เข้าสู่ระบบAnastasia’s POV:He called me that same evening.I was in the kitchen when my phone rang and I saw his name and I answered before the second ring because I had been waiting for it since Harlan left and I knew what the call was going to be about before he said a word.He did not say anything immediately.I waited.“Did you read yours?” he said finally.“Yes,” I said.Another pause.“He knew,” Marcus said. “Things about me that I did not know he knew. Things I thought I had hidden.”“What things?” I said.“The temper,” he said. “He wrote about my temper. He said he watched me fight it my whole childhood and he said.” He stopped. “He said he was proud of me for fighting it. Not for winning. Just for fighting.”I held my phone.“He saw it,” Marcus said. “I spent years thinking he did not see it and he saw everything.”“He always did,” I said.“I know that now,” he said. “I’m just.” He stopped again. “I’m angry that he’s not here. I thought I was done being angry about it and then Harlan p
Anastasia’s POV:Harlan called and asked if he could come for coffee.Not dinner. Not a meeting with documents. Just coffee, he said, and his voice had something in it that was different from every other time he had called, quieter, the particular quiet of someone who had been carrying something for a long time and had decided the time had come to put it down.He came on a weekday when the children were at school and the house was quiet and I made coffee and we sat at the kitchen table and he looked at the kitchen the way people looked at rooms that told them something about the people who lived in them.“You have built a good life,” he said.“Yes,” I said.“Your father would have liked this kitchen,” he said. “He was a man who appreciated a kitchen that worked properly.”“You knew him well,” I said.“Well enough,” he said. “The way you knew someone when you were building something dangerous together. You learned who people were very quickly in those circumstances.”I held my coffee.
Anastasia’s POV:Lucas turned forty and did not want a fuss.He said this clearly and without ambiguity on three separate occasions in the two weeks before and I listened to him say it and I nodded and I said okay and then I called Simone.“He said no fuss,” I said.“I heard,” she said.“So,” I said.“Small fuss,” she said. “Contained fuss. Fuss with boundaries.”“That’s still fuss,” I said.“Everything is fuss if you look at it the right way,” she said. “The question is what kind.”We planned something small.Not a party. Not a room full of people. Just dinner at the house with the people who mattered, the kind of evening that arrived without announcing itself as a significant occasion even though it was.Lucas came home on the evening of his birthday and walked into the kitchen and stopped.Simone and Dean were there with Eve who was in her carrier on the kitchen counter looking at everything. Marcus and Elena. Victoria who had driven twelve minutes from her new house, which she had
Anastasia’s POV:Zoe’s party was exactly what Zoe had planned.Which meant it was exactly right.The community center room had been arranged differently from how it had been for the day, the chairs in clusters rather than rows, small tables with things on them that people could pick up and look at and put down, and the photograph wall in the entrance had new additions that nobody had told me about and I stopped in front of it when we arrived and stood there for a moment.There were photographs I had not seen.One of me in the studio from behind, at my desk, the sketch notebook open, taken by someone who had been standing in the doorway. I did not know when it had been taken or who had taken it but the light in it was exactly right and I looked at it for a long time.One of Lucas and Noah in the garden, both crouched over something in the soil, heads together, the same angle.One of Zoe and Victoria at the table in Victoria’s northern sitting room, the afternoon Zoe had gone with me to
Anastasia’s POV:Sandra Ellison called to fire me.She did it politely, in the particular way of people who had decided something and wanted to seem reasonable about it, and she said she had been thinking about the direction of the project and she felt it was time to take it somewhere else and she appreciated everything I had done so far.I listened.I said I understood.I hung up and sat at my desk for a moment.Then I called her back.She answered on the third ring with surprise in her voice because people who fired you did not expect you to call back immediately.“I would like fifteen minutes,” I said. “Before you make the final decision. Not to argue. Just to show you something.”A pause.“Okay. Fifteen minutes,” she said.I went to her.She lived in a building on the west side that had been renovated in the nineties and never touched since and her apartment was full of expensive things that did not talk to each other and a view of the city that she had clearly paid significantly
Anastasia’s POV:Victoria called me on a Wednesday and said she was thinking of selling the northern house.I sat very still with the phone against my ear and did not say anything for a moment because the northern house was the last place that was entirely hers and she had refused to leave it for thirty years and this was not a small thing.“When did you decide?” I said.“I’ve been thinking about it for a while,” she said. “Since Edmund’s things. Since the boxes.”“What changed?” I said.She was quiet for a moment.“I realized I was keeping it for him,” she said. “Not for me. I was keeping it because it was the last place that had him in it and I was afraid that if I left, I would be leaving him.”“And now?” I said.“Now I understand that I’m not going to leave him anywhere,” she said. “He comes with me. He has been coming with me for thirty years and I did not understand that until recently.”I thought about Edmund’s wedding ring on the shelf in the Linden Street study. The photograp
Anastasia’s POV:“You have paint on your face.”I looked up from the mood board spread across my desk and found Celeste Dupont standing in my office doorway in a cream blazer and reading glasses pushed up on her head, looking at me the way she looked at everything, like she had already figured it o
Anastasia’s POV:“If you tell her about this meeting I will make sure you never work in this city again. Do you understand me?”I stood completely still in the entrance of my own home with my keys still in my hand and my heart doing something complicated inside my chest.That was my husband’s voice
Anastasia’s POV: The service stairs smelled like cleaning products and old carpet and the particular staleness of a space that existed only to be functional and had never been asked to be anything else. Elena went first with the fireproof box under one arm and her laptop bag over the other shoulde
Anastasia’s POV:I read the folder in my car.I did not go home first. I did not call Simone. I sat in the Salvatore Enterprises parking structure on level two with the engine off and the overhead light on and I read every single page while Adrian Cole sat in the passenger seat beside me and said n







