Chapter 13

CHAPTER THIRTEEN : The Day Before

~Zella's POV~

I had barely put my coffee down, the same one Evander had made, still warm, which I was not going to read anything into before Brynn started moving.

Drawers opening. Music turning on. The unmistakable sound of someone committing to being awake whether they felt like it or not.

I sat on the edge of my bed for a moment longer than necessary, staring at nothing in particular and thinking about the fact that I had already had one conversation this morning that I didn't know what to do with. Two days. I exhaled, stood up, and went back to the kitchen for a refill because if today was going to be whatever it was going to be I was going to need more than one cup.

“Get dressed,” she said, pointing at me with a piece of toast. “We’re going shopping.”

"It's eight thirty."

"The shops open at nine."

"Brynn."

"New Year's Eve is tomorrow and I refuse to wear something I already own. Get dressed."

"I have things I already own."

"Yes and I've seen them and we're going shopping."

I stare at the celling

---

"Want to refill? Coffee's there," he said.

"Thank you." I picked up the mug. It was already the right temperature which meant he had timed it and I was going to absolutely not think about that. "Are you coming shopping?"

"Apparently."

"Dad said yes without even arguing," Brynn said from somewhere behind me, appearing with a piece of toast. "Which means either he's in a good mood or he's given up on having opinions. Either way, we win."

"I have opinions," Evander said.

"Name one."

"We should leave before ten to avoid the crowds."

"That's a logistic, not an opinion." She pointed her toast at him. "Try again."

"That toast is going to leave crumbs on my floor."

"There it is." She took an enormous bite and walked out of the kitchen. "Ten minutes, both of you. I'm timing it."

Evander looked at me.

I looked at my coffee.

We said nothing.

It was fine.

---

The shop Brynn chose was the kind of place that had one dress in each size and soft lighting and no visible price tags, which Brynn navigated like she had been born in it and I navigated like someone who was very aware of the no visible price tags situation.

Brynn went immediately to a rack and started pulling things out with the focus of a professional. Evander stood slightly to the side with his hands in his jacket pockets looking like he was waiting for a meeting to start. I stood near a rail and looked at things and tried to look like I was looking at things rather than being intensely aware of where everyone in the room was standing.

"Zella." Brynn held something up. "This one."

It was green. Dark green, the kind that was almost black in certain lights, with a neckline that was — present. Definitely present.

"That's a lot of dress," I said.

"It's not a lot of dress, it's the right amount of dress. Try it on."

"I don't need..."

"Try it on, Zella, I'm not asking." She pushed it into my hands and steered me toward the changing rooms with the efficiency of someone who had made this decision before I had arrived. "Go."

I went.

---

The dress was, objectively, a very good dress. I stood in the changing room and looked at myself and had complicated feelings about it.

I came out.

Brynn was still at the rail. She turned around and made a sound that was not words but communicated everything. "Yes. That one. Done. We're getting that one."

"It's very..."

"Perfect, yes, I know." She turned back to the rail. "Dad, tell her."

I looked at Evander.

He was already looking at me.

He looked at the dress the way he looked at most things without obvious reaction, without rushing, just taking it in with that steadiness that I had come to understand was not indifference but its opposite. Then he looked at my face.

"She doesn't need me to tell her anything," he said. "She already knows."

Brynn pointed at him without turning around. "Correct answer."

My face did the thing.

I went back into the changing room.

---

Brynn spent forty-five minutes trying on things and coming out to ask our opinion on each one and going back in and trying something else, which was completely normal Brynn behaviour and also meant that Evander and I were sitting on the small sofa outside the changing rooms for an extended period with approximately eighteen inches between us and nothing requiring our immediate attention.

"You're quiet," he said.

"I'm always quiet."

"You're quieter than your quiet."

I looked at the changing room curtain. "I'm fine."

"I didn't ask if you were fine."

"You implied it."

"I said you were quiet. That's an observation not a question."

I looked at him. He looked back with the expression that meant he was approximately one sentence away from saying something that would make the eighteen inches feel like considerably less.

Brynn burst through the curtain in something gold. "Right. Honestly. Be honest."

"Beautiful," I said immediately.

"Too much?" she asked her father.

"For what occasion?"

"New Year's Eve dinner."

"Then no."

She looked at herself in the mirror. "I think yes. I think it's too much." She went back in. The curtain closed.

Evander looked at me.

"You should get the green one," he said. Quietly. Just for me.

I pressed my lips together and looked at the curtain.

"We have an agreement," I said. Also quietly.

"I'm aware. I'm talking about a dress."

"You're not talking about a dress."

A pause.

"No," he said. "I'm not."

The curtain opened again. Brynn in something black this time. "This one."

"Yes," we both said, at exactly the same time.

She looked between us. "Okay weird but I'll take it." She went back in.

