Page 44

"Yeah. Well, of the parent company."

My mother looks at the tower. Then at me. Then she laughs so hard the machines beep at her. Danny stands there, looking back and forth between me and my mom, like a man who isn't sure whether he's passed or failed.

He's passed. I watch her decide somewhere around the forty-minute mark, when she asks what he's reading and he says Persuasion, third time through, and she looks at me with her eyebrows up. Done deal.

Then his hand finds my knee, and he says, "There's something I'd like to discuss. With both of you."

"Patricia. Your balance with this hospital is eighty-seven thousand dollars. I'd like to pay it, and all your bills going forward. I learned a lesson recently, at cost, that I shouldn’t do things without asking. So, I'm asking. You each get a vote, and if either vote is no, the subject is closed."

The room goes quiet. Everything in me lines up to say no. Three years of carrying it — the math, the bold-print letters, the weight that's been on my back so long it's shaped my posture. Putting it down feels like —

Like dying. That's what Mom said, and she was right. Letting someone help feels like dying.

She's already looking at me. She doesn't say a word. Just does the mom thing with her face — I know exactly what's happening inside you, and I'll wait.

His hand turns over on my knee. Palm up. An offer. "There's no argument, Anna. Just the question. Can I hold this one thing?"

I put my hand in his.

"Okay." It comes out small. It costs more than any word I've ever said, and it's worth more too.

Mom exhales like she's been holding her breath for three years. "Thank God. Now open a red Jell-O. We're celebrating."

Danny smiles and kisses my head, and suddenly, I’m not sure how I got this lucky.

Thing two happens at the club that night.

Sunday Whiskey — except I'm not serving it. I'm walking to the Founder's Table on Danny's arm in a green dress. Past Theo, who gives me a nod that's basically a parade. Past Matteo, who's polishing a glass that's been clean for ten minutes.

"There she is," Jagger says, smiling. "Look at the wall."

"What?"

"The wall, Anna."

The decanters glow in their row — Jagger's, Caleb's, Elliot's, the S of Danny's. And at the end of the row, where a new decanter should be, there's no decanter at all.

There's a shelf. Small, brass-edged, glass-fronted, lit from above like the locked cases where they keep the hundred-year-old bottles.

Inside it, standing upright, is a book.

My book. My copy of Persuasion — the destroyed one, the spine held together by hope, the cover soft as cloth from fifteen readings, the one that's been missing from my bag since Thursday, which I'd torn the apartment apart looking for, which I'd grieved.

"You stole my book."

"I borrowed your book," Danny says. "For installation purposes."

"I thought I left it on the train! I mourned, Danny. I had a whole thing, Matteo can confirm, there was a eulogy!"

"There was," Matteo says, appearing with champagne. His eyes are glassier than the case. "It was beautiful. I'm not crying, there's citrus oil in the air."

"There's no citrus oil," says Caleb.

"There's ambient citrus."

"The wall is for what sustains us," Danny says, quiet, just to me, while the table argues about garnish humidity. "Whiskey, for the rest of us. We put up what we pour when we need to remember who we are." He looks at the case. At the ruined paperback standing in the light between four thousand dollars of crystal like it has every right to be there. "That's yours. It was never going to be a decanter."

Under the shelf there's a small brass plate. ANNA CHESTER.