“I’m wonderful,” she said. And meant it. I could hear the truth of it, the unmanaged version, the word landing with the specific weight of someone saying it who knew the difference between wonderful and fine. “It’s a lot of people.”
“It is.”
“Shelby told me three things about Noah in the first five minutes that I’m reasonably certain he doesn’t know she tells people.”
“She is a brat, that one, and keeps Noah on his toes.”
“Dottie cried.” She looked slightly amazed by this. “Actual tears. She said she was so happy for me she couldn’t help it and then immediately told me the story of the first time she introduced Raia to this world, and I cried a little too and then we both pretended we hadn’t.”
“I saw,” I said.
She looked up at me. “You were watching.”
“I’m always watching you.”
The echo of what I’d said in the aftercare room was intentional. She heard it, caught it the way she caught things, the flicker of recognition moving through her eyes before she lookedaway with the composed expression she used when something had landed and she was deciding what to do with it.
“I like them,” she said quietly. “Your people.”
“They’re your people now,” I said. “Whether you’ve fully processed that or not.”
She was quiet for a moment. Around us the room continued its warm and noisy business, the family doing what it did, which was exist loudly and without apology in spaces that were large enough to hold all of it.
“Yes,” she said. Simply. The way she said the things she’d decided. “I suppose they are.”
Epilogue
Polina
Six Months Later
My name was on the program.
Not in the acknowledgments. Not in the donor list or the board notes or the carefully curated thank-yous at the back where names went to be seen without being read. On the front page, under the exhibition title, in the same clean font as everyone else who had earned their place there:
Associate Curator: Polina Morozov
I had looked at it for approximately thirty seconds when the programs arrived from the printer last week, standing alone in my office. My office, with my name on the door and my bookson the shelves and my degrees on the wall where I had put them myself, and had felt something move through me that had no name except the feeling of a thing being true that you had believed for a long time would never be true.
Then I had put the program down and gone back to work, because there was a great deal of work and I was very good at it and that was the point.
Tonight, the Barnes Foundation’s main hall held two hundred people and an exhibition I had spent four months building and a roomful of the city’s cultural and philanthropic community, and I was moving through all of it with the ease of a woman who had found the thing she was supposed to be doing and was doing it.
I was also, if I was honest, slightly distracted by the table near the Matisse collection.
They were impossible to miss. They always were, this group of people had a way of making any room they were in arrange itself around them, not through effort or performance but simply through the force of being entirely, unapologetically themselves. Erik and Raia were near the bar, his hand at the small of her back, both of them talking to a foundation board member who looked slightly dazzled by the combined effect. Gabriel and Rose stood near the Cézannes, which I had privately arranged knowing Gabriel would gravitate there and that he would have correct opinions about them. Colin and Lincoln had Zara between them, the three of them so comfortable in their own shape that everyone else moved around them without thinking about it.
Noah was doing something near the canapé table that I couldn’t fully see but which had caused Shelby to make a face of profound affectionate suffering, which meant it was either embarrassing or about to be.
And Dottie.
Dottie had arrived forty minutes ago in a gold dress that had immediately made her the second most photographed person in the room after the exhibition itself, which was correct. Beside her was a man I had not met, tall, quiet, observant in the watchful way of someone who worked with their attention, and she had introduced him as Marcus with the casualness of a woman who was not at all casual about him. I had made a note to ask her everything later.
She caught my eye across the room and beamed with the radiance of a woman who was happy in multiple directions simultaneously, and I smiled back and felt the simple happiness of it settle beside everything else that felt good about tonight.
This is mine.
The thought came simply, without fanfare. The hall and the exhibition and the program with my name on it and the people from my life standing in the rooms of my career, all of it present at once, all of it real, all of it mine in the way that things were yours when you had reached for them yourself rather than been handed them with conditions attached.