---

By afternoon Brynn's phone had buzzed eleven times. I knew because I was sitting next to her at lunch and I could see the screen lighting up and I could see her turning it face down each time with increasing casualness that was not casual at all.

Evander was looking at the menu.

On the fifth buzz Brynn said "excuse me" and went outside and I watched her through the window, her back to us, one hand pressed to her ear, nodding at something.

Evander watched her too. "Is she alright?"

"She's fine." I picked up my water. "Friend stuff."

"Which friend?"

I looked at him. He looked at me. We both knew we were in a conversation with a subtext neither of us could acknowledge directly.

"Just a friend," I said.

He held my gaze for a moment. Then looked back at the menu.

Brynn came back in and sat down and picked up her menu and said "sorry, what are we eating" with the brightness of someone who had made a decision and closed a door behind her.

"Everything okay?" I asked.

"Completely fine." She smiled at me with her eyes saying 'talk later.' "Now. I'm thinking steak. Dad, are you getting steak?"

"I wasn't."

"Get the steak, it's Paris, you should get the steak."

"I'll get whatever I want to get."

"The steak though."

"Brynn."

"I'm just saying."

He got the steak.

---

Back at the penthouse Brynn announced she was going to have a bath and think about things and would someone please make sure she didn't fall asleep in it. She looked at me when she said this, then at her father, then back at me, with an expression I couldn't fully read.

Then she went to her room and closed the door.

Evander and I stood in the living room.

"She's not okay," he said.

"She will be." I sat on the sofa. "Give her tonight."

He sat in the armchair. Not the sofa. The armchair, with the deliberate distance of a man making a choice about geography. I noticed. I didn't say anything about it.

"Tell me something," I said.

He looked at me. "What."

"Anything. Something real. We've been whatever we've been doing for almost two weeks and I don't actually know anything about you."

He was quiet for a moment. Then, "What do you want to know."

"Whatever you'd actually tell someone. Not the version you give when someone asks at a dinner party."

Something shifted in his expression. The composed version stepping back slightly. The real one appearing in the gap.

"I almost didn't build the company," he said. "I had a place at a university in Edinburgh. Architecture." He paused. "I deferred for a year to help my father with something and the year became two and then my mother got sick and then Brynn's mother and I..." he stopped. "The place expired. I never went back."

I looked at him. "Do you regret it?"

"Some days." He looked at the window. "Less than I used to."

"Why less?"

He looked at me. "Because the things that kept me from it turned out to matter more than it would have."

The room was quiet.

"Brynn," I said.

"Among other things," he said.

I didn't ask what the other things were. I wasn't sure I was ready for that answer yet.

"You could have said architecture," I said. "When Brynn asked what documentary we were watching."

He looked at me for a second.

Then something happened that I had not seen before in two weeks of watching his face... he laughed. Properly. Not the almost-smile, not the corner-of-the-mouth thing, an actual laugh, brief and quiet but completely real, and it did something to my chest that the almost-scenes and the agreement and the Christmas night hotel room had not done.

I was in significantly more trouble than I had previously estimated.

"I thought of it afterward," he said.

"That's the best you've got? You had the whole evening."

"I was slightly distracted."

"By the French architecture documentary?"

"By something else entirely."

I looked at my lap. He looked at the window. The city was doing its Paris evening thing outside, all gold light and winter dark, and the penthouse was warm and quiet and tomorrow was New Year's Eve and the agreement was sitting somewhere between us like something neither of us knew what to do with anymore.

A knock at my door. Brynn's knock, three quick ones, her specific rhythm.

I got up and went to the hallway. She was standing in her robe, hair damp, face cleaner than it had been all day, looking like a person who had made a decision in the bath and come out the other side of it.

"I'm going to tell him," she said. "Tomorrow. Before dinner. I need you there."

I looked at her. "Brynn..."

"I know. I know it might go badly. I know he might..." she stopped. "But Theo's right. I can't keep doing this. And I can't ask him to keep waiting." She looked at me with the specific look she had worn at seventeen when she had stood between me and a group of girls who wanted to make my life difficult — chin up, already decided, slightly terrified but doing it anyway. "Will you be there?"

I looked at my best friend.

Then I thought about what was in the living room.

Then I thought about the irony of my entire life.

"I'll be there," I said.

She exhaled. "Thank you." She squeezed my arm. "Get some sleep. Tomorrow's going to be a lot."

She went back to her room.

I stood in the hallway for a moment.

Then I went back to the living room doorway.

Evander looked up.

"Goodnight," I said.

He looked at me for a moment. "Goodnight, Zella."

I went to my room and closed the door and lay in the dark and thought about tomorrow and everything it contained, Brynn telling her father about Theo, dinner, the countdown, the dress, the two weeks of this and whatever they had been building toward or falling into or both simultaneously.

'Tomorrow,' I thought.

I almost slept.