I take the bourbon and don't drink it.
"Has Ward come down?" I ask.
"Not today." He lays the words on the bar the way he lays the drink, flat and without emphasis. "Whoever's up there was already in the building when I opened."
He picks up another glass and begins polishing.
I drink the bourbon. The woman's voice I heard through Ward's door was not one I recognize, and I know every voice thatmatters in this building. The details line up one by one: Denver plates, kitchen entrance for discretion, closed door, the clipped cadence of someone who bills by the hour. Ward is bringing in outside counsel on a morning when outside counsel means the family's attorney is no longer sufficient. Which means me.
I set the empty glass on the bar and Keaton replaces it without being asked.
"Don't," I tell him.
"You're going to need it."
"Why?"
"Because you're about to walk into a room full of people performing grief for a woman your family wanted dead, and you're going to have to perform it, too." He doesn't look up from the glass in his hand. "And you're not as good at it as you used to be."
He's right. I take the second bourbon.
The reception room carries the same studied elegance. Folding chairs in rows, upholstered, not metal, because metal folding chairs signal gymnasium and the Aldrich Hotel signals permanence. A lectern stands at the front in dark-stained oak that matches the lobby paneling, because the Aldriches don't do anything once when they can make it echo. Beside it, a photograph of June rests on a small easel.
The photograph is wrong, and it takes me a moment to place why: it's too young. The June in the frame is early fifties, strong-jawed, clear-eyed, her hair still dark. The June I knew in her last years was thinner, grayer, her gaze sharper, as though age had burned away everything but the essential apparatus of paying attention.
Someone on Ward's staff chose the younger photograph because it's more flattering. The woman who actually died would have loathed this entire event. June's voice is clear enough in myhead:'If any Aldrich sets foot at my memorial, I want you to promise me you'll make a scene.'
I promised. I lied.
Greer arrives just after nine, and the room adjusts.
The small movements give it away. Heads turn. Conversations suspend mid-sentence and resume a beat late, half a tone quieter.
She walks in wearing the dark green dress from dinner, the one she packed for the funeral and repurposed for a chess game over scotch and bourbon. Its intended occasion has finally arrived. Her hair is pulled back from her face this time, exposing the line of her jaw and the tendons in her neck. My body responds to the sight of her before my brain has any say in it.
The hollow at the base of her throat where I put my mouth hours ago. The collarbones I traced with my thumb while she came apart underneath me. The line of her shoulders, her back held straight, the same spine that arched against the kitchen counter in her mother's house while I held her wrists and watched her try to keep her composure and fail.
She walks into a room full of people, and I can still feel the weight of her thigh against my hip. The sound she made when I pressed inside her. The way her fingers closed on the back of my neck hard enough to leave marks I can feel under my collar right now. Every person in this room is looking at Greer in her funeral dress, and none of them are seeing what I see—a woman I have memorized with my hands—and that knowledge is doing something territorial and absolute to the pit of my stomach.
She doesn't look at me. She crosses the room toward the first row of chairs, where a seat has been reserved with a small card that saysFAMILY. She reads the card, sits without removing it, and folds her hands in her lap.
The room fills. The town council occupies the third row, all seated together with the synchronized solemnity of men whohave been told where to sit and what to feel. Rick Halston, county assessor, is in the next row with his wife. He keeps adjusting his collar. His eyes find me and drop to the floor. The hold on the mining permits won't last without reinforcement.
Thayer comes through the side door. My cousin moves the way he always moves, with the loose-limbed ease of a man who has never had to calculate the effect of his own body on a room. He's a few years older than me, built broader, his face open and handsome in the way a jury consultant would describe as ideal. His sandy hair is pushed back from his forehead, and his expression defaults to warmth the way mine defaults to neutrality.
He spots me at the bar and comes over first, because Thayer always comes over first. The hand lands on my shoulder, warm and fraternal, a grip that saysfamilythe way a handshake saysbusiness.
"You should be up front, not skulking back here with the bourbon." He leans against the bar beside me and signals to Keaton, who pours without being told. Thayer drinks whiskey at funerals. I know this because I've been to funerals with Thayer, and the man's rituals are as consistent as his smile. "How are you holding up?"
"I'm not the one who lost a parent."
"No." He takes his whiskey. "But you were fond of June. Everyone knew that." The warmth in his voice is perfectly calibrated, concern threaded with affection, the voice of a man who has never met an emotion he couldn't wear well. "She was a good woman. Stubborn as hell, but good."
"She'd have appreciated the stubbornness making the eulogy."
He laughs, short and warm, and squeezes my shoulder. "Take care of yourself today, Cal." He lifts his glass in a silent toast and pushes off the bar.
Then he crosses to Greer.
