Chapter 14

CHAPTER FOURTEEN : New Year's Eve

~Zella's POV~

Brynn knocked on my door at five o'clock with the energy of someone who had made a decision and was not entertaining second thoughts about it.

"Get up," she said. "We're getting ready together."

I was already sitting on the bed in my robe staring at the green dress hanging on the wardrobe door like it had done something to me personally, which in a way it had, because every time I looked at it I thought about the changing room and 'she already knows' and the eighteen inches on the sofa and 'no, I'm not.'

"I'm up," I said.

She came in anyway, sat on the bed beside me, looked at the dress, looked at me, and said "you're going to look incredible tonight" with the specific warmth of someone who meant it about more than just the dress.

I looked at her. She was already halfway through her makeup, one eye done, the other bare, which on Brynn looked intentional rather than unfinished. She had the particular brightness of someone who had made a terrifying decision and was committed to it now.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

"I'm telling him tonight." She said it the way you say things you've rehearsed enough times that they've stopped feeling scary and started feeling inevitable. "Before we go. In the living room. I've decided."

"Brynn..."

"I know." She picked up my mascara from the nightstand without asking and handed it to me. "I know it might go badly. But Theo deserves better than what I've been giving him and my dad deserves to hear it from me and I deserve to stop feeling like I'm living in two directions at once." She looked at me in the mirror. "Does that make sense?"

"It makes complete sense," I said.

She nodded once, satisfied, and went back to her own eye.

I looked at the green dress.

'Tonight is going to be a lot,' I thought.

That was, by some margin, the understatement of December.

---

Evander was in the living room when I came out.

He was standing near the window in a dark suit, looking at the Paris evening settling outside, and he turned when he heard me and his eyes moved to the dress and then to my face and then — nothing. He looked away. Turned back to the window.

One look. Three seconds. That was all.

My face did the thing.

"Brynn's almost ready," I said, to the room.

"I know," he said, to the window.

We stood in the particular silence that had become its own language over the last two weeks and I looked at the back of his jacket and thought about architecture and 'among other things' and the one second he always gave me before he kissed me back and the way he had laughed, properly, really laughed in this exact room two nights ago.

Then Brynn came in.

She was in the black dress, hair up, looking like herself turned up several degrees, and she looked between her father and me and said "good, you're both ready" and then she put her bag down on the sofa and straightened up and I recognized the expression on her face because I had seen it at seventeen outside a school hallway.

Chin up. Already decided. Slightly terrified but doing it anyway.

"Dad," she said. "I need to tell you something before we go."

---

Evander turned from the window.

He looked at his daughter. Then at me. Then back at her.

"Sit down," he said.

"I'd rather stand."

A pause. "Alright."

Brynn took a breath. "I've been seeing someone. For four months. His name is Theo and before you say anything I need you to hear me out completely because I know you have opinions about him and I know why and I'm asking you to set them aside for five minutes while I talk."

Evander said nothing. Which was not the same as agreeing.

"I kept it from you because of how things went when you met him. I know that one dinner left a bad impression and I know when you decide something you're..." she paused, "...certain about it. And I wasn't ready to have this conversation until now. But he's been patient for four months and he deserves better than me hiding him, and you deserve to hear it from me directly instead of finding out another way." She stopped. "That's it. That's what I wanted to say."

The living room was very quiet.

Evander looked at his daughter for a long moment. I watched his face do the thing it did when he was thinking... not blank, not composed, something quieter and more internal than either.

"I told you what I thought of him," he said. "After that dinner."

"You told me after one dinner."

"One dinner was enough."

"For you." Brynn's voice was still even but I could hear what was underneath it, months of this, months of managing two directions at once, months of being afraid of exactly this conversation. "Not for me."

"He was..."

"He was nervous, dad. He was meeting you for the first time and he was nervous and it came across wrong and you decided and that was it. You didn't give him another chance."

"I gave him my honest assessment."

"After one dinner."

"Brynn..."

"How many chances did you give him? One dinner and then a verdict? That's not fair and you know it."

"What I know," Evander said, and his voice was still level, which was worse than if it hadn't been, "is that I sat across from that man for two hours and what I saw was someone who..."

"Who was nervous. I just said that."

"Who was not..." he stopped. Took a breath. "I'm not doing this because I want to control your life. I'm telling you what I saw."

"And I'm telling you what I know. Four months, dad. I know him. You had two hours." Brynn's voice cracked slightly on the last word and she pressed her lips together and held it. "I'm not asking you to like him. I'm asking you to trust that I know what I'm doing."

"You're twenty-four."

The air in the room changed.

Brynn looked at her father for a long moment.

"I'm aware," she said. "I'm twenty-four and it's my life and I have been managing it without incident for several years now and I would appreciate it if you would treat me like someone capable of making her own decisions."

"I do treat you..."

"You treat me like I'm twelve." She said it quietly, which was worse than if she'd shouted it. "You don't mean to. But you do."

Evander said nothing.

