His Grandfather's Command

Chapter Three — Noah

The subway home was one of those nights.

Cheap cologne and takeout containers and the particular exhaustion of a city that was breathing in the small hours. I found a seat near the door, dropped my bag between my feet, and let my head fall back against the glass.

The card was still in my apron pocket.

I'd transferred it to my coat on my way out small, white, slightly warm from being pressed against my side for three hours. I didn't take it out and look at it again. I didn't need to. I had already memorized it. Theodore Vandermeer. A phone number. An address on the upper east side that I had looked up once on my break in the Calloway's bathroom and then immediately closed because the building that came up in the search results had made my chest do something complicated.

I pressed my temple against the cool glass and watched the tunnel walls slide past in the dark and thought about a man who drank plain tea and ran background checks and had been watching me move through my section for three weeks before deciding to turn my life upside down on a Tuesday night.

Marry my grandson.

The words still felt absurd. Like something from a novel you'd read in one sitting on a rainy afternoon, enjoyable precisely because it had nothing to do with real life. Real life was the subway. Real life was my aching feet and my apron in my bag and the radiator that worked sixty percent of the time.

Real life was not Theodore Vandermeer and his card and his grey eyes full of something that had looked, terrifyingly, like certainty.

I got off at my stop and walked the four blocks home in the September air and told myself I wasn't going to think about it anymore tonight.

I thought about it the entire four blocks.

Noah was awake.

Of course he was.

The light under his door was visible from the hallway, he'd given himself a key to my apartment eight months ago on the grounds that he lived twenty minutes away and worried about me, and I'd let him keep it because the truth was I worried about him right back and having him on the other side of a door sometimes was better than having him on the other side of the city making bad decisions in a well-lit room somewhere.

I unlocked the front door and he was on my couch in joggers and a hoodie that had seen better years, feet on my coffee table, watching something on his laptop with headphones around his neck rather than on his ears which was his version of being alert, of listening for my key in the lock.

He looked up when I came in.

"Hey." He paused his show. "You're late."

"Closing shift." I dropped my bag by the door and toed off my shoes with the specific relief of someone who had been on their feet for eight hours. "I told you not to wait up."

"I wasn't waiting up. I was watching something."

"With your headphones around your neck."

He looked at his headphones. Looked back at me. "I multitask."

I almost smiled. Almost. I went to the kitchen and filled a glass of water and stood at the counter drinking it and staring at the middle distance while Noah watched me with the expression he thought when something was wrong and was deciding how to ask about it.

He had our mother's eyes. That was the thing about Noah that could still catch me off guard on an ordinary Tuesday, he had her exact eyes, dark and perceptive and slightly too honest, and sometimes looking at him directly was like looking at something I had lost and been given back in a different form.

"What happened?" he said.

"Nothing happened. I'm tired."

"Aria."

"Noah."

"You're doing the thing where you stand in the kitchen and stare at nothing and pretend you're fine."

"I am fine."

"You're also still wearing your coat."

I looked down. He was right. I was standing in my own kitchen at midnight still in my coat like I'd forgotten I'd arrived somewhere.

I took it off. Hung it on the back of the door. Felt the slight weight of the card in the pocket.

"Something happened at work," I said.

Noah sat up properly. Feet off the table. Laptop to the side. Full attention. Which from Noah, who existed in a state of cheerful distraction most of the time, meant he'd registered that this was real.

"Are you okay? Did someone …"

"Nothing like that." I came back to the living room and sat in the armchair across from him, pulling my knees up, and looked at my brother who looked back at me with those honest eyes and waited.

I told him.

All of it. Theodore walking over, the things he knew about us, the proposal, the card, the plain tea, the way he'd described Elias like a problem he'd been trying to solve for years and had finally found the right answer to. I told it the way I told Noah everything, which was directly. He was my brother and performing for him felt like performing for myself and I'd never had the energy for it.

By the time I finished he was staring at me.

"Say something," I said.

"I'm processing."

"Noah …"

"Give me a second." He held up a hand. Stared at the middle distance. Looked back at me. "This man…umm.. Theodore Vandermeer… sat in your section, ran a background check on you…"

"Correct."

".... found out where you work, where you live, what happened to Mum and Dad …"

"Yes."

"...came back a third time, waited until the right moment, and then asked you to marry his grandson." He said it slowly, like assembling something. "His grandson who doesn't know any of this."

"Apparently not the specifics, no."

"Aria." He looked at me. "That's insane."

"I know."

"That is genuinely, actually insane."

"I know, Noah."

"The man ran a background check on a waitress."

