It might be the closest thing to pride I have ever seen on him, and it has been directed at me, and I don't know what to do with that except store it in the place where I keep the things I'm not ready to name. The place that's been getting crowded lately.
"The Hamptons is Friday," he says.
"I know."
"We should discuss?—"
"After the Hamptons," I say. "You said not yet. I'm giving you until Friday."
He looks at me.
I walk past him toward the Tower.
Behind me, after a moment, I hear his footsteps follow.
Not catching up. Just following.
That's different.
That's new.
And I find that I'm not surprised by it, which might be the most significant development of all.
25
SOFIA
The blood-red dress was a deliberate choice.
He sent the approved gown three days before the Met gala — charcoal silk, tasteful, expensive, the kind of thing that saysI belong herewithout saying anything at all. I hung it on the back of my door and looked at it for approximately forty-eight hours.
Then I ordered the red.
I'm not certain what I was testing. Maybe whether the Hamptons changed anything. Maybe whether hisif I start, I won't stopwas real, or another layer of control wearing the costume of vulnerability. Maybe I'm just tired of wearing his choices on my body and calling it an arrangement.
The dress is floor-length, deep scarlet, structured at the top and fluid below, and when I come down to the car and he sees it his entire face does something complicated in the space of half a second before going perfectly blank.
He says nothing.
He holds the car door open.
I get in, and neither of us mentions the charcoal silk hanging on the back of my door.
The Metropolitan Museum at night is something else entirely.
I've seen photographs — the steps, the fountain, the particular gathering of beautiful people in extraordinary clothes that constitutes the Met's main event for the outside world. But Obsidian has taken over the entire Egyptian wing, which means we bypass the steps and the cameras entirely and enter through a side door that opens into the Temple of Dendur gallery as if we've been there all along. As if we own the place.
As if, in some specific financial sense, several of the people here do.
The Temple of Dendur glows amber under controlled lighting, the ancient stone columns rising against the glass wall and the Manhattan dark beyond. Two thousand years and a continent away from where they were built, and still commanding every room they're placed in. I understand the appeal.
The gallery has been arranged for tonight with the specific consideration of people who understand that atmosphere is a weapon. Low tables, candlelight, the kind of floral arrangement that costs enough to be forgettable because excess is only vulgar when it's noticed. The crowd is maybe two hundred — small for an Obsidian event, which means this is the curated version, the inner ring.
I take a glass of Sancerre from a passing server and I work.
I've gotten better at this. The function I was acquired for — to be present, pleasant, an extension of his presence in a room — turns out to be something I can do with less resentment than I brought to it in October, which probably says something worth examining about what three months here has done to my sense of self. I prefer to think of it as skill. I've been developing the ability to navigate a room where everyone is simultaneously an asset and a threat, where the real information is in whatdoesn't show, where knowing who defers to whom tells you more about the actual power structure than anything anyone will say directly.
Aleksei works the room in exactly the way he always does: unhurried, precise, arriving exactly when expected and leaving exactly when useful. I've watched him do this enough times to know the pattern — the greeting that opens before the other person realizes they're being managed, the departure that always happens on his terms. He's good at it. He's been doing it since he was probably sixteen and it shows.
