Page 54 of Claimed By the Boss
“She was.” I look at my plate for a moment. “She would have been very good at the grandmother part. She would have driven us completely insane, and we would have been grateful for every second of it.”
The kitchen holds that quietly.
“Tell me more about her,” he says.
So I do. I tell him about the soap she bought in bulk from the store on Mercer, the same bottle I’ve been buying ever since,without checking the label. I tell him about the shoebox of drawings she kept under the bed, every terrible crayon rendition Lena and I ever produced, saved with the same care she gave the mortgage papers.
I tell him about the pancakes, about her voice staying even in the kitchen that night, about the way the house still smells like both of them somehow, years after they’re gone, the way houses hold people long after the people themselves have left.
I tell him about the summer I was eleven and decided I wanted to learn to cook properly, the way adults cooked, and my mother sat with me at the kitchen table every Saturday morning for three months, going through a cookbook she’d had since before I was born, the pages soft and annotated in her handwriting. I burned things constantly. She never once suggested I stop. She just adjusted the temperature and told me to try again.
I tell him about the way she laughed, sudden and loud and completely unguarded, the laugh that Lena inherited entirely and that I only ever catch glimpses of in myself.
I talk for longer than I’ve talked about them in years, and he listens the way he listens to things that matter, without interrupting, without filling the pauses, his fork forgotten on his plate. By the time I finish, the kitchen has gone dark outside the window, and neither of us has moved to turn on more lights.
“That’s the most you’ve ever told me about yourself,” he says.
“I know.”
“I’d like more of that. When you’re ready.”
I look at him across the table, this man who reviewed a file about my life for months before he ever met me, and still didn’t know the most important parts of it.
“There’s a lot you don’t have in any file,” I say.
“I’m aware of that now,” he says. “More than you probably expect me to be.”
Later, I’m in my room reading when I notice the thing on my nightstand that wasn’t there this morning.
A small jar of the expensive hand cream I mentioned to Lena in a video call two weeks ago, offhand, barely a sentence, saying I’d been meaning to order it. I didn’t order it. I forgot about it entirely by the next day.
He was apparently within earshot of that call.
I sit on the edge of the bed and look at the jar for a long time.
It isn’t a grand gesture. It isn’t flowers or jewelry or anything that announces itself. It’s a man who heard a woman mention something she wanted and quietly made sure it appeared. No fanfare. No acknowledgment. Just a thing that needed doing, done, the way he does everything that actually matters to him.
I think about my mother’s even voice in the kitchen at midnight. About steadiness being something you build on top of fear rather than something that replaces it.
I think about the man down the corridor who admitted at dinner tonight that the part he cannot manage is the part that terrifies him most, and who said it plainly, without dressing itup, because he has learned somewhere in the last several months that honesty costs less than the alternative.
I put the cream on the nightstand where he left it, turn off the lamp, and lie back in the dark.
22
CELINE
The function is smallerthan the council dinners. It’s a private gathering at a house in Connecticut belonging to a man named Orlov, an old friend of Zane’s, old enough that the word friend actually applies rather than functioning as a euphemism for something more transactional.
Forty people, maybe fewer, with no formal seating, and orchestrated introductions like the first dinner.
I don’t need him to brief me in the car this time.
I notice this on the drive out, the absence of the careful instructions he used to give before the first dinner.There will be twelve people at the table. You don’t have to answer anything you don’t want to answer. If someone crosses a line, look at me.
He doesn’t say any of that tonight. He just looks at me once when we pull up the long gravel drive, the headlights catching the white columns of the house ahead, and the look isn’t checking whether I’m ready. It’s the look of a man who already knows the answer and is simply taking a moment to register it properly, the way you register something you’ve been waiting to be sure of.
I am ready. I’ve been ready for weeks now. I just didn’t notice exactly when that became true.
