Page 92

“Why,” she asks slowly, “would you want to do that? Hand me that kind of power. Most men in your position would keep the keys. It’s leverage. It’s a leash.”

Here is the question I have been waiting for her to ask, the one that lets me say the thing I have never been any good at saying.

I lift my hand to her face.

I run my thumb along the curve of her cheek—slow, deliberate, as if wiping away a tear that isn’t there, that maybe was there an hour ago and will be again, that I want her to know I would wipe without comment every time it falls.

“Because no one will ever disappoint you again while I’m breathing,” I tell her, low and absolute. “And on the impossible chance that someone does…that one day even I do…I need to know you’re standing on your own ground when you decide what to do about it. That if you ever choose to leave, you leave because you can, with every resource at your back to land softly. You will never again be sold into a transaction and set on a shelf like a doll—something to be admired, dusted, kept, and never once permitted to step down and walk out and prosper on your own two feet. Not while I have anything to say about it. The opposite of what was done to you is not being kept more gently. It’s being made free.”

I am not built for this.

I made my peace, a long time ago, with the fact that affection is a language I read fluently and speak with a permanent accent, that the warmth other men hand out like coins costs me something to produce.

But I force myself the last few inches, lean down, and press my lips to her forehead—a brief, deliberate, careful thing, the most fluent sentence I have.

She freezes under it.

For a long moment she doesn’t breathe, and I hold still and let her have the time, because I’ve learned that pushing this woman toward a feeling is the surest way to watch her armor it over.

When she finally exhales, it’s shaky, and something behind her mismatched eyes has gone soft and stunned and very young. I have handed people a great many things across a great many years—diagnoses, verdicts, the occasional mercy. I have never handed anyone their own freedom and watched them realize, in real time, that they’d stopped believing it was a thing that could be given.

The expression on her face is one I intend to be responsible for again. Often. It may be the first genuinely selfish want I’ve permitted myself in a decade.

Not in distaste—I’ve catalogued her tells thoroughly enough to read the difference—but in pure surprise, the startled stillness of a woman recalibrating who she thought I was.

She didn’t expect me to make the move. Which means she’s been reading me accurately all along, has clocked exactly how hard physical tenderness comes to me, and the knowledge that she sees that clearly only makes me want to prove her wrong about its limits.

“I’d give you the access now,” I murmur against her hairline, “but I don’t want your ex-husband learning precisely how secure you’ve become. Let him keep underestimating the woman he thinks he left with nothing.”

I draw back and squeeze her hand once, grounding.

“Hungry?”

She blinks up at me, still resettling from the forehead kiss—and her stomach answers for her, a long theatrical growl that rolls through the quiet square like a horn section warming up, like the massed hymn of an entire starving congregation.

It startles a blush out of her.

An actual blush, pink climbing her cheeks, which on a woman who has cheerfully discussed arson over breakfast is so disarming I nearly miss her sheepish nod.

“Diner food,” I ask, “or luxury? There’s a place at the end of the lane with linen napkins and a tasting menu, and there’s a place across from it with vinyl booths and a griddle that hasn’t been scrubbed since the last administration. Your choice.”

“Slobby burgers!” she declares, with the same triumphant conviction she brought to the pole flyer, and I find myself nodding before I’ve consciously agreed, because apparently her joy has become a thing I simply obey.

And it is a marvel to me, her joy—the way it arrives whole and unembarrassed over the smallest possible things.

A pole class. A blueberry granola bar. A greasy burger in a vinyl booth, chosen with the same gravity another woman might bring to the tasting menu I offered.

I have spent a fortune in my life on rooms full of people incapable of being pleased, and here is a creature who burns penthouses and dismantles institutions and lights up like a struck match at the promise of a milkshake and a griddle. It tells me everything about the scale of what was taken from her, that ordinary delight should feel this rare.

It sharpens, quietly, the cold thing I keep beneath the planning: a precise, patient intention toward the man who taught her that wanting simple things was dangerous. He will learn what I learned long ago—that the quietest man in the room is generally the one keeping the most careful list.

I turn toward the vinyl-booth establishment—and her hand tugs mine, halting me.

I look back.

She’s gone shy.

Genuinely, uncharacteristically shy, her gaze dropped, her thumb worrying the side of my hand, and when she speaks it’s barely above the noise of the square.