All Chapters of Go Away Chris : Chapter 111 - Chapter 120

Ayesha's POVThe conversation with Dr. Cross lasted forty-seven minutes, which was forty-six minutes longer than Ayesha had initially planned for it and considerably more useful than she had anticipated, because what emerged from the forty-seven minutes was not the management of a crisis but the beginning of a genuine understanding between two people who had expected to be adversaries and had discovered, through the specific friction of an honest conversation, that they were not."A manufacturing defect," Dr. Cross said, when Ayesha delivered the assessor's finding. "Not the electrician. Not your husband's recommendation. A component that was faulty before it was installed.""Yes," Ayesha said."That changes the liability picture entirely," Dr. Cross said."It removes the professional liability question from the conversation," Ayesha said. "What remains is the fact of the fire and the damage and the recovery, which are real and which the gallery is addressing, but the specific questio

Ayesha's POVShe told Ken about New York over the dinner he had cooked, which was simple and good in the specific way of food made by someone who understood that the meal's job was not to impress but to restore, and the kitchen was warm and Iris was asking about the fire with the specific inquisitive energy of a six year old who had processed the event into something she needed to understand fully before she could file it correctly in her understanding of the world."Did everything burn?" Iris said."The north wall," Ayesha said. "And the paintings on it.""All of them?" Iris said."All of them," Ayesha said.Iris thought about this with the seriousness it deserved and then said, "Rowan will make more.""Yes," Ayesha said. "She will.""Because that's what artists do," Iris said, with the authority of a six year old who had grown up inside a gallery and who had absorbed its logic as naturally as most children absorbed the logic of school or sport or whatever the dominant environment of

Ayesha's POVThe National Arts Broadcasting Award ceremony was held in a building in central London that had been a theatre in the previous century and that retained the specific quality of a space accustomed to significant things happening inside it, the walls carrying the accumulated weight of performances and speeches and the particular electricity of occasions that people remembered afterward, and the room filled on the Thursday evening with the specific mixture of cultural figures and institutional representatives and press that these events assembled, all of them in the specific register of people who were present for something that mattered to them professionally and who were also, to varying degrees, watching each other.Ken was beside her in the way he was beside her at things that mattered, which was fully and without requiring acknowledgment of his presence, the specific quality of a man who understood that some evenings were hers and that being beside her was sufficient pa

Ayesha's POVDanielle Osei arrived at the Brooklyn space at nine on Wednesday morning in the specific way of a person who understood that arriving when you said you would arrive was not a courtesy but a professional baseline, and she was tall and direct and had the quality of someone who had spent enough time in rooms that resisted her ideas to have learned not to announce them defensively but to place them in the room with enough confidence that the room had to contend with them.She looked at Ayesha and said, "You're the person from London.""I'm the person from London," Ayesha said. "You're the person who wants to bring the street inside.""I'm the person who thinks the street is already inside if you build the space correctly," Danielle said. "Which is different from wanting to bring it in. You don't bring the street in. You build so that the barrier between the gallery and the street stops functioning as a barrier."Ayesha said, "Show me what that means in this room."Danielle wa

Ayesha's POVThe alarm went off at four forty-five New York time on Thursday morning and the hotel room was dark and the city outside the window was doing the specific things New York did at four forty-five in the morning, which was not sleeping exactly but quieter than at any other hour, the particular quality of a city that never entirely stopped but that acknowledged, in the deepest part of the night, the existence of a different register.She made coffee with the hotel room's machine, which was not good coffee but was hot and present and served the function coffee served at four forty-five in the morning, which was orientation rather than pleasure, and she sat at the desk with her phone and her notepad and the specific focus of someone who had been thinking about this call since five o'clock the previous evening and who had decided, in the hours of the night, exactly what she was going to say and how she was going to say it and what she would not agree to regardless of how the fou