On His Knees for His Enemy

Chapter 15: The Gala Invitation

The invitation arrived through official channels, which was how I knew it wasn't official.

Not an assistant's email. Not the events calendar that Victor's office distributed to Cross Corporation's senior consultants on the first of each month. It came directly from Nathaniel Cross's personal account, at seven forty-three on a Tuesday morning, with a subject line that said: Cross Foundation Annual Gala — this Friday — if you don't have plans. The body of the email was three sentences. The first explained that it was the Foundation's largest fundraising event of the year and that senior partners occasionally brought clients or professional contacts. The second said that a plus-one had already been registered under her name if she chose to use it. The third said: no obligation.

A man who wrote 'no obligation' in a professional invitation was communicating something that had nothing to do with obligation.

I read it twice. Then I called Maeve and told her to clear my Friday evening. Then I went to my closet and stood in front of the emerald dress for a long time.

* * *

The dress was silk, cut on the bias, the color of deep water in harbor light. I had bought it in Philadelphia, two years ago, from a designer whose work I'd followed since my mother wore a piece of his — different silhouette, same color, a gala in the spring of 2012 — to a fundraiser at the Gardner Museum. I had been seventeen that year, still Ariana, still wearing my hair down because I didn't know yet how much work it was to be a person. My mother had worn emerald and I had told her she looked like the kind of woman that paintings were made of, and she had laughed and said paintings were made of women who didn't have to get up at five in the morning to run a household.

I had not thought of that memory in four years. I told it to go back where it came from and finished dressing.

The stilettos were Tom Ford, black, four inches. The earrings were diamonds — studs, small, the kind that suggested wealth without announcing it. I wore my hair up, not because I was Aria Kenzari and Aria Kenzari wore her hair up, but because the back of the dress required it. I stood in front of the mirror and confirmed that the woman looking back at me was the right woman for the evening: polished, contained, unmistakably purposeful.

Then I went to the Cross Foundation gala, and I told myself the entire way there that the dress was a strategic choice. I was good at telling myself things.

* * *

The venue was a converted warehouse in the Seaport district, the kind of space that spent eleven months of the year as an architecture firm and one month a year reminding Boston that it still knew how to throw a party. String lights and polished concrete. Long tables draped in white linen. A string quartet in the corner playing something from the late Romantics that no one was listening to closely enough to identify. Waitstaff moving through the crowd with the practiced invisibility of people who are paid to be furniture.

I arrived at eight-fifteen, which was fashionably late by twenty minutes and strategically early by forty-five. The room was about half full. I took a glass of champagne I did not intend to drink and did a circuit of the perimeter, mapping exits and adjacencies the way I mapped every room I entered — a habit so old I had stopped recognizing it as a habit.

I saw Marcus Cross near the entrance to the main hall. He was speaking with a city councilman I recognized from photographs, his hand on the man's shoulder, his expression carrying the particular warmth of someone who owned the room and was generous enough not to say so. He had not seen me yet. I kept moving.

I saw Nathaniel at eight-thirty-two.

He was across the room, speaking with two men I didn't recognize, one hand in his trouser pocket, the other holding a glass of the Lagavulin that would be his single drink of the evening. He was in a suit the color of deep charcoal, not quite black, with a white shirt and no tie — the only time I had seen him without one, and it changed the architecture of him in a way I hadn't prepared for. Without the tie, the line from jaw to collar was uninterrupted. He looked less armored. Not unguarded — Nathaniel Cross was never unguarded — but different in the way of a vessel that has shed its rigging without losing any of its draft.

He glanced up before I had decided to approach. Our eyes met across approximately thirty feet of party.

His expression did not change. But the quality of his stillness did, very slightly, in the half-second before he looked back at the men he was speaking with. As though something in him had completed a calculation and arrived at an answer it hadn't been expecting.

I went to find the hostess and located my table.

* * *

The evening moved the way these evenings moved: speeches, applause, the studied shuffle of people positioning themselves next to the right conversations. I spoke with a shipping executive from Hamburg who had questions about the North Atlantic market that I answered accurately and without revealing anything useful. I spoke with a museum director about Rothko — the real kind, this time, which was a pleasure I allowed myself. I did not seek out Nathaniel, and I did not avoid him, and by ten o'clock we had managed to be in the same room for ninety minutes without saying a word to each other, which was a kind of conversation in itself.

Then the quartet shifted to something with a waltz in it, and a few couples moved toward the open floor at the room's center, and Victor Hale appeared at my elbow and said, with the pleasant neutrality of a man who was watching something he found interesting: "Nathaniel's been trying to get over here for twenty minutes. He keeps getting stopped."

"By whom?"

"Everyone," Victor said. "He's the host." He looked at me sidelong. "He'll make it eventually."

Victor drifted away. I set down my champagne.

Nathaniel arrived three minutes later. He didn't say anything immediately. He stood beside me and looked at the dance floor for a moment, and then he said, without turning his head: "You wore green."

"Emerald," I said. "There's a difference."

"Is there."

"Green is a color. Emerald is a statement."

He turned his head then. The look was brief and entirely unambiguous about what it meant, and then it was gone, replaced by the composed surface he wore the way other men wore their suits.

"Would you like to dance," he said. It was not a question in tone, but he had left it as a question in form, which I understood as unusual for him.

"Yes," I said.

We moved to the floor. He was a better dancer than I had expected, which I should not have been surprised by — the man boxed four mornings a week and had the physical intelligence that tended to transfer across disciplines. His hand settled at my waist in the conventional position. It stayed there for approximately two bars of music and then, very slightly, drew me an inch closer. Not enough to be remarked upon. Enough to be felt.

I felt it.

"You've done this before," I said, meaning dancing.

"My grandmother taught me," he said. "She was the only person who insisted on it. She said a man who couldn't dance was a man who didn't know how to listen with his body." He paused. "She died when I was eleven. On my birthday, as it happens."

He said it the way people said things that had been said so many times internally that the external saying of it had become matter-of-fact. Flat from repetition, not from absence of feeling.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"It was a long time ago."

He looked at something over my shoulder. I did not look to see what. I already knew — the particular weight of being observed by a man who was measuring something he couldn't quite name yet. I had felt it twice before in this city, through a glass wall, across a dining table. Marcus Cross, tracking the variable.

I kept my face in the direction of Nathaniel's shoulder. I kept my expression exactly where I'd left it. I danced.

* * *

The evening ended at eleven. I said goodbye to the hostess, collected my wrap, and found my car at the kerb. Nathaniel walked me out — not because I'd asked him to, but because he simply fell into step beside me at the right moment, and stopping him would have required making a choice about what stopping him meant.

On the steps outside, the October air came off the harbor cold and sharp and carried with it the specific smell of the waterfront at night: diesel and brine and the iron cold of deep water. My city. The city I had dismantled myself to return to.

"Thank you," I said. "For the invitation."

"Thank you for coming." A beat. "The emerald was the right choice."

"I know," I said.

He looked at me for a moment, something quiet moving behind the grey of his eyes, and then he nodded — the same fractional nod he used when a meeting was concluded — and went back inside.

In the car, I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth and sat very still for a count of ten.

My mother had worn this color to the Gardner Museum in the spring of 2012. Elena Cross had been at that event. I had been seventeen years old and I had not yet understood that some rooms are dressed rehearsals for later, harder things.

I told myself this was strategy. I told myself the dress, the dance, the inch of distance that had closed, were all instruments of the plan. I told myself that feeling something was not the same as feeling it, and that the difference mattered.

I got very good at telling myself things, in those early weeks. I had not yet understood that the telling was the first sign.