Chapter 5 — Hello, Josie-bug

The dress was ice-blue and it fit her.

That was the part she had not expected. Not the price of it, not the car, not the photographers folded up along the steps like birds on a wire. The fit. Somebody had taken her real measurements from somewhere and had not rounded them off to her sister's.

"Stop pulling at it," Julian said in the car.

"It's too—"

"It isn't." He didn't look up from his phone. "You look like the most expensive thing in the building. Try to enjoy the next four hours, because none of them will."

Then the door opened, and the light came at her in white bars, and his hand arrived at the small of her back.

She was ready for a lot of things that night.

She was not ready for how steady that hand was.

Four hundred people, and Josie could feel every one of them deciding what she was.

She got nine minutes of peace. Then a waiter carried a microphone to the low stage, and Regina Sterling took it, and the room turned like water going down a drain.

Regina was wonderful at this. That had to be admitted. She stood in gray silk with her chin at exactly the right angle and spoke to four hundred people as if to one, and every mouth in the room stayed on her, which meant Josie could read her perfectly, which — Josie understood about eleven seconds too late — was entirely the point.

"—and of course we must welcome the newest member of our family," Regina said. "My stepson's bride. Everyone has been so curious."

A wave of heads turned.

"Josephine, darling. Come and give us a few words."

There it is.

Josie did not move. Beside her, she felt rather than saw Julian go very still.

Four hundred people. No notes, no warning, no interpreter, and a microphone — the one object on earth engineered to be useless to her.

"Oh—" Regina put her fingers to her lips, delighted, warm as honey. "Of course. Forgive me. She won't hear the applause anyway."

The laugh went through the floor.

That was how Josie received it. Not sound — pressure. Four hundred bodies rocking forward at once and the boards taking it and passing it up through the soles of her feet into her knees, into her stomach, into her teeth.

They had laughed at her at fourteen. They had laughed at her at nineteen. She had built a whole life out of the four seconds after a laugh.

Josie walked up onto the stage.

She took the microphone out of Regina's hand.

And she turned and put her back to the room, which made four hundred people go strange and quiet, and then she turned around again, slowly, so that she was facing all of them, and she began.

"I'm told there's a guest list," she said.

Her voice was flat. It was always flat. Tonight it sounded like a knife going down on a table.

"Here's tonight's. Mr. and Mrs. Ferris, table four. They pledged four hundred thousand. Mr. Okoye, table nine — six hundred, and he's decided against the naming rights, he told his wife so during the soup. The gentleman in the blue jacket at table eleven pledged two million about an hour ago, which I know because he said it twice, to two different women, and got a different number the second time."

The room had stopped moving.

"Table two hasn't pledged anything and is going to say so at the end of the night to avoid being asked twice. Table six is leaving early because there's a flight. And the lady in gray—" she looked at Regina, and did not look away, "—told the man beside her at seven-fifteen exactly how much she expected this evening to embarrass me."

She set the microphone down.

"You should all be more careful about what you say at bars."

A beat.

"I've been reading this room since seven o'clock."

Nobody moved. Four hundred people sat in a silence Josie could see — stopped faces, stopped hands, a woman with an olive halfway to her mouth.

Then, from the very back of the ballroom, one man began to clap.

She felt it before she found him. Two beats, three, four, alone in all that stillness — and then the room broke, and the noise came up through the boards like a tide, and Josie stood in the light and watched her husband applaud her from forty feet away with his eyes fixed on her face.

She got to the mezzanine before her legs gave out.

She put both hands on the brass rail and breathed. Below, the party had swallowed the moment already and moved on, the way parties do.

Through the glass on the far side of the landing, two floors of the hotel's business center were lit up cold and blue and empty.

Except they weren't.

Crawford Vale was standing at a terminal with the gray-suit man beside him.

Josie went absolutely still.

He was side-on to her. Forty feet, maybe fifty, through two panes. Bad angle, bad light, silver moustache blurring the shape of the words.

She got fragments.

"—before midnight—"

"—Meridian—"

"—and the second card, tonight, it has to be tonight—"

The gray suit said something. Crawford shook his head and answered, and she caught four words whole and clean:

"He's been dead six years."

Then they walked out the far door, and the lights in the business center stayed on.

Josie was down the stairs and through that door in ninety seconds.

The terminal was still awake. Somebody had been careless — men like Crawford Vale had been careless their entire lives and had never once been punished for it, because who was going to catch them?

There was a document open on the screen, waiting for a second signature.

She did not read the numbers. Later, she would not be able to tell anyone the numbers. She read the bottom of the page, where the second signature was, because the name under it had thirteen letters and she had been staring at those thirteen letters on a gravestone for six years.

THOMAS J. ROURKE

The signature was there. Small, slanted, the hook on the g.

And beside it, a date.

Josie's mouth went dry. She counted it backwards twice, because her hands had started shaking and she did not trust herself.

Eight months.

The signature was dated eight months after they buried him.

The lights went out.

The whole floor, all at once — and Josie stood in the dark with the screen glowing on her face and every hair on her arms standing up, because for a person like her, darkness was not romantic. Darkness was total. Darkness meant she could not hear and could not see and had nothing left at all.

Hands took her.

She swung at them, hard, and the hands caught her wrist and folded it down and an arm came around her waist and pulled her backwards off her feet, fast, behind the pillar by the glass — and she smelled him and stopped fighting.

Julian.

He put his body between her and the screen and shut it down with one hand behind his back without looking.

Through the pillar she felt it: footsteps coming up the mezzanine stairs. Two people. Heavy.

Julian's mouth came down to her ear, which was useless, and then he seemed to remember, and pulled back, and in the last of the light from the ballroom below she read three words off him:

"Don't. Move. Newlyweds."

And he kissed her.

She understood exactly what it was. It was staging. It was a man building a story for whoever came around that corner — the new husband and his new wife, drunk, stupid, indiscreet, nothing to see.

It did not help.

She was pinned between cold glass and a man's chest, and she could not hear one single thing — not his breath, not her own, not the party, not the footsteps — and so the whole world came in through her skin instead. His hand spread open on her back. His jaw. His heart going hard and fast under her palm, much faster than a man staging anything.

Her whole body betrayed her at once.

And over his shoulder, in the mirrored elevator doors across the mezzanine, she saw a man step out of the dark.

He stopped.

He looked directly at her — not at Julian, not at the pillar, at her, straight down the reflection, the way somebody looks who has been watching for a long time and has finally decided to be seen.

And he turned his face into the light so she could read it. Deliberately. Carefully. Every word shaped slow and wide and unmistakable, the way you shape words for someone you taught to read them.

"Hello, Josie-bug."

Nobody had called her that in fourteen years.

Nobody alive.