Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
The breath goes out of me on a sudden inward catch, and I can’t call it back. Thirty cameras firing like a hailstorm, and not one of them will ever guess what just happened on these steps, that the most photographed coldness in the city felt something buckle low in his chest because a girl ran to him without first checking whether he’d open his arms to catch her. She didn’t doubt it for an instant. That’s the part my body answered before my discipline could so much as raise its hand to vote. She came to me certain of being caught, and no one has been certain of me, of anything soft in me, in longer than I can stand to count.
Here is the thing I’ll turn over later, in the dark of the apartment, when I have the leisure to be honest with myself. No one watching would ever guess this is the first time we have touched. Not the first real time. The only time. A handshake in a judge’s chambers, the cool press of a pen passed from her fingers to mine, and now this, her whole body fitted against me, her hands fisted white-knuckled in the wool of my coat, and not one professional skeptic in that crowd doubts for a second that they are looking at a husband holding his wife.
They aren’t wrong, which is the strange part. They have built an entire marriage out of a single photograph, and the photograph tells no lie.
I bring one hand up to cradle the back of her head, her hair cold and soft under my palm from standing out here in the wind, and I say nothing, because I have nothing yet that is true enough to be worth saying.
Behind us, Jeff steps up. I hear him before I see him, that courtroom baritone he keeps holstered for exactly these occasions.
“Ladies and gentlemen. I’m Jeff Cruz, Mr. Flint’s counsel.”
“What’s Mr. Flint doing here?” someone calls.
“It would make rather less sense if he weren’t”—and I can hear the small, lethal smile he’s wearing without turning to look at it—”considering Camilla is Mr. Flint’s wife.”
The sound the crowd makes then is a different animal entirely. I’ve stood in front of enough rooms in my life to know the noise of one being handed something it didn’t have a minute ago. Cameras detonate in a fresh volley. The questions climb a full octave. And against my chest Camilla goes very still, the particular stillness of a person whose private grief has just been carried out into the street and set alight for the warmth of strangers.
I draw her in a fraction closer, enough to say I have you in a language I’m not at all certain I speak.
She doesn’t pull away.
That doesn’t mean anything either, I tell myself, and very nearly believe it.
It takes two hours to make a death administratively survivable. Two hours of lawyers and prepared statements, a service elevator and a side exit and a second unmarked car, Jeff being very good at his job while Bills feeds me logistics by text that I approve without reading, until the chaos is finally behind us and the door of the apartment closes on a silence so complete it rings.
The penthouse swallows the two of us the way a cathedral swallows a pair of mourners, all that glass and grey stone and forty-one floors of nothing underneath, the lights of the bridges laid out cold and far below. Our apartment. I keep having to correct myself on the pronoun. It’s been mine for years, and before that simply the place I slept between flights, and now it belongs to the two of us, because one of the conditions buried in the arrangement was that we live as any married couple would, under one roof, behind one door. Richard wrote that clause himself, in his own failing hand. I’d taken it for sentiment at the time. I am beginning to suspect it was strategy, and that the old man saw something coming that I am only now catching up to.
She stands in the middle of the vast main room with her arms wrapped around herself, a small dark figure on a pale acre of floor, like a guest no one has told where to sit.
“There’s a room made up for you,” I tell her, crossing to the bar cart because my hands want something to do that isn’t reaching for her. “Down the hall, second door. Anything you need that isn’t already in it, you tell me, and it’s there tomorrow.”
The day still clings to her, the funeral-home pallor, the swollen eyes, the coat she hasn’t thought to take off, and I feel an unfamiliar pull toward gentleness, which is not a tool I keep anywhere within easy reach.
“Camilla.”
She lifts her gaze to mine, and I make myself say it. “You’re twenty-two. You’ve your whole life in front of you, and your father asked this of you when he had no time left and no leverage but love. A dying man asking his daughter for something isn’t a fair fight. So I’ll say this once, and mean it. The arrangement can be renegotiated. Any part of it. If you signed because you were frightened, or grieving, or because you couldn’t bring yourself to tell him no—”