§1 — Hook
The car pulls up at the curb on Fifth and the photographers are already there. Six of them. I count without meaning to. Two weeks ago Briggs would have called this a slow night for a Saturday. Two weeks ago I would have rolled out of the back of an Uber alone and given them the one-finger salute that bought me last month's fine. Two weeks ago I did not have a fiancée.
"Pause when you get out," Reagan says, beside me. "Three seconds. Don't smile yet. Let them get the shot."
"Got it."
"Then you smile. Don't make it a smirk. Make it a — a quiet one."
"What's a quiet smile."
"Whatever a smirk isn't."
The driver gets out. The driver opens her door. Reagan steps out first because we negotiated that, last Tuesday, in her office, in the meeting where she made me sign the cohabitation rider and I made her sign the no-questions-about-Cole rider, and we shook on both with the kind of handshake people do when they are trying not to feel the other person's hand at all.
I follow her. I pause for three seconds. The shutters cough. I do not smirk. I do whatever the opposite of a smirk is, which mostly involves looking at the back of her head and trying not to think about the fact that she smells like green tea and rain and the inside of an expensive bookstore.
She turns. She takes my arm. The arm she takes is the one that is not, currently, full of a torn rotator cuff I am pretending I do not have.
"Smile," she says, through her teeth.
I smile. The shutters cough harder.
"Holt!" someone yells. "Holt, are the rumors true?"
"What rumors," Reagan says, sweet as a Sunday, and walks me up the steps of the Met like the shutters are not even there.
§2 — Build
The gala is for the Liberty Foundation, which is the franchise's name for the thing the franchise does to keep itself in the Times. The owner is here. The general manager is here. The defensive coordinator is here, and he has not made eye contact with me since Buffalo, which is fine; I have not made eye contact with myself since Buffalo either.
Reagan does the room the way I have seen her do a deal. Briefly. Surgically. With one hand on my forearm at all times, because the photographers in the corner are still working and we are, as she put it on Tuesday, establishing the visual grammar.
"Tom." She has the owner's hand in three minutes. "Wonderful event. You remember Maddox."
"Hard to forget him." Tom's smile is the smile of a man whose lawyers have been on the phone all week. "Maddox. Heard a rumor."
"Rumor's true, sir."
"You don't say."
"I do say."
Tom looks at Reagan. Reagan looks at Tom. There is a beat in which something — a fee, a favor, a future — passes between them in the language they both speak and I am only beginning to learn.
"Reagan," Tom says, "my office Tuesday. Bring your deck."
"Eleven a.m."
"Ten."
"Ten."
He moves on. Reagan's hand on my forearm tightens by a degree I would not have caught a week ago.
"You just got the meeting," I say, low.
"We just got the meeting."
"You're welcome."
She does not look at me. She is scanning the room for the next handshake. But the corner of her mouth does a small, complicated thing, and I see it, and I file it the way she would file it. She wanted that one.
We work the floor for another ninety minutes. I drink one glass of champagne and put the second one down full. Reagan drinks none. At one point a woman from a network sideline desk comes up and asks how we met and Reagan says through mutual friends in March with such bored conviction that I almost believe her myself. The woman laughs. Reagan laughs. I do whatever the opposite of a smirk is.
By eleven we are back in the car.
"That was good." She does not look at me. She is typing on her phone. "Tuesday's the round, Maddox. Tuesday is the round."
"Glad I could be of service."
She looks up. She actually, for the first time all night, looks at me. The car is dark. The driver has put up the partition. Her eyes are not the eyes she had in the conference room two weeks ago. They are some other thing — tired, and warmer than I would prefer, and looking at me like she is, for one second, trying to read me the way she reads everyone else.
She gives up. She goes back to her phone.
"You did well," she says.
I do not say anything.
She is not the kind of woman who says people did well lightly. I sit in the back of the car with my torn rotator cuff and the bookstore-rain smell of her and I think: do not get used to this.
Then I think: too late.
§3 — Twist
The car turns down Hudson and pulls up to the building.
The building is mine. The penthouse on the top floor is mine. The doorman knows my name and the doormen on the day shift know not to know it. It is a perfectly serviceable place to live alone, which is what I have been doing for three years.
I have not been doing it alone since Tuesday.
"Wait." Reagan does not get out. She sits in the car with her hand on the door release and does not move. "Maddox."
"Yeah."
"The morality clause."
"I know."
"Marcus called me at five. The league pulled the language Briggs flagged. They expanded it. Cohabitation isn't optional anymore. It's enumerated. Shared address of record, shared utility name, shared — the whole list."
"I know," I say again, and I do, because Briggs called me at six.
"Tonight's the start of the press window. If we don't move my things in tonight, the next photo of us at the curb is the photo that ends the engagement story before it starts."
"I know, Reagan."
"You don't have to —"
"I know."
She looks at the building. She looks at the entrance. She looks, for one slow second, like a woman who has just realized that the contract she signed does not have a clause for the way the elevator smells.
"There are three guest rooms," I say. "You take whichever. I won't —"
"I know you won't."
"Just so it's said."
"It's said."
We get out of the car. The doorman does not blink. The driver pops the trunk. There are two suitcases and a garment bag in the trunk; her assistant brought them down from her place this afternoon, while we were getting dressed, while she was in her own apartment for what, I realize now, may have been the last time for six months.
I take the garment bag. She takes the smaller case. The doorman gets the bigger one. We walk into the lobby together, and the lobby is quiet, and the elevator is empty, and her shoulder, at the elbow level, is one inch from mine for the entire ride to the top floor, and I do not move it, and she does not move it, and the elevator number ticks the way numbers tick when you are trying not to count them.
The doors open into the foyer of the penthouse.
§4 — Cliffhanger
She steps in first, because she is the kind of woman who steps in first, and because my arm, the bad one, has started to do the thing where it tells me I drank too much champagne. I follow with the garment bag.
She stops.
I do not realize she has stopped, at first. I am one step behind her, looking at the back of her head, at the place where her hair has come a quarter-inch loose at the nape, and so I almost walk into her.
I look up.
The entry table is small. It is a piece of furniture I have not, technically, looked at in three years; it is a piece of furniture I have walked past six times a day and not looked at. On the entry table is a framed photograph. The frame is silver. It is the only photograph in the apartment. It has been there since the week I moved in.
In the photograph, Cole is laughing. He is twenty-two. He is wearing the gray hoodie, the one with the bleach stain on the cuff, the one our mother kept in a Ziploc bag in a closet for nine months and gave to me, finally, on the anniversary, with the kind of look that means don't make me hold this anymore. He has his arm around me. I am eighteen. I am laughing the way you laugh when the person next to you is the funniest person in the world and the world is — for one full second of one Tuesday in May — the kind of place where neither of you has anything wrong with him.
I have never moved the photograph. I have also never, in three years, brought a single person into this apartment who would have a reason to look at it.
Reagan looks at it.
I cannot move. I cannot — the doorman, somewhere behind me, is asking where to put the big case. I cannot answer him. I cannot answer her. I cannot, in this moment, do anything except watch a woman I have known for fifteen days look at the only thing in my life that is not, technically, mine, and feel my entire chest do the thing it does in the second after a hit, when the air has not yet decided whether or not it is coming back.
She does not turn around.
"Maddox," she says, very quietly. "Who is this."
— to be continued in Ep3