Chapter 7
NORA
The club has my husband's name on the lease and none of his fingerprints anywhere I can see. He hired someone good. It's all warm brass and low gold light, a long bar lit from under the bottles, banquettes the color of oxblood, the kind of room that takes a fortune to make look like nobody tried.
The bouncer takes one look at my face and unclips the rope before I get my mouth open.
That's new. It's been happening for a week, doors coming off their hinges the second a stranger figures out whose ring this is.
I haven't decided yet whether I hate it or whether the part of me that grew up mucking stalls finds it a little bit funny.
Marisol is already at the bar, because Marisol is always already everywhere, drier than the gin she's not drinking. She's got a club soda with lime in front of her and her phone face-down, which with her is a sign of respect.
"There she is," she says. "The Mrs."
"Don't."
"Mrs. Radulov." She tries it again, slower, watching me flinch. "Mrs. Radulov of the Beverly Hills Radulovs."
"I will leave."
"You won't. I ordered you the good water and a basket of the truffle thing." She slides a stool out with her foot. "Sit your rich ass down. Tell me everything or tell me nothing, but sit, because Tessa's parking and once she's here we lose the floor for the night."
I sit. The truffle thing is, infuriatingly, very good.
I'm three bites in, halfway to forgetting I came here braced for something, when Tessa arrives in a cloud of somebody's signature scent.
All collarbones, a dress I happen to know costs more than she clears in a month.
She folds me into a hug that runs one second too long.
"Look at you," Tessa says, holding me out at arm's length like produce. "Marriage looks expensive on you."
"It's the water," Marisol says. "It's imported. You can taste the exchange rate."
"I'm not drinking," I tell them both, before either gets going, because I know this crowd. "Don't make it a thing. I've got an early call with the ranch guys and I want a clear head."
Tessa's smile holds steady. "Since when do you turn down a free drink?"
"Since the free drinks come with a man who counts them.
" It's a lie, a small clean one, and it does the job.
Easier than the truth, which I don't have words for yet and wouldn't hand to this table if I did.
I've been off it a week on a hunch I won't say out loud, a hunch with no proof behind it but a calendar and a door I let myself get pinned against.
So I let them think it's Isaak watching my intake. Marisol snorts. Tessa keeps her smile up, her eyes a half-degree too sharp, the look she's worn around my good news since Ardenhope. The night moves on without anyone calling me a liar.
For an hour it's good. Better than good.
Marisol does her impression of our supervisor at Halo reading the new dress code aloud, and I laugh until my ribs hurt.
For a stretch I'm not Mrs. Anything. I'm just a girl from the Valley with two friends and a basket of fried truffle whatever.
This is what I came for. I'd forgotten it was even on offer.
Then the dress-code bit ends. Tessa leans her chin on her hand and says, light as anything, "So what's it like? Waking up rich."
"I don't wake up rich. I wake up married. The rich is his."
"Same house, though." She turns her glass by the stem.
"Same closet. I saw the closet, Nor, you sent the video.
That's a one-bedroom apartment for your shoes.
" She means it as a joke. It almost is one.
But there's a wire under it, pulled taut.
I've known Tessa since we were twelve trading the same paperback back and forth, so I hear the wire even when she doesn't mean me to.
"Some of us are still counting quarters for rent and praying the Civic starts. "
"You could've stayed in Ardenhope," I say, gentle, because I don't want a fight. "Rent's a joke up there."
"And do what, marry a feed-store guy, die up there?
" She laughs, but it doesn't reach all the way up.
"No. I wanted out, same as you. The difference is you keep coming up soft.
Every time. Crypto boy, then a billionaire, like there's a line and you keep getting waved to the front of it.
" A beat, then the smile snaps back into place, full wattage.
She lifts her glass. "I'm happy for you.
I am. To Nora, who always gets the good end of the stick. "
Marisol clinks without enthusiasm. I clink because the alternative is making it a thing, and I don't make it a thing.