I was sitting on the armchair in the corner of the room with my hands in my lap and my green dress and my absolute inability to say a single word, because I was watching a daughter tell her father she had been keeping a relationship secret from him because she was afraid of his reaction, while I was sitting in his living room keeping my own secret relationship from both of them, and the irony was not lost on me. It was extremely, specifically, personally found.

'If Brynn only knew,' some part of me thought. 'If she could see the room she's actually in right now.'

I looked at my hands.

"I'm not saying he's wrong for you to be happy," Evander said finally. "I'm saying I don't think this particular person..."

"His name is Theo."

"...is the right..."

"His name is Theo, dad. Say his name."

A pause.

"Theo," Evander said. "I don't think Theo is right for you. That is my honest opinion and I'm not going to pretend otherwise because you've asked me to."

"I didn't ask for your opinion. I came to tell you, not to ask you."

"You told me. I'm responding."

"With the wrong response."

"With an honest one."

Brynn looked at her father for a long moment. Something in her face had gone very still in the way things went still right before they moved decisively in one direction.

"I love him," she said.

The room was completely quiet.

"I love him and I'm going to keep seeing him and I respect that you have concerns and I'm asking you to respect that I've made my decision." She picked up her bag from the sofa. "Now. We have a reservation at seven thirty and I would like to go to dinner because I am hungry and I got dressed up and I would like the evening to be something other than this." She looked at her father. "Can we do that? Can we go to dinner and talk about something else and come back to this when we've both had time to think?"

Evander looked at his daughter.

Then he picked up his jacket from the chair.

"Let's go," he said.

---

The car was silent.

Brynn looked out her window. Evander drove. I looked at my hands and thought about everything I was not going to think about.

The restaurant was beautiful, warm light, white tablecloths, the kind of quiet that meant expensive and we sat down and opened our menus and the waiter came and Brynn ordered something without reading the description and Evander ordered something without looking up and I ordered something I chose by pointing at random and then we were left with our water glasses and the candlelight and the specific silence of three people who all knew what was underneath the evening and had agreed without discussing it to leave it there for now.

Brynn talked. Of course she did, it was Brynn, silence was something that happened to other people but it was different from her usual talking. Lighter. More careful. She asked me about things, asked her father things, kept the surface of the evening moving because if it stopped moving it would sink.

Evander answered what he was asked. Correctly, fully, without hostility. But he was elsewhere. I could see it, the fraction of distance in his eyes, the way he looked at Brynn when she wasn't watching him with something careful and complicated that was not anger, had never been anger, was something closer to the fear of a parent who loves someone more than they know how to say and defaults to certainty because certainty feels safer than fear.

I ate approximately half my food. Brynn finished everything on her plate including the bread which she hadn't ordered, because Brynn processed difficulty through doing things and eating was a thing to do. Evander ate most of his, steadily, without appearing to notice he was doing it, because Evander maintained routine the way other people maintained composure automatically, as a matter of principle. I pushed mine around and called it dinner.

At some point Brynn excused herself to the bathroom and Evander and I were briefly alone at the table and I looked at the candle and he looked at his glass and neither of us said anything for a moment.

Then he said, "Was I wrong."

Not a question exactly. Not quite a statement.

I looked at him. "About Theo?"

"About how I handled it."

I thought about Brynn's face when she said 'I love him.' The stillness of it. The complete absence of performance in that moment.

"I think you were honest," I said carefully. "I think honest and wrong aren't always the same thing."

He looked at the candle.

"She said I treat her like she's twelve."

"She said you don't mean to."

"That's not the same as it not being true."

I looked at him. He was looking at the candle with the expression that meant the composed version had stepped back and the real one was sitting at the table in a Paris restaurant on New Year's Eve trying to figure out if he'd just damaged something he couldn't repair.

"She'll come back," I said. "That's what Brynn does. She says the thing she needs to say and then she comes back."

He was quiet for a moment.

"You know her well," he said.

"Since we were seventeen."

"She talks about you like you've always been there."

"She has always been there for me." I looked at the tablecloth. "Tonight was me returning the favour. Even if I wasn't much use."

"You were there," he said. "That was enough."

Brynn came back from the bathroom and sat down and picked up her fork and said "right, are we getting dessert" with complete commitment and we both looked at her and the tension in the table broke slightly, not gone, just moved to the edges where it could exist without dominating everything.

We got dessert.

---

The drive home was quieter than the drive there, which was impressive given how quiet that had been. Brynn had run out of surface conversation somewhere between the crème brûlée and the bill and now she was looking out the window at Paris going past, the city lit up and celebrating, people on the streets, the particular electricity of a city that had decided tonight meant something.

We didn't talk about what it meant for us.

At the penthouse Brynn went straight down the hall without stopping. At her door she turned around and looked at me not at her father, just at me and her face said 'I'm okay, give me a minute' and mine said 'I know, take as long as you need' and then she went in and the door closed behind her.

The sound of it sat in the hallway for a moment.

Then the penthouse was quiet.