His grin is involuntary and young. His teeth are expensive and not overdone. He looks at his hands like they are answering an accusation. “They still are, and you should not believe everything people tell you about me.”
He gets up with such precision, striding towards the door and some sort of alarm goes off in my head.
I’m playing games. Games I don’t understand, and Antonio Macrae, he is the master of everything. He doesn’t just know the rules, he doesn’t just own the board; he made it, crafted it with his own bleeding hands.
“I don’t,” I say quickly after him. And then, “Neither should you.”
He pauses, his hand about to touch where the door will open as if by magic just for him.
“Will you let me bring you a plant?” he asks, turning to look at me. “Something alive and stubborn?”
The thought of a plant in this whiteness is obscene and lovely. A leaf would be a blasphemy here. I picture a pot of rosemary, something you brush in passing to release scent. The idea makes my throat ache.
“They will not allow it.” I reply.
“I will ask,” he says, the way a monarch “asks”, a word with a weight attached so heavy it becomes a command. “And if they refuse, I will see what I can do.”
The way he speaks feels like it is nothing, a thing of no consequence, and that puts my hackles up because he was the one who suggested this, not me. Now, he’s acting like I’ve asked for the world and he will see if he can oblige.
He’s twisted this. Twisted me.
“I do not ask favours,” I say, and mean it. “Especially not those that will be tallied and delivered like a bill.”
My father warned me about men who dealt in debts like silk, soft now, strangling later. Antonio Macrae is the very epitome of that.
“You mistake me,” he says softly. “I am not interested in adding to my ledger.”
“Then what…”
“I’ll speak to them. No promises, Grace. I’ll see what I can do.” He says, cutting across me as he taps lightly on the door to signal this entire conversation is done.
There it is, the silk. No promises. See what he can do. As though he hasn’t already done it all.
It is a little thing. A little gesture. I’m taken to use the bathroom and when I return, it is there. On the desk. As if it has always been there.
Its leaves are shiny with a slight wax texture.
It feels robust, solid, as if it can survive the confines of this place better than I can.
I try to keep my joy hidden but it is impossible to do so.
I have something. Something that is not white, that is not flat.
Something that is real, alive.
It is madness, stupid, but I sit on the bed, and I pull out the book Antonio gave me. In my head, I stick two fingers up at the camera, and I read out loud one poem after another. Letting my new plant hear it, letting it rejoice in each new verse as I speak it.
This gift will cost me - I know that.
But right now, it feels like I would pay any price. Any price at all.
3 years and 8 months until auction
It’s raining. It’s always raining in Paris in April. I don’t know why so many people consider this place so damn romantic, when most days it’s a mess of grey tones and sodden, dirty, streets.
The air here is thick with the perfume of stale cigarette smoke fighting for dominance with the sharp bite of the spring wind. It cuts through my wool coat as I sit here, elbows on the scarred wood of this sidewalk cafe table. Tourists wander past, cameras clicking like metallic insects, utterly oblivious to the currents beneath the surface. They’re here for the Eiffel Tower, the romance of the Seine, the carefully curated view of Paris.
I on the other hand, am here less for the beauty, more for the shadows the beauty casts.