"He runs them on everyone he does business with. He said it isn't personal."

"It's extremely personal!" He stood up. Noah processed things on his feet, he'd done it since childhood, pacing whenever something needed working out, our mother used to say he thought with his legs. "Okay. Okay. Who is this person, actually? What do we know about him?"

"Theodore Vandermeer. Founder of Vandermeer Enterprises. Seventy something. Semi-retired." I paused. "I looked up the building on the card. It's …"

"I'll look it up." He had his phone out already, thumbs moving. Then he stopped. Looked at the screen. Looked at me. "Aria. This is a forty floor building on the upper east side."

"I know."

"This man is …" He scrolled. Scrolled more. "This man is extraordinarily wealthy."

"I gathered."

"His grandson is .." He turned the phone toward me. A photograph from some business publication, Elias Vandermeer at what looked like a company event, dark suit, darker expression, the kind of handsome that read more like a warning than an invitation.

I looked at it for a moment.

"He looks mean," Noah said.

"He looks like someone who's had his photograph taken against his will."

"Same thing." Noah put the phone down. Looked at me with an expression that was shifting from processing into something more serious, the particular gravity he only deployed for things that actually mattered to him. "What did you say? To Theodore. When he asked."

"I said I'd think about it."

"Think about it." He repeated it carefully. "Not no."

"Not no," I confirmed.

He was quiet for a moment. Sat back down on the couch. Leaned forward with his elbows on his knees in the way that meant he was actually thinking about it.

"Tell me what you're actually feeling," he said. "Not the sensible version. The real version."

I looked at my brother.

The real version. He always wanted the real version. It was one of the things I loved about him and one of the things that exhausted me because the real version required being honest about things I'd gotten very comfortable keeping at arm's length.

"Terrified," I said. "Obviously."

"Obviously. What else?"

I pulled at a loose thread on my sleeve.

"He said I'd been making myself small," I said quietly. "Theodore. He said it like he could see it. Like it was just, a visible thing about me." I paused. "And the worst part was he wasn't wrong. I know he wasn't wrong. I've known for a while that I've been, shrinking. Since Mum and Dad. Since before that, honestly." I looked up at Noah. "And I keep telling myself that's just surviving. That small is safe and safe is what I need right now. But sometimes it feels less like surviving and more like…"

"Disappearing," Noah said.

I looked at him.

He looked back at me steadily. "I know," he said simply. "I've watched it happen and I didn't know how to say it without you shutting the conversation down."

The apartment was quiet around us. Outside a car passed, music thumping briefly through the walls and then gone.

"It's an arranged marriage, Noah," I said. "To a man who doesn't know I exist yet. Who by all accounts is going to be…” I thought about the photograph. The dark expression. "A lot."

"Yeah." He nodded. "But you picked up the card."

"I picked up the card."

"And you told me." He leaned back. "You didn't come home and put it in a drawer and pretend it didn't happen. You told me." He looked at me with those honest eyes. "Because some part of you is actually considering it."

I didn't answer.

Which was, of course, its own answer.

Noah was quiet for a long moment. Then he exhaled, long and slow, and rubbed a hand over his face and looked at the ceiling and said, to no one in particular, "Dad would have had approximately one thousand questions."

Something squeezed in my chest. I laughed despite it.

"He would have wanted to meet Theodore first," I said.

"He would have wanted to run his own background check."

"He definitely would have Googled the building."

"He would have Googled the building, printed the results, highlighted the relevant sections, and presented them at a family meeting." Noah smiled the real one, the one that was all dad, wide and slightly crooked. "And Mum would have asked if the grandson was kind. Not successful, not good-looking. Kind."

We sat with that for a moment.

The particular gentle weight of talking about them in the present tense of who they'd been. It still hurt. It probably always would. But sitting here with Noah in my small living room at midnight turning their imagined reactions over like smooth stones, that part didn't hurt. That part felt like keeping them close.

"I don't know what I'm going to do," I said honestly.

"I know." Noah stood, stretching, reaching for his jacket. "But for what it's worth," He paused, looking at me with an expression that was older than his usual one, quieter. "You deserve more than small, Aria. Whatever you decide. You deserve more than small."

He hugged me, brief, tight, the particular hug of a sibling who didn't always have the right words but always showed up anyway. Then he let himself out and I listened to the sound of his footsteps in the corridor and the elevator doors and then the building settling back into its nighttime quiet.

I sat in the armchair for a long time.

Then I got up, went to my coat hanging on the back of the kitchen door, reached into the pocket, and took out the card.

I placed it on my bedside table.

Just a door I wasn't ready to close yet.