Ward crosses the room with the measured gait of a man who has never rushed. His trajectory tells me where he's headed before he gets there.
Greer stands. Her spine straightens and her shoulders set, her body organizing itself around the decision to meet him at full height.
Ward extends his hand. Greer takes it. The handshake lasts longer than it should, Ward's fingers wrapped around hers, his other hand coming up to cover the clasp. The gesture offers solace. In Ward's vocabulary, it also establishes contact.
I watch my uncle hold the hand of the woman I held hours ago. Something cold and precise settles through me, old as territory.
His fingers close over hers with proprietary warmth. He leans into her the way he leans into everyone, because Ward Aldrich has never acknowledged that other people's proximity belongs to them. She is standing inside the perimeter of the man who may have put her mother in the ground, and his hand is on hers. The controlled, deliberate violence of my own restraint surprises me.
I don't move. My hand tightens on the glass until the pressure finds the edge of what the glass can hold. I ease off. I watch.
He leans in and speaks into the gap between them, his mouth close to her ear. The words don't carry. Not to me, not to anyone in the room except Greer. Ward doesn't speak to rooms. He speaks to the person he's holding. The room learns the content later, through channels, filtered and shaped and delivered at the speed and temperature he decides.
Greer's jaw sets. The muscle along the line of it flexes and holds. She meets his gaze with flat, level attention, and the steadiness in her eyes is so precisely her mother's that for a moment the years between them collapse and it's June standingthere. June's jaw, June's refusal, June's talent for absorbing a blow without flinching and filing the bruise for later.
Ward releases her hand. He nods once, the avuncular benediction, and turns to the council members. The room exhales.
Ward catches my eye as he passes through the reception. The look carries nothing explicit. A door held open, an invitation to cross back into the warm room, the quiet rules, the understanding between men who share a name and a mountain and a secret.You're still my brother's son. Come home.
I stay at the back of the room with my bourbon. I don't follow him.
Greer makes it through a few more handshakes before she breaks for the bar.
She steps into the space beside me without looking at me, close enough that the sleeve of her dress brushes my forearm. "Single malt. Neat. Whatever's closest," she says to Keaton.
Keaton pours. He sets it in front of her and retreats to the far end of the bar with the instincts of a man who reads rooms for a living.
She picks up the glass and takes a drink that is not a sip. The line of her throat moves as she swallows, and I watch it because I can't stop watching it. The memory of my mouth against that exact stretch of skin is so immediate that I can feel my own pulse readjust.
Her hip is inches from mine. The edge of her elbow rests on the bar close enough that if either of us shifted, the contact would happen. The effort of keeping that distance steady in a room full of people who could be watching is a kind of torment I am cataloging for future reference.
"Your family throws a lovely party for a woman they wanted gone," she says, still not looking at me. Her voice is low enoughthat the walnut paneling swallows it before it reaches the nearest cluster. "The lilies are a nice touch. My mother was allergic."
"I know."
"Of course you do." She takes another drink. Her eyes find the photograph on the easel, the too-young June on display. "They used the wrong photograph. She would have been furious."
"She would have told me to make a scene."
"Then we're both disappointing her today."
She sets the glass down. Her fingers rest on the base of it, close enough to my hand on the bar that I can feel the warmth without the touch. The restraint of not closing that gap is costing me more than any silence I've ever held for Ward.
She turns her head just enough to look at me. The full weight of her attention lands with a force that has nothing to do with grief and everything to do with the dangerous negotiation that has been running between us since the night she told me to prove I wasn't the man who tried to kill her, and I proved it on her kitchen counter.
"Your uncle just told me my mother would want me to take care of myself," she says, her voice carrying a quiet edge. "In the voice a man uses whentake care of yourselfmeansbe careful."
The words sit between us on the polished bar. Ward's warning, delivered through a woman who just walked straight from the patriarch to the fixer and handed him the threat as though choosing which Aldrich to arm with it was never a question.
She didn't crumble. She didn't go pale. She absorbed the hit the way June absorbed every hit this family ever landed, and then she walked to the one person in this building she's decided to trust. She is trusting me with this right now, in the inches of bar between her elbow and mine. The weight of that trust is heavier than anything Ward has ever put in my hands.
"He means it," I tell her. My voice is low. I am looking at the bar because looking at her face from this distance in this room would give the room more than I'm willing to spend. "When Ward tells you totake care of yourself, it's not a suggestion. It's a preview."
"I know what it is." She finishes the scotch. "My mother got the same preview for decades. She didn't take care of herself. She took care of the truth."
She sets the empty glass on the bar, and her fingers brush the back of my hand as she draws away. The contact is brief and deliberate and sends a current through me that I feel in the base of my spine.
Whether she meant it as reassurance or as something else entirely, I can't tell. The not-knowing is its own kind of fixation, the pull of a man who needs to understand everything this woman does, rapidly discovering that she will always be one move ahead of him.