She's my oldest friend, a little drunk, a little broke, and once, a long time ago, she gave me her bus money so I could get home.
I owe that twelve-year-old more patience than the woman across the table is currently earning.
I drink my expensive water and decide to let it go.
That's when the bartender finds me.
He's older than the room, fifty-something, sleeves rolled, the only person in here who moves like he's been on his feet for thirty years and made peace with it. He sets down a fresh club soda I didn't order, with a black cherry in it like he knew I'd want something to do with my hands.
"On me," he says. "Benny. I run this bar." He lowers his voice to something just for me, friendly, almost fond. "And you're the one everybody's been whispering about all week, so I figured I'd come introduce myself before the whispering does it for me."
"That sounds ominous."
"It's a bar. It's all ominous." He wipes down a spot that's already clean. "You want the version they tell, or you want to keep your nice night?"
I should say keep my nice night. I know I should. But I've spent a week married to a man I'm half-convinced put my father in the ground. There's a sentence I can't stop turning over, and here's a stranger offering to say it out loud where I don't have to ask. "Tell me the version they tell."
Benny glances down the bar, then back. "Word in certain rooms is your old man got crossways of the Russians.
That a debt came due out there in the sticks and they sent somebody to collect it the hard way.
" He says it kindly. The kindness is worse.
"I'm not telling you it's true. Half of what crosses this bar is somebody's third-hand nothing.
I'm telling you it's what's being said, and you married into the family it's being said about, so somebody ought to be straight with you.
Figured it might as well be the guy pouring the drinks. "
I keep my face level. Ranch-auction face, the one my dad taught me, the one that gives a buyer nothing.
Inside, the floor tilts. It's the same shape as the thing I already feared, only now it's not just mine.
It's in the air of my husband's own club, in the mouth of a man who has no reason to lie to me, and that makes it heavier than any suspicion I cooked up alone at two in the morning.
"Who says it?" I ask.
"Everybody and nobody. That's how it always is.
" He straightens, done, like he's set down a weight he'd been carrying for me.
"Anyway. Cherry's good for you. Drink your soda.
" Then he's gone down the bar to someone waving a card, leaving me with a rumor, a garnish, and a heart going harder than the music.
I turn back to the table with my best nothing-face on.
"What did the bartender want?" she says, even, not really asking, watching me over the lime.
"To comp me a soda."
"Mm. And the look on your face is from the soda."
"It's a good soda." I pick the cherry out by the stem. "Tell me about the supervisor. You were doing the voice."
She lets me have it. She picks the bit back up, Tessa chimes in with the time the same supervisor cried at a retirement lunch that wasn't his, and for a few minutes I almost get the night back.
I almost convince myself a tired man behind a bar repeated a rumor he didn't believe, that it means nothing, that I can carry it home and set it down next to all the other nothing I can't prove.
I'm reaching for that, both hands, when a voice from behind me takes it away.
"Nora Calloway. My God. It's you."
I'd know the voice with my eyes shut and my ears full of wax.
Brandon. Of all the bars in this city, of all the nights, Brandon, in a jacket worth a quarter of Tessa's salary, smelling expensive and looking like every dollar of it's rented.
Two years since he loaded the last of his things into a leased Porsche and told me I'd "outgrown his trajectory.
" Two years, and here he is at my husband's bar wearing the smile he used to aim at investors.
"It's Radulov now," I say.
"I heard." He puts a hand to his chest like the news wounds him in a tender place.
"I heard, and I thought, good for her. Truly.
After everything. After your dad." His voice drops on the last word, soft, rehearsed, all the right notes in all the right order, none of them connected to anything behind his eyes.
"I was gutted when I heard, Nora. Garrett was the closest thing to a father I ever had. "
Garrett. He uses my dad's first name like he's allowed to.
Something cold walks up the back of my neck.
Marisol has set her drink down and squared toward him, weighing whether to call security or handle it herself.
