“You have somehow become involved with a man who sounds increasingly like a character written by someone with unresolved trust issues.”
I opened my mouth.
She pointed the coffee at me.
“Don’t interrupt. I’m building a case.”
Despite everything, the group of us laughed and I felt suddenly freer than I ever had. This was real. I was here, with women I could talk to and no one was going to barge in. Take my phone.Send me home. Or derail my life ever again. The enormity of it settled over me.
“Hi. I’m Mari. I’ve been hovering in the background verbally kicking Jared’s ass to fix his shit. Here we are.”
Oh, I liked her. I liked her very much.
“Jared. He had the chance, the computer, the drive, the access he needed. He was in your father’s study in the middle of the night with everything he’d spent eighteen months working toward right in front of him.” Her voice was even, not dramatic, just the clean delivery of a fact. “He put the drive back in his pocket and walked out.”
I already knew this. He had told me himself, in the rear drive of the house with blood on my face and agents moving through the rooms. I had heard it and I had filed it and I had said I need time because I did need time and the knowing and the believing were not the same thing yet.
But hearing it from someone else was different. Someone with no stake in whether I believed it. Someone telling me because it was true, not because she needed me to forgive him.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“He told Declan,” she said. “The night he came to get you. He told Declan everything, the operation, Khaos Inc., all of it. We know, Polina. All of us. And none of us know quite what to do with the fact that Jared Kane, who has spent eleven years making sure nothing sticks”—her voice held something warm and slightly exasperated, the tone of someone describing a family member they knew too well—“sat in front of the thing he’d been working toward for a year and a half and chose a woman he’d known for three weeks instead.”
The room held the weight of that for a moment.
The way Mari described it put things in perspective in a way Jared never could have.
“He remembered the Barnes,” I said.
Not quite to her. To the table. To the wine glass Dottie had handed me after dumping the coffee down the sink. To the simple fact of a man sitting alone in a locked-out room at four in the morning writingThe Barnes. Tomorrow. Don’t wait for permissionon a torn piece of notepaper and tucking it beneath my phone.
“The Barnes Foundation?” Raia said.
“I told him—“ I stopped. “In the dark. I told him I’d call the Barnes if my father weren’t in the picture. It was nothing, just… I said it once, in passing, and he”—I looked up—”he wrote it in the note he left. Like it mattered.”
The women were looking at me with expressions that were both soft and slightly amused, like women watching someone arrive at a conclusion they’d already reached.
“It did matter,” she said. “That’s the point.”
I pressed my lips together and looked out the window.
“I have a contact,” Mari said, her voice shifting to something more practical, the tone of a woman who understood that sometimes the most useful thing you could do for someone was hand them something concrete to hold. “At the Barnes Foundation. Her name is Dr. Ellison. She’s on the curatorial committee. I’ve done some fundraising work with her.” She paused. “If you wanted an introduction. A real one, through the front door, with someone who would take your work seriously. I could make that call.”
I looked at her.
“He described your knowledge of the collection,” she said. “How you moved through it that night. And I’ve looked at your academic work. Jared mentioned your degrees and I may have done some research.” A small unapologetic smile. “You’re more than qualified. You were always more than qualified. You just kept getting your exits closed.”
My throat tightened. I pressed the heel of my hand against my sternum and looked at the ceiling and told myself that I was not going to cry in front of women I’d just met.
“He remembered,” I said again. Quietly. To myself, mostly.
“He did.”
I sat with it for a moment. The Barnes. The interview I had been reaching toward for four years while my father quietly redirected everything away from it. The thing I had said in the dark in a voice that surprised even me with its certainty, and the man who had heard it and kept it and left it under my phone like a promise.
I was not forgiving him yet. I needed to sit with the beginning of us—my name given to him by another, the operation, the calculation that had walked through Midgard’s doors the same night I did and decide what it meant. Whether it changed the thing itself or only the context of it. Those were questions for days I hadn’t had yet.
But I was making a decision. Not about him, about myself. About the Barnes and the interview and the career I had been told, in a hundred quiet ways, I was not allowed to have.
