Neutral Ground

CHAPTER EIGHT

Adrian — Third Person

He arrived twenty minutes early.

This was not like him, Adrian Ashford was a man who arrived precisely on time not early,which suggested eagerness,and not late,which suggested disrespect,directly on time which suggested control,he had operated on this principle for so many years.

                And yet here he was,twenty minutes early,sitting at a corner table on the rooftop of a restaurant that neither of his family members had ever set foot in, in a part of the city that existed at a comfortable distance from every social circle that might recognise either of their faces.

He had chosen this place carefully.

The rooftop was quiet at his hour, a monday evening, the sky moving from gold to a deep bruised blue at the edges,the city spread below in a way that reminded him, with a precision that was almost uncomfortable,like the Whitmore Gala.

He only ordered water,he did not look at his phone,he had deliberately stopped looking at his phone for the past three hours,just to avoid messages from Lydia.

At seven minutes past the hour they agreed on,he heard footsteps on the rooftop stairs.

He already knew it was her before even looking back.

She came through the door with the particular quality of someone who has been steeling themselves for something and has decided that the best approach is forward headway,with eyes already scanning the room with the quick,documenting intelligent he had noticed at the gala.

                                     She was wearing something dark and simple and she had her hair down in a way that people won't easily recognise her.

              

          She found him in approximately two seconds and crossed directly to the table without hesitating.

She sat across from him and looked at him and said,without introduction:

“How did you find my number?”

He had expected this question, he had prepared for this, he had a perfectly adequate answer ready. 

“I have a contact who handles certain kinds of information retrieval,”he said.

“That is a very clean way of saying you had me looked into.” Elena said.

I had your number found, that is considerably less than having you looked into,Adrain continued.

She considered it, her eyes were very direct,  the kind of direct that made most people want to look away first.

“Why,”she asked.

“Because I needed to know if you were alright”,he said it evenly without any form of decoration, “and because I wasn’t done talking to you.”

Something moved across her face, not softening,exactly more like the recognition of something she had been expecting but had not quite believed would be said plainly.

She picked up the menu,looked at it,which gave Adrian the impression she was not exactly reading it.

“My father sat me down yesterday morning,"Elena said without looking up. He had a very long duration of our conversation, the fact that you approached me.

“Mine as well.”

“What did you tell him,”Elena asked.

That it was a conversation at the  party, that it was nothing.

She looked up and responded, ‘so did I.’

They looked at each other across the table.  The acknowledgement settled between them that they had both in their respective homes, told their fathers the same lie.

The waiter came,they ordered without looking at each other, the brief and domestic interruption of two people who are in the middle of something and have to pause for the ordinary business of the world. Then after the waiter left, Elena looked at Adrian with eyes full of questions.

‘I want to ask you something,’she said, ‘And I want you to answer me honestly even if the honest answer is complicated.’

“All right, go on,”adrain replied.

‘Your family version of what happened with my grandfather’s partnership, tell me.’

He had known this was coming, he had thought about how to answer it, which version to give,how much of the complicated truth to offer and how much to hold back. He had rehearsed something measured and careful and strategically incomplete.

He looked at her and threw the rehearsal away.

‘My father dissolved the partnership,’he said. The version I was raised on is that your grandfather had been mismanaging the shared accounts for two years before my father discovered it. That the dissolution was damage control rather than betrayal.’

Elena's expression did not change. Then she asked “And do you believe the version?”

He considered the question with the seriousness it deserved. “I believe my father believes that I am less certain about the complete truth.”

“Why?”

“Because I have spent several years looking at our family’s financial history and there are gaps,documents that should exist and accounts that were closed in ways that left no clear record.which means the absence of them is not an accident.”

She was quiet,he watched her process it,the way her eyes went slightly inward, the way her hand turned her water glass once,slowly on the table.

He found it extraordinary.

Most people, when given information that disrupted their established narrative, either reject it immediately or accepted it. Elena appeared to be doing something more difficult,holding it alongside with what she already knew and examining the space between them.

‘My father's version’,she finally said,has no mismanagement in it. My grandfather was the wronged party,full stop,no reason, no gaps.

‘Stories without reason usually have somewhere they’re hiding it’,Adrian said.‘

She looked at him sharply. Then,after a pause,something that was almost a reluctant acknowledgement crossed her face “yes”,she said, ‘they do.’

They ate,the conversation moved carefully at first,then less , she asked questions that were precise and specific and that told him she had been thinking about this for longer than just this week. He answered honestly,which was not something he often did  in conversations about his family,and found that honesty had a quality of relief he had not anticipated.

She told him at one point,about her grandfather, not the betrayal side, just what he had been like. The way he laughed,the workshop he had kept in the basement of the family home,full of things he was meaning to repair.

Adrain listened without interrupting. A thing he was not always good at.

The sky had gone fully dark by the time the plates were cleared. The city below them was lit and moving,indifferent ways  and beautiful,the same city they had looked at from the Whitmore windows expect that now they were sitting across from each other rather than standing side by side.

“There is something I haven’t told you,” he said.

“My father has had someone watching you. Not since the gala,before. He has someone watching your family for some time. I don’t know the full extent of it, but I know it exists and I should have told you before now.”

The silence that followed was a specific kind. Not the silence of someone who was surprised,bit the silence of someone who had suspected something and was now processing the confirmation.

“How long?”she said.

“I don’t know,months at least.

She nodded,once,slowly. Her hand on the table was completely still.

“Thank you for telling me,”she said. Which was not the response he had expected,and which told him something about her that he stored carefully.

He reached for his water glass,then stopped.

“What are you thinking about,”he asked. Which was also something he usually rearly asked.

She looked at him. In the low light of the rooftop her eyes were very dark and very steady which looked like what was carrying something he could not entirely read. “I'm thinking about what my father told me yesterday to stay completely away from you,”she said slowly.

“Mine said the same,” adrain said with a voice full of guilt.

The city moved below them, a breeze came across the rooftop, warm and carrying the particular smell of an evening in summer.

— ✦ —

Then Adrain said, “what if the story you were told is missing half the truth?”

“Then I would want to hear the other half,”she replied.

The words were out before she could stop them. He watched her register it, watched her almost trying to pull them back.

But she didn't.

Adrian looked at her across the table, this was the woman he was told his entire life was the enemy, who had told her own father she wanted nothing to do with him, who had come anyway,who had asked for honesty and received it and also gave it back, he felt something settle in him that had not been settled in a very long time.  

This was going to be complicated. He thought to himself.

Then he said, 

“Then I think you should probably know everything.”

She looked at him steadily and replied ‘I think so too.’

Neither of them moved.the evening held them up where they were.

And somewhere across the city, in two separate houses, two fathers believed they had been obeyed.