And I mean it, too, which is the thing he will never understand and I have long since stopped trying to explain to him. He is the man every woman in this city has built a fantasy around, and I am the one woman alive who looks at him and sees a brother who never once learned to mind his own business. His suspicion of Trey comes from the very same overprotective place that used to make him glower at any boy who dared walk me home, and I love him for the place it comes from even on the days I’d cheerfully like to shake him for where it leads him.
He goes, his dark coat disappearing down the slope between the stones, and then I’m alone with my father at last, and that’s when the memory comes the way it always comes in this exact spot.
The day of my wedding, which was not so much a wedding as the signing of a stack of contracts in a room that smelled of medicine and antiseptic and the particular cloying sweetnessof a sickroom. Afterward Dad had the nurse wheel me into his bedroom, just the two of us, the blinds half drawn and his breath coming slow, and he took my hand in both of his thin papery ones and looked at me with a gravity I’d only ever seen him wear before a trade big enough to make or break a whole season.
“There will come a time you’ll find him particularly hard to understand,” he told me. “Be patient. Pray about it. Remember what your Mama used to teach you.”
Quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger.
I’d nodded the way you nod to a dying man, holding his words carefully like something that might break, certain I would carry them gently with me always and just as certain I’d never have any real need of them. And six months on, I still haven’t needed them. That’s the strange part, the part I keep turning over. There’s been nothing to be patient about. No moment I’ve found Trey hard to understand. No anger to be slow toward. He has been, from that very first morning to this one, very nearly perfect.
I tell my father that I love him, and I straighten, and I head back down the slope toward the car with the warmth of the morning still folded up inside me like a secret. But the memory comes down the hill after me, and so does the small cold thought that always trails along behind it, the one I have never once managed to fully talk myself out of.
Because that’s the thing that frightens me, on the days I let myself be honest. A husband with no flaw that needs forgiving. A marriage with no moment hard enough to need my mother’s wisdom for. When a thing seems too good to be true, there is always, always a lie buried somewhere underneath it, just waiting to be turned up, and I have spent six happy months being very careful not to wonder what mine might be.
I even end up falling asleep on the living room sofa that evening, still in my coat, because this has never once happened before and I don’t know what else to do with myself.
Why hasn’t Trey come home?
Chapter Two
The office was Richard’s before it was mine, and I’ve changed almost nothing in it. The same dark shelves, heavy with the bound league records no one has opened in twenty years. The same broad desk, oak the color of strong tea, angled so that whoever sits behind it sees the door a full second before the door sees him. The same two leather chairs on the supplicant’s side of all that wood, lower than mine by an inch and a half, which is not an accident and was never an accident. I kept every bit of it on purpose. A man learns more from the room he inherits than from any room he builds for himself, and Richard built this one to be looked up to across a great deal of polished oak.
Right now the oak is the only thing standing between me and Raymond Glasgow, and Raymond is smiling at me across it the way men smile when they’ve already decided they’ve won.
“I’ll come straight to the point,” he says, and lays a slim leather folder on the desk between us. “I’ve always admired that about you, Flint. No taste for ceremony. So.” He flips the cover open with one manicured finger. “Neither will I.”
I don’t reach for the photographs. I’ve negotiated against far better men than Raymond Glasgow, and the first thing theyteach you, if anyone bothers teaching you anything at all where I come from, is that the man who lunges for the thing on the table has just told the whole room how badly he wants it. So I leave the folder where it lies, the edge of one glossy print showing past the leather, and I look at Raymond instead, and I let the silence do to him what silence does to a man who walked in with his lines rehearsed.
He cracks before I do. They always crack before I do. He turns the top photograph a few degrees toward me with that same finger. “Two months,” he says. “And I’ll be candid, that’s only what we gathered in the last two months.”
I look down.
It’s her. Camilla, in the soft grey wool coat I bought her in the spring because she said the cold here was different from California cold, her face turned up toward a man a full head taller than she is, laughing at something he’s just said. Barrymore. There’s no mistaking him, there has never been any mistaking him, the most photographed jaw in the sport, the golden retired god of the Waymakers, and his hand is resting at the small of my wife’s back as though it has every right in the world to be there.
I turn it over. The next one. The two of them on a park bench, her head tipped to rest against his shoulder, two paper cups of coffee between them on the slats. The next. A café table behind glass, his coat draped over the back of her chair. The next, and the next.
I go through all of them. I make myself do it slowly, one print at a time, my face arranged into the same expensive nothing I’d wear across any table where nine figures were changing hands, because the alternative is to let Raymond Glasgow see what is happening underneath it, and I would sooner take a letter opener to my own hand than give him that.
“You understand,” Raymond says gently, “why I’m showing you these.”
“Enlighten me.”
“Because I want you out.” He says it pleasantly, almost warmly, the way only the truly old money can say the very ugliest things. “And I’m hardly alone, Flint. The whole board wants you out. We’ve only been waiting for a reason that would let us be civil about the doing of it.”
“Civil,” I repeat.
“We’re old-fashioned here. You knew that walking in. We prefer our own kind, and Barrymore is our own kind, down to the bone. Good family, good name, the right schools, a grandfather with a wing of the hospital named after him.” He spreads both manicured hands, taking in the room, the building, the whole gilded world I bought my way into. “Camilla is Richard’s daughter. Every man at that table watched her learn to walk in these halls. We are all, each one of us, cut from a single bolt of cloth.” His gaze travels down my suit, which is worth rather more than his car, and finds it wanting anyway, the way it was always going to find it wanting no matter what I paid. “And then there is you. The boy from the wrong side of the tracks who married his way to a seat at the table. It was never going to hold. Surely you always knew that.”
I say nothing. I’ve learned over the years that nothing is the most expensive thing I can hand a man like this, because nothing gives him no purchase, no edge, nothing to set his weight against.
“Give up your seat,” Raymond goes on, encouraged by the quiet the way I knew he would be. “Sell your shares back to the group. We’ll see you paid handsomely, more than handsomely, and you can carry that remarkable talent of yours somewhere it’ll be admired for what it earns instead of resented for what it bought.” He settles back into the leather, crossing one legover the other. “Or stay. Stay, and explain to a table full of men who watched that girl grow up why you mean to go on sitting among them while your wife makes a public fool of you with the franchise’s favorite son. Do you really want to remain, Flint? Tethered to a woman who’s been meeting the Waymakers’ greatest legend behind your back for months?”
There it is. The blade he came to slide in, finally drawn out from under all that civility and pushed home clean.
I let it sit between us a moment. I gather the photographs back into a neat stack, square the edges against the desk, and close the leather cover over them with one unhurried motion, and only when my hand is resting on the shut folder do I let myself speak.
“Bills.”
