Semua Bab Go Away Chris : Bab 31 - Bab 40

Ayesha's POVMara got engaged in February and married in June, which she described as an irresponsibly short engagement and then organized with the methodical precision of someone who had been quietly planning a wedding in the back of their mind for several years and simply needed an occasion to deploy it.She asked me to be her maid of honor in the same conversation in which she told me she was engaged, which was the kind of efficiency I had come to expect from Mara and which I received with the same mixture of affection and mild breathlessness that most of Mara's announcements produced."Obviously," I said."Good. I need someone sensible. The bridesmaids are wonderful but they will require management.""I can manage.""You're the only person I know who has successfully managed Diana, which means you can manage anyone."She was not wrong about that.The months between the engagement and the wedding were full in the way that other people's important occasions fill the calendar, with d

Ayesha's POVOur daughter arrived in a spring that was indecisive about its own intentions, cold one morning and warm the next, as though the season itself hadn't fully committed to arriving. She was born on a Thursday, which was an ordinary day in every respect except that at the end of it the world contained a person who hadn't been in it at the beginning.We named her Iris, which had been on a short list for several months and which settled into place the moment I said it out loud in the hospital room and watched Chris look at her and say it back as if confirming that it was right.Iris.Yes.My mother came to the hospital and sat in the chair beside the bed and held her granddaughter for a long time without speaking, which for my mother was the clearest possible evidence of the depth of what she was feeling, because my mother almost always had words for things.When she finally looked up, her eyes were bright, and she looked at me with the expression I had seen at intervals across

Chris's POVVanessa Holt had been a feature of my early adulthood in the way that certain people are features of a period of your life without being integral to who you become on the other side of it. We had been part of the same social circle for several years in my mid-twenties, had been briefly involved in a way that never formally started or ended so much as gradually became something else, and had maintained a cordial peripheral connection in the years since.She was charming and perceptive and had always understood exactly how to be useful to people she wanted things from. I say that not cruelly but accurately, because I had known her long enough to understand the distinction between Vanessa being warm because she felt it and Vanessa being warm because it served a purpose. The two sometimes coincided. It was not always easy to tell which was which in the moment, which was, I suspected, the point.I had not thought about her in several years. When Adrian had mentioned in passing

Chris's POVI met Vanessa for coffee on a Wednesday afternoon, at a place she suggested that was not far from the Azul offices, a decent but unremarkable café that I would not have chosen and that I suspected she had chosen specifically for its distance from anywhere I was likely to be recognized.I did not examine that suspicion closely enough.She was already there when I arrived, at a table near the window with two cups ordered and a smile that felt, as it always had, like something extended specifically to you. That was her gift: the ability to make a person feel like the room had been arranged around their arrival.We talked for an hour, which was longer than I had intended. She asked about the company with the attentive interest of someone who had done reading. She asked about Iris, warmly, in a way that I had no particular reason to distrust. She talked about her own work with the self-deprecating intelligence she deployed when she wanted to appear unguarded, and I found myself

Ayesha's POVThe photograph arrived on a Monday.Not through any official channel, not as something delivered to the house or sent to my phone. It arrived the way the most damaging things tend to arrive, indirectly, through a route that made it impossible to trace back to its source without looking paranoid for trying.A mutual acquaintance from the gallery circuit, a woman named Petra who I liked well enough but did not know intimately, sent me a message on a Tuesday morning that said simply: I saw this and thought you should know. I'm sorry to be the one to send it.Below the message was a screenshot.The photograph showed Chris and Vanessa at a table in what looked like a restaurant, their heads close together in the way of people deep in conversation. It was not an incriminating photograph in any obvious sense. They were clothed, in a public space, with nothing physically between them that couldn't be explained as two people who knew each other leaning in to be heard over ambient