Chad's mouth opens. Closes. He looks up, because Narod's face requires a significant upward trajectory from Chad's height, which is average, which Chad has always experienced as sufficient, and which now, contextually, reads as somewhat inadequate.
"Hey," Chad says. To me. Specifically to me, with the deliberate re-orientation of a person choosing not to acknowledge Narod's presence, which I recognise as a Chad Classic, the same selective vision that once looked directly at my quarterly bonus and said, "Is that before or after they factor in the support staff?"
I feel Narod's hand on my shoulder. Steady. Unhurried. Not gripping, not posturing, just present, the same way he is always present, with the quality of attention that means I am the fixed point he is oriented toward and everything else is simply geography.
I look at Chad. I look at the lanyard. I look at his expression, which is doing something deeply unflattering, something that sits between wounded pride and the very recent discovery that the narrative he has been carrying about me, specifically the one where I am the person he generously moved on from, is not the story that is being told here.
"Chad," I say, pleasantly, the same tone I used with Martin in the conference room, the tone that costs nothing because I have nothing left invested in the response it produces.
He looks at me. He looks at the bracelet again. Something moves across his face that I don't need to name or catalogue or carry home with me. It exists, it passes, it is not mine to manage.
"You're here together?" he says, and the question carries more weight than he intends it to, with someone doing rapid, painful arithmetic.
"We are," I say.
Narod says nothing. He does not need to. He is simply standing at his full, uncompressed height with his shoulders easy and wide and his hand warm on my shoulder, and the quality of his silence is not threatening and not performing, it is simply the silence of a person who is exactly where they intend to be, with exactly the person they intend to be with, and finds the current interruption mildly interesting at most.
Chad looks up at him again. Narod meets his gaze with the mild, attentive expression he uses during quarterly risk briefings, the one that is completely polite and communicates nothing except complete and total calm, which is somehow more destabilising than any alternative.
"Right," Chad says. "Cool. That's." He gestures vaguely at the festival around him, the lanyarded gesture of a man recontextualising his afternoon in real time. "Great that you're, yeah."
I watch him locate an exit strategy. I watch him find it.
"Well," he says. "Good to see you."
It is clearly not, and we both know it, and the beautiful thing, the genuinely, quietly beautiful thing, is that I feel nothing about that except a small, clean sense of completion, like closing a tab that has been open in the background consuming processing power for far too long.
"Take care of yourself," I say, and mean it in the sincere, utterly indifferent way you mean it about a chapter of your life that taught you something useful and then finished.
He walks away down the gravel path, lanyard swinging, tote bag clutched, until the festival crowd absorbs him and he is gone.
Narod waits. He is very good at waiting. He has the patience of something geological. Then, after a moment, he says, in the low, careful voice he uses when he is taking his readings, assessing the data, checking my state before he proceeds.
"Are you all right?"
I look at the woven wall hanging with its protection symbol. I look at the gold on my wrist, heavy, warm and chosen. I look up at Narod's face, at the amber eyes and the earnest careful attention and the polished tusks and the wire-rimmed glasses that sit slightly crooked because he nudged them when he was reading the card and didn't notice.
I reach up and straighten his glasses.
"I'm excellent," I say, and I mean that with a completeness and a precision that would satisfy even his standards of measurement. "Can we get more of those skewers?"
His entire face opens up, warm and uncomplicated and entirely his.
"Greta's grandmother's recipe," he says. "I can get you the full ingredient list. She likes you."
"Everyone who matters likes me," I say, and take his hand, and we walk back into the festival together, and somewhere behind my sternum the drums keep their deep, rolling beat, and the late afternoon light turns everything gold.
CHAPTER 20
NAROD
Iwatch Chad go.
He doesn't run, exactly, but his pace acquires a particular quality, a purposeful, rapidly accelerating quality, as though he has just remembered an extremely urgent appointment on the opposite side of the festival grounds. His lanyard swings with the momentum of a man performing a strategic withdrawal. Within approximately four seconds, the crowd has absorbed him entirely, and he is gone, and I find myself experiencing a sensation that I can only categorise, after careful internal review, as deeply satisfying in a way that requires no further analysis.
I don't growl. I don't unfold to my full height in a display of territorial dominance. I don't even shift my posture. I simply exist, at my full and uncompressed dimensions, with Livia's shoulder under my palm and her gold bracelet catching the late afternoon light at my wrist height, and apparently that constitutes sufficient information for a man like Chad to make an extremely rapid and well-reasoned decision.
The sound that comes out of me is not something I have made very often in my life. It is low, warm and genuinely amused.
