“So, your kink is death?” Simon asks Yael.
Yael ignores him. “I didn’t know your brother, Dez, but I watched your film. And it’s clear you loved him during his life and that you gave him what he needed at the end—”
“Does he exist?” Dez asks. “As Mo? Will I see him again?”
“Once you open your mind as wide as your heart, you’ll see him everywhere,” Yael says.
“Goddamned ambiguous angels,” Dez says, and looks away.
“I’m staying at Acheron,” Simon announces. “I’ve decided.”
“I thought you wanted to go back to Oklahoma,” Dez says.
“That was before tonight.” Simon takes a deep glug of his martini. “Esther and I are both staying.”
“Have you fucked her already?” Yael asks. “The window’s closing.”
“I don’t think anything’s closing,” Simon says. He sounds happy.
Dez wonders if she could be happy tonight with all she learned at the gala if Mo were still alive. It’s impossible to tell. But she takes Simon’s hand and squeezes. She’s glad for him.
He rests his head on her shoulder. “Stay too?”
Dez exhales. She doesn’t know.
“I’m not sure I have a home to go back to,” she says. “But I also don’t know if I can make it here. Even if I wasn’t grieving …”
“Grief is a condition of existence,” Yael offers. “And an asset for art.”
“What do you know about grief?” Simon asks. “You’re a fucking angel.”
“I wasn’t always an angel.”
“What did you used to be?” Dez asks.
“It doesn’t matter. Everything’s different since Samael left.”
“Samael? You mean the guy from the painting?” Simon says.
“He’s not just ‘a guy from a painting,’” Yael says. “He was our leader. He was—”
“The Angel of Death,” Dez says.
“SamaelinventedDeath,” Yael says.
“No shit?” Simon says.
“He started with Adam and Eve. After they ate from the Tree of Knowledge, got themselves kicked out of the Garden, their suffering was inevitable. But death wasn’t. Not yet. Sam pioneered the entire system. The world’s been running on it ever since.” Yael takes a large drink from her martini and touches her breast. “It still gets me excited.”
Dez and Simon look at each other.
“So Genesis,” Dez says, “is true?”
“True enough,” Yael says. “You can’t expect a thirdhand retelling to get every detail right. The Bible’s a big game of Telephone. And a lot of lame-ass patriarchal censors watered the best parts down. But the original truth still lingers between the lines.”
“And when you say Sam left …” Simon says.
“Here one day, gone the next,” Yael says, gazing down into her drink. “Apparently Rafe was the last one to see him.”
