When he finally moved, a small shift of weight, the prelude to returning inside, I moved with him, a half-step toward the house that said the same thing without requiring it to be said.
We walked back up the path in the same silence we'd shared for the last hour. He held the back door and I went in first. In the warmth of the kitchen we stopped for a moment in the way of people who are about to separate and haven't yet found the natural point of it.
"Goodnight," I said.
"Goodnight."
I went upstairs. He went to the study, or somewhere, I heard his footsteps moving away from the kitchen in a direction that wasn't the stairs, which meant there was still work to do, or something that required the study's particular kind of quiet.
I lay down on top of my covers without undressing and looked at the ceiling.
I had come down, I thought, because I'd seen him alone with something heavy and I hadn't been able to stay upstairs. That was the whole of it. There was no strategy in it, no calculation about what it would produce, no file labeled useful for later. I had simply been unable to leave him there.
I held that fact in the drawer I'd been building in my mind, the one that didn't have a label yet, the one that contained justo and the only good thing he did and the empty bookshelf and the way a coffee cup had been waiting at exactly the right temperature and a hundred other small pieces of evidence that I had no framework for yet.
The drawer was getting full. I didn't examine what that meant. I closed my eyes. Somewhere below, Dominic was still in the house. I fell asleep before I could decide if that was why I was calm.
* * *
Chapter 15: First Kiss
The dress was the only thing I had brought with me that I'd chosen for no reason.
Not for an occasion, not for a function, not for the specific social requirement of appearing presentable in a context where presentable was currency. I had bought it two years ago from a secondhand shop in a city that wasn't New Orleans, on a Saturday afternoon when I had forty minutes between a shift at the coffee shop and a study session, and I had seen it in the window and gone in without planning to and come out with a bag and twelve dollars less.
Wine-colored. Simple in the way that required something more than simplicity to carry correctly -- a cut that didn't announce itself, fabric that moved without being asked to. I had worn it twice. To a friend's birthday dinner I hadn't wanted to attend but had, and to a concert at a small venue where the music had been better than expected and I'd been glad I'd worn something that matched the occasion retroactively.
I had brought it to New Orleans because it fit in the bag and because leaving it behind had felt, in the irrational calculus of a packing session at five in the morning, like surrendering something I hadn't finished with yet.
I put it on at seven fifteen.
* * *
The Moreau ball was held every November, in the second-largest of the three ballrooms at the family's social club on St. Charles Avenue -- a building that had been built in 1904 by a man who believed that the proper conduct of social life required appropriate infrastructure, and which had been maintained at a level that suggested his descendants agreed.
The main floor was already full when we arrived: the Garden District's particular social world, gathered under chandeliers that cost more than most people's annual income, moving through the conversational choreography they'd been practicing at events like this one for decades. I read all of this in the thirty seconds between the car door and the entrance. Catalogued the exits -- four, two of them visible from the main entrance -- and the social geography: who stood with whom, which clusters had the easy adjacency of genuine connection and which had the careful spacing of obligation.
Dominic moved through the room like he'd been born knowing its geometry, which he had. He introduced me to people whose names I already knew from weeks of research, and I held conversations and smiled at the right moments and watched him the way I watched everything -- from the outside, cataloguing rather than participating. It was a habit I had developed for rooms I wasn't certain of.
The problem was that I had started to become certain of him.
* * *
At ten fifteen I went toward the garden.
I didn't look back to see if he followed. I simply walked toward the French doors that opened to the club's side terrace, and stepped through them into the November night, and stood in the dark away from the light and sound of the ballroom.
He came through the door forty seconds later.
The terrace had a low wall and beyond it a garden, smaller than the one at home, more formal. The music from inside was muffled but present -- the particular contained sound of a party continuing without you, which was its own kind of freedom. We stood at the wall. The city was visible in the distance, the particular nighttime texture of New Orleans, lit and alive and operating on its own logic.
"Do you regret it," I said.
He was looking at the city. "What specifically."
"Choosing me." I kept my voice even. "The arrangement. You said yourself I'm leverage. You could have found a different kind. Cleaner, probably. Without--" I paused. "Without what the Callahan name comes with."
He was quiet for a moment. "No."