Married to the Monster

Untitled Episode CHAPTER FOUR

He was already standing when I walked in, which meant he had been waiting, and the fact that Caius Voss had been waiting for me in his own office at nine in the morning was the kind of detail I filed carefully and chose not to examine directly.

I had dressed differently this time. Dark trousers, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, my hair down. I had stood in front of my closet for twenty minutes, and I was not willing to think too hard about why. In your own capacity. I had tried to dress like myself.

He looked at me when I walked in and something moved briefly across his face that I was becoming better at reading. A flicker of something before the control closed over it again.

"Sit down," he said. Then: "Please."

Please surprise us both. I could tell from the slight shift in his expression that it had come out unbidden. I sat.

He did not go behind the desk. He sat across from me, in the same chair as our first meeting, same deliberate proximity, forearms on his knees, and he looked at me in the direct way he had that made it impossible to look anywhere else.

"What I am going to tell you is not in the contract," he said. "You are not entitled to this information by the terms of our arrangement. I am choosing to give it to you because you will be better prepared for the Hartwell Gala if you have it, and because it is the right thing to do."

I noted that he offered two separate reasons as though they were distinct justifications. I noted also that neither of them was: because I want you to know.

"Elena Marchetti and I were involved for approximately fourteen months," he said. "Two years ago until eight months ago. The involvement was not publicly declared. We attended events together. I was clear with her from the beginning that I was not in a position to offer what she ultimately wanted."

"Which was?"

"A future," he said without inflection, as though it were a commodity he simply did not carry in stock. "She understood the terms. For a long time she accepted them. Toward the end, she stopped accepting them and started believing she could change them. When I ended things, she chose to interpret the ending as temporary rather than final."

I processed this. "She thinks you will go back to her.

"She thinks the engagement is a reaction to something she did. She has told mutual acquaintances that I am not the kind of man who gets engaged, which is accurate, and that, therefore, there must be something behind this that will eventually resolve itself."

"And she needs to see at the Hartwell Gala that it will not."

"Yes."

I was quiet for a moment. I thought about the four-page profile with his handwritten warning at the bottom. I thought about the words he had said in the elevator. I thought about fourteen months.

"You hurt her," I said.

It was not an accusation. I stated it the way you state a fact assembled from evidence.

He was quiet for longer than usual. Then: "Yes.

"And you did not mean to."

"I did not set out to. The outcome was the same."

This was the most honest thing he had said to me since I signed the contract. He was sitting in his own office admitting to a damage he had caused without diminishing it or excusing it, and the quality of that admission was something I had not expected from him.

"Why are you telling me this?" I said.

"I told you. Preparation for the gala."

"That is not the full reason."

He looked at me. I looked back. The silence between us had a quality I was beginning to recognize, like something at the edge of being said.

"You read people very quickly," he said.

"I am an editor. I read everything quickly."

His mouth moved, almost a smile, not quite. "Elena never pushed back in this office. In fourteen months she never once told me that something I said was not the full reason.

I said: "Then you were having the wrong conversations.

He walked me to the elevator again. Same corridor, same silence, different weight to it.

I asked what I had been constructing since the car ride after Chamber, the one I had almost sent as a text at two in the morning before I put my phone down.

"Caius."

He stopped. The use of his first name stopped him in a way I had not expected. He turned to look at me and for a moment there was something in his expression that was close to unguarded.

"The contract says twelve months," I said. "At the end of twelve months, when the debt is cleared and the arrangement is complete, what happens to Elena? Does she eventually understand, or does she wait another year believing the next engagement will also resolve itself?"

He was quite long enough that I thought he would not answer.

Then: "That is not something I have worked out yet.

I looked at him directly. "You should. Because if you have not figured out how to tell her the truth directly, using me to show her is not going to fix anything. It will only give her someone else to blame.

He held my gaze. Something in it shifted, quietly and completely, the way a room shifts when a window is opened.

"You are right," he said.

Two words. But Caius Voss had the quality of a man who had not said those two words together in a very long time, and the way he said them made that clear.

The elevator arrived. I stepped in.

He held the door with one hand, something he had not done before, and looked at me with an expression I did not yet have language for.

"Have dinner with me on Saturday," he said. "Not on the schedule. Not a public appearance."

I stared at him. "That is not in the contract.

"No. It is not."

The door beeped. His hand stayed on the frame.

"Why?" I said.

"Because I want to know who you are when you are not performing for me," he said quietly. "And I think you want the same thing."

The door beeped again. He stepped back and let it close.

I rode down seventy-seven floors and walked out of the building into the cold November air and stood on the sidewalk for a full minute doing nothing.

My phone rang. Petra.

I answered. She said: how was the serious secret meeting?

I said: he asked me to dinner. Off the schedule.

The silence on her end lasted four full seconds. Then: Vivienne. That man is not doing a performance anymore.

I knew she was right. That was the part I was not ready to say out loud.