Consider Us Even

Jade

I was two steps past him when his hand closed around my wrist.

Not violently. But completely. His fingers wrapped around me from behind, and I stopped walking because the alternative was pulling against his grip and I was not going to do that in a hallway in a house full of people ten feet away.

I stood still.

“Let go,” I said. My voice came out level and quiet, and I was grateful for that.

He said nothing.

I waited. Five seconds. Ten. The sounds from the deck were muffled through the walls, glasses, and voices, and Leo said something that made people laugh. A completely ordinary dinner party happening in a completely different world from this hallway.

His grip did not change.

I turned around.

He was closer than I had calibrated for, and the hallway was narrow enough that turning to face him put us at a distance that had no professional justification. I looked up at him and found his eyes already on my face, dark and flat and carrying something in them that I did not have a clean name for.

I kept my voice at the same level. “What do you want?”

He said nothing. He looked at me the way you look at a problem you are deciding how to handle: without heat, without hurry, with the particular patience of someone who already knew how this was going to go.

I had run out of things I was willing to say, so I waited again.

His jaw tightened.

“I told you not to come looking for me,” he said. His voice was low enough that it did not carry past the two of us. “Three years ago. I was very clear.”

Something moved through me that was not quite anger and not quite grief and lived somewhere between the two in the part of me that had been holding three years of things I was never going to say out loud.

I kept my face still.

“I’m not looking for you,” I said. “I’m walking back to dinner.”

“You’ve been in every room I’ve been in for two weeks.”

“You’ve been in every room I’ve been in,” I said back. “I was in those rooms first.”

His eyes did something I had not expected. Something shifted in them, fast and dark, like I had said something that landed somewhere he had not anticipated. His grip on my wrist adjusted. Tighter for half a second and then steady.

I held his gaze, and I did not flinch because I had flinched in front of him once, and I had promised myself in a bathroom three years ago that it was the last time.

“If there’s something you want to say to me,” I said, “then say it. Otherwise, I’d like to get back to dinner.”

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then something happened in his expression that I can only describe as a door opening that should have stayed closed. The composure shifted. Not much. But enough that I saw what was underneath it, and what was underneath it was something cold and sharp and aimed directly at me.

“You want me to say something?” His voice had not risen. It was still low, still even, still the voice of a man who had complete control of every room he was ever in. “Fine. Thank you.”

I stared at him. “What?”

“For the corridor,” he said. “Three years ago. You walked away clean. No lawyers, no press, and no follow-up of any kind for three years.” He looked at me without a trace of irony or warmth. “Most people aren’t that contained. It made things simple. So. Thank you for that.”

The hallway was very quiet.

I stood in it, and I let his words arrange themselves into their full meaning, and I felt every single one of them land in the place they were designed to land.

He was thanking me.

He was standing in a hallway in Montauk three years after offering me money to disappear, and he was thanking me for disappearing. For being clean about it. For making things simple for him by taking nothing and asking for nothing and walking away so completely that he had been able to file the entire thing away without consequence.

He had no idea.

He had absolutely no idea what walking away clean had actually cost me. What I had carried out of that corridor and continued to carry every single day for three years. He was standing here looking at me like I had done him a professional courtesy by managing my own devastation efficiently, and he was grateful for it.

I looked at his face.

I kept everything I felt completely off of mine.

“You’re welcome,” I said.

He blinked. A small thing. The only crack.

“And since we’re being honest,” I said, my voice still quiet and even and costing me more than he would ever know, “I’ll save you the trouble of saying the rest of it. I know you’d prefer I wasn’t in rooms you’re in. I understand the feeling completely. But I’m not going to arrange my life around your comfort, and I’d appreciate it if you extended me the same courtesy.”

I looked down at his hand on my wrist.

He followed my gaze.

He let go.

I stepped back and straightened my dress with one hand and looked at him one final time with the expression I had spent three years perfecting, the one that showed him absolutely nothing.

“Enjoy the rest of your evening,” I said.

I turned and walked back toward the deck.

I made it four steps before my phone rang in my pocket. The sound of it broke the silence of the hallway, and I pulled it out and kept walking and answered without looking at the screen.

It was Brooke. “You’ve been gone forever. Are you okay?”

“Coming now,” I said.

I slid the phone back into my pocket and walked out onto the deck and into the noise of the dinner party, and I found my seat and sat down and picked up my wine glass, and I did not let a single thing show on my face for the rest of the night.

But my hand was not completely steady on the glass. And I did not put it down until it stopped.