Chapter Seventy-Six: An Honest Conversation

He arrived at seven exactly, and he was carrying a lamp.

It was an ugly lamp. Ivy would have said so to anyone who asked. A heavy brass base gone green at the joints, a shade the color of weak tea, a cord wrapped around it in careful loops. He stood on her landing holding it against his chest with both arms, the way he had once held two plates in a dish towel, and looked at her with the cautious dignity of a man presenting a diplomatic gift.

"It was in my father's office," he said. "I read that bringing nothing is rude and bringing wine is presumptuous. I have a lamp. It is the ugliest object I own. May I bring it in?"

"Ask me properly."

"Ivy," said Damien gravely. "May I bring the lamp in?"

She laughed so hard she had to hold the doorframe, and let him in, and set it on the corner of the drafting table, where it cast a warm, hideous, perfectly adequate light across the pencils. It was, she decided immediately, the best thing in the room.

---

She had cooked, on a two burner stove with a pan that had come with the lease. Chicken and rice, the way her mother made it, with too much garlic and a lime cut into quarters. She served it on her mother's plates.

She watched him take his. He held it with both hands, level, as though it were full to the brim with something that might spill, and carried it to the crate she had set as a chair, and sat. He did not say a word about it. He only ate slowly, with his head a little bowed, and she understood that he knew exactly what he was holding.

"This is good," he said, after a while.

"It's not."

"It's very good. I have eaten at restaurants with stars that would be ashamed." He set down his fork. "Ivy. May I say something before we begin? I've been rehearsing it, and it is going to sound like a speech, and I would like permission."

"You have it."

"I'd like us to do something we've never done," Damien said. "Say plainly what we want. Not what's needed, not what the situation requires. What we actually want. Out loud, at this table, with nothing on fire." He looked at his hands. "Nobody has asked me that since I was nine, and I have almost no practice."

"All right," said Ivy. "I'll go first."

---

She had not planned it. She spoke slowly, looking at the lamp.

"I want my own work," she said. "Not a job at your company, not a consulting role, not something with your name on a letterhead. I want a name on a door that's mine, even if it's a very small door. I want to stay in this neighborhood for a while. I like the bread and the window and the person who hammers on the pipe at six. I want to know what it's like to live somewhere I chose."

He was listening with the whole of his face.

"I want to be loved without being a solution," she went on, and her voice caught. "Do you understand? For six months I was the person who fixed things. The drainage, the files, the archive. I was very good at it and I don't regret it. But I don't want to be wanted because I'm useful. I want to be wanted on the days I have nothing to offer."

"Ivy."

"And I want to learn how to let someone help me," she said, "without it feeling like a rescue. That's the one I'm worst at." She drew a breath. "That's what I want. The rest is just fear."

"Tell me the fear."

"That I'll disappear again," Ivy said. "Into your life. That I'll wake up in a year and I'll know your coffee order and your board schedule and your mother's brand of cruelty, and I won't remember what I wanted to build."

---

He sat very still for a moment. Then he nodded, once, slowly, as if she had read out the terms of an agreement he found entirely fair.

"My turn," he said.

He turned his plate a quarter turn on his knee.

"I want to keep the company," Damien said. "I thought I wouldn't. For about a day, after the vote, I thought the honest thing was to walk away from all of it. I don't think so now. I think the honest thing is to stay, and run it the way it should have been run, and be someone people can look at when it goes wrong." He paused. "I also want Sundays. My father told me once not to let the business eat the part of me that could enjoy one. I haven't had a Sunday since he died. I want a hundred."

She smiled, faintly, and said nothing.

"I want you," he said. "I've said that. I'll say it again whenever you need it. But I want to say what comes with it. I don't want to propose, Ivy. Not for a long time. Not in a year, perhaps, and not because of a deadline or a vote or a board. I want to wait until it can't possibly be a clause." He met her eyes. "And I'd like you to be the one who tells me when the time is right, if it is."

She could not speak for a moment.

"And the fear," she said, at last.

"That I'll become her." It came out flat, without ornament. "That I'll start solving you. That one morning I'll hear myself arrange your life in my mother's voice, very kindly, for your own good, and I won't notice until it's too late."

---

They sat with that between them.

Outside, a bus groaned at the corner. Somewhere below, the bakery's metal shutters rattled down for the night.

"I'd like to make some rules," Ivy said.

"I'm very good at rules."

"Not that kind." She smiled, a little crookedly. "Things we say out loud. Not paper. No lawyers, no clauses." She counted on her fingers. "One. You ask. You don't arrange. If you catch yourself arranging, you say so."

"Agreed."

"Two. If I go quiet, ask me twice. I'll say I'm fine the first time, and I'll be lying."

"Twice," he said, and she watched him commit it to memory the way he would a covenant schedule.

"Three." She thought. "If you start solving me, I'll say, you're solving me. And you stop. Immediately. No defense."

A slow, startled smile broke over his face, the whole of it, creased and boyish and astonished.

"You're solving me," Damien said, trying it out. "It's a very good phrase. It has terrible implications for my entire personality."

"Good," said Ivy, and found that she was crying a little, laughing at the same time. "That's the point."

---

They washed the plates together, at the small stained sink, in water that took a long time to run warm. He dried them with exaggerated care, holding each one up to the lamp as though checking it for flaws.

"The judge filed on Friday," he said, quietly. "Foster published it in full, as I promised. It names my mother. It names Lyle, and Delaney, and Pearson. It names me, for six years of never asking a single question about where the money came from." He set down a plate. "Marcus resigned the same day. The shares transfer over twelve months."

"And Eleanor?"

"Voss sent a single line," said Damien. "She acknowledges receipt." He rubbed his thumb along the rim of a plate. "I don't know what to do about her. I won't pretend I do."

"I don't forgive her," Ivy said. "I want to say that. I may never. But I don't want that to decide whether you see her."

"I haven't decided."

"When you do, tell me. Don't ask permission. Just tell me."

"I will."

She dried her hands. She looked at him, standing in her kitchen under an ugly lamp with a towel over his shoulder, a man who had once arranged her life in thirty one pages, and she felt a warmth go through her that had nothing to do with the stove.

"Is this a date?" she said.

"I believe we skipped several," said Damien. "I'd like to go back. Properly. Dinner somewhere with chairs." He hesitated. "Thursday?"

"Tuesday and Thursday," said Ivy. "For a while. No contract."

"Tuesday and Thursday," he agreed, and held out his hand, solemnly, to shake on it, and she took it, and neither of them let go for a very long time.