Tessa, across the table, has gone a particular shade of careful, mouth tight, eyes pinned on Brandon.
I'll have time to wonder about that look later.
Right now I have my hands full of my ex.
"You didn't come to the funeral," I say.
"I was in Singapore. The fund." He waves a hand at a fund, at Singapore, at the whole inconvenient globe that kept him from a graveside. "I wanted to reach out a hundred times. I didn't know if you'd want to hear from me."
He pulls out the empty stool like he's been invited, sits, leans in close enough that I can smell the gum under the bourbon.
"Listen. I don't want to make this weird.
I just, when I heard about Garrett, I kept thinking about all his stuff.
The ranch stuff. The trophies, those old notebooks he was always scribbling in.
He had a system for everything, your dad.
" A small laugh. "Did you, ah, did you end up keeping any of it? Did it come to you?"
There's the question he came over here to ask. The trophies. The notebooks. He buried the ask under thirty seconds of fake grief, but the ask is the only reason he crossed the room.
I've spent two years thinking the worst thing Brandon ever did to me was leave.
Sitting here, watching his eyes stay flat and busy while his mouth does grief, I understand all at once that the leaving might have been the kindest thing on his list. Because he didn't come over here for me.
He didn't even come over here for the show of coming over here.
He came to find out what I have. He wants to know what's left of my father's things, and where I keep it.
So I do what my father taught me at a hundred auctions. I give the buyer nothing.
"It all went to the estate sale," I say, easy, bored, reaching for my soda at last. "Liquidated to pay down what he owed. There wasn't much. Some tack, some ribbons. The bank took the rest." I shrug. "Why? Did he owe you money too?"
Something flickers behind his face, fast, there and gone. "No. God, no. I just hate the thought of his things scattered to strangers." He recovers the smile, but it's running a half-second behind now, like a bad dub. "You look good, Nora. Married money agrees with you."
"It's the water," Marisol says, deadpan. "Imported."
Brandon's gaze cuts to her, then to the door, then back to me, and I watch him remember whose room this actually is.
Whose name is on the brass over the door he came in through.
He stands so fast the stool rocks. "We should catch up.
Properly. I'm around." He's already backing away.
"Tell Tessa I said hi." Which is strange, because Tessa is right there, eight feet off, and the man who just said her name has his eyes on everything in the room except her.
Then he's threading toward the exit, gone into the gold light and the bodies.
I'm left with a glass of soda, a cherry, and the cold certainty that two people tonight came to my husband's bar to put something into my hands.
One a rumor. One a question. I only know the night I came to feel normal has left me more watched than I've been since I left the ranch, that I'm going to lie awake adding up a sum I have no numbers for.
"Okay," Marisol says, low, the second he's out of earshot. "I don't like that man. I didn't like him before I knew him and I like him even less now that I've smelled him."
"You and me both. He always smelled like that. Money he doesn't have and bullshit he believes."
"What was that, about your dad's things? Why would Brandon care about a dead rancher's trophies?" She's frowning toward the door he left through, and Marisol's frown is a thing with teeth in it. "That wasn't catching up. That was a man casing what you own."
"I know." I knew it while it was happening. Hearing her say it out loud only makes the floor tilt further. "I don't know what it means."
"It means be careful." She says it level, not dramatic, and the lack of heat is how I know she means it down to the bone.
"Two years he's gone, no card, no call, not even at the funeral.
Then your name's in his mouth at the one bar in this city that belongs to your husband. Men like that don't wander."
Across the room Tessa is texting, thumbs fast, head down, the night's bright laugh gone off her face like it was never rented to begin with.
I watch her for a second too long. I tell myself it's the wine, the envy I've decided to forgive her for one more time.
I tell myself a lot of things on the way out the door.
I drink the last of the soda. I eat the cherry. I let Marisol walk me to the car with her arm hooked hard through mine, and I don't look back to see whether Tessa watches us go.