all ended, with Delphine at the door and Ada rising and the twenty minutes closing like a shop grate.
I got my coat and said the careful, formal goodbye the clause required. And Theo, gathering his pencils back into their tin, walked me to the door, small hand not quite taking mine but traveling beside it, and looked up.
“Do it again tomorrow,” he said.
Not a question. A boy who did not yet know that the world is mostly made of no, issuing an instruction to the two adults who ran his sky, certain they would obey because they always had.
Both of us froze.
I felt Ada go still behind me, the whole room holding, and I turned my head, and for one unbearable second we looked at each other over our son’s copper head, and something in her face came unbricked.
The wariness dropped for a single breath and I saw it: not the woman on the marble floor who had told me to burn Vale Group before I branded her son, but the girl in the jasmine, green-eyed, looking at me as though I were still the man who had knelt in the grass and meant every impossible thing he swore.
One second. Then she remembered who I had been, and the wall came back down.
But I had seen it. And so, I understood with cold certainty, had someone else, because a woman like Chloe does not need long to smell what she is about to lose.