I stopped at the edge of the floor and looked at it.
The girl who had worked this floor was still me. I did not want to lose her. She had known things that the current version of me was at risk of forgetting if I was not careful—the arithmetic of survival, the cost of a week’s rent in four-hour increments, the weight of a tray at the end of an eight-hour shift. Those things were worth keeping. They were the things that made the charitable work real rather than performative, that kept me honest in rooms where it was easy to stop being honest.
I kept her, deliberately, the way you keep the true versions of yourself that inconvenient circumstances had the courtesy to reveal.
“You’re doing the look again,” Viktor said behind me.
I turned. He was in his customary black, and he was looking at me with the expression I had come to know as his version of tenderness, which was not soft exactly but was warm.
“What look?” I asked, putting my hand in the hand he extended.
“The one where you’re doing three things simultaneously and I can see two of them,” he answered, pulling me into him with our connected hands.
“Only two?”
“I’ve learned not to push my luck with the third.”
I laughed.
I looked at him for a moment. We had been in the same penthouse, and outside, we were two powerhouses that couldn’t be looked down on. Our playful banter and arguments didn’t diminish our public composure, it gave us a hidden language no one else understood but us.
“I’m going to be late,” I said.
“The foundation board meeting.”
“You remembered.”
“I remember everything.” He said it without self-congratulation—it was simply accurate, Viktor’s memory being one of the things I had stopped finding unnerving and started finding useful. “The Castellano grant proposal.”
“And the Henderson community center funding.” I picked up my bag from the chair by the door. “We’re voting tonight.”
“Vote yes on the community center,” he said.
“I was going to.” I looked at him. “Were you planning to tell me how to vote?”
“I was planning to share an opinion.” The smile that wasn’t exactly full appeared on his face. “You are free to ignore it.”
“I am aware of my freedoms,” I said. “You worked very hard to ensure I knew them.”
“One of my better decisions.”
I looked at him for a moment with the specific regard that two years had made possible. He looked back the same way. Viktor had learned to be looked at without managing the looking, which was one of the truest things he had ever given me.
“I’ll be home by nine,” I said.
“I’ll be in the study,” he said. “I’m deciding on the Reno expansion. I want your read on the market analysis before I finalize it.”
“That’s asking, not telling,” I noted.
“I am capable of asking.”
“You are improving,” I said.
I kissed him.
He held my face briefly when I pulled back, the same as always, the thumb along my jaw. I let him.
“Go,” he said.
