The car is at the curb. Roman holds the door.
She gets in. I get in. The door closes.
The city moves past the window. She’s looking at it with the quiet of someone who has been performing for two hours and has just stopped. Not exhausted. Returned to herself. There is a difference, and we both know it.
“Dominic will call me tomorrow,” I say.
She turns from the window. “About what?”
“About you.”
She looks at me for a moment. “What will you tell him?”
“That he should have led with the eastern logistics question himself instead of waiting for you to bring it up.”
She looks back at the window. Something moves at the corner of her mouth. Not a smile. The beginning of one that she decides against.
“Gregor,” she says.
“Don’t concern yourself with Gregor.”
“He spent two hours deciding he didn’t like me.”
“He spent two hours deciding he was threatened by you,” I say. “That’s different.”
She’s quiet for a moment, the city moving past, the car warm against the night outside.
“You could have warned me,” she says. “About what tonight was going to be.”
“I could have.”
“Why didn’t you?”
I look at her profile against the window. The gold earrings she wore, small, nothing like the women in that room with their inherited jewelry. The dress she chose herself because she put my box back on my desk.
“You didn’t need it,” I say.
She doesn’t respond to that. She goes back to the window.
I go back to the city.
But I don’t stop seeing her.
9
CELINE
This time,he tells me three days in advance.
I want to be clear about this because it matters to me in a way I cannot fully explain, the difference between a box arriving at my door at four in the afternoon and a calendar invite sent on a Wednesday for a Saturday evening. One is a decision made about me. The other is information I was given.
I accept the calendar invite without responding.
He notices. He doesn’t say anything. That’s the version of acknowledgment we’ve arrived at over the past two weeks, a language made entirely of what we don’t say directly, and I’m becoming fluent in it against my will.
The gala is for a children’s hospital foundation on the Upper East Side. Three days ago, I approved the seating chart, argued with a florist about peonies, and signed off on centerpieces I’m afraid to calculate the cost of.
Tonight, I will attend as Zane Volkov’s wife.
