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In the golden light of the bar, her eyes shimmer. “I can’t accept that.”
“Of course you can. You were the one who told me to marry St. Clair and skim some off the top, and this is me doing just that. I couldn’t have done any of this without you. I’ll be there on your opening day too, the proudest best friend there ever was.”
She hugs me again, squeezing me tight, and speaks through a closed throat. “I don’t know how to repay you.”
“You don’t have to,” I murmur. “I love you, you know.”
“I love you too,” she whispers. “Getting your bosshole to help me too. You’re a genius.”
“If we rise, we’re rising together.”
She nods, leaning back to wipe her eyes. “I’m exhibiting.”
“You’re exhibiting,” I repeat. It feels like ten years of work to get to this point, of seeing her experiment and find her voice, lose it again, rediscover a new direction.
My own throat feels a little tight. “You know what this means for tonight.”
“We need to celebrate.”
I nod, reaching for both of our glasses and pressing hers into her hand. “Bottoms up,” I say. “To artists who cancel, and the artists who seize the opportunities they leave behind.”
She raises her glass. “To friends who have each other’s backs.”
11
Victor
The computer screen in front of me fades in and out of view, my eyes struggling to focus. I lean back in my office chair and close them. The emails and memos can wait. They’ll have to, because I don’t have any more in me tonight. Running on empty.
It’s past midnight and I should be in bed.
Had been, in fact, until the cold premonition that always signaled a bad night drove me out of it again. The best thing to do on such nights is to avoid my bed until I finally fall into it so exhausted I sleep like the dead. It keeps me from dreaming of them.
I run a hand through my hair. Where is she?
Cecilia hadn’t mentioned where she’d be tonight and Bonnie hadn’t known either. I’d called Steven, but he hadn’t driven her anywhere. No notes left behind on the kitchen counter either.
Her schedule is usually predictable. Reliable. She’s here when I get back home, chatting with Bonnie in low, cheerful tones in the kitchen or, in the last week, sitting on the couch in the living room with a book in hand. She always shuts her bedroom door by ten p.m.
And on her way up the stairs to go to bed, she always pauses at my half-open office door. “Goodnight,” she says.
It had annoyed me at first, but she’d kept at it, professional and kind, like clockwork. I always say it back. “Goodnight.” And then I listen to her soft steps heading upstairs, the sound of another person living in my apartment. Making it feel like a home.
But not tonight.
I push away from the desk and head into the kitchen. Maybe what I need is a cup of coffee. The clock on the microwave assaults me with a time that’s far too late, showing twenty past one.
We have never discussed this. To keep or not to keep one another informed. But surely she should recognize that herself? Cecilia Myers, who is the paragon of organizational virtue and forethought. Who had run my life so smoothly I didn’t know to miss her as my assistant until she left.
She might be in trouble.
Possible scenarios flash through my mind, of Cecilia lost in the city, her phone dead, her wallet a beacon to thieves. Cecilia in another man’s apartment, in his arms, giving him all of her laughs. And then, my brain unable to stop, the image of her in a car wreck, her body bent and broken.
I wrest my mind away from that image.
Reach for my phone and find her number.
I drum my fingers along my kitchen counter as the signals go forth. One, two, three…
