Chapter 40: Brothers

I did not go with Damien to Marcus's apartment.

He did not ask me to come and I did not offer because this was one of those moments that belonged entirely to the two people inside it and adding a third person would have changed the chemistry of it in ways that would have made honesty harder and performance easier and honesty was the only thing that was going to be useful tonight.

He left at seven.

Noah was asleep by seven thirty with Gerald and the cat which was a new development because Eleanor had apparently decided that the cat was going to Brooklyn with us for the week which the cat had received with its customary comprehensive indifference and which Noah had received with an enthusiasm that suggested this had been his plan all along.

I went to the studio.

Not because I had decided to paint. Because the studio was where I went when things were too large to sit with in ordinary rooms and needed the particular quality of the north facing windows even at night when the north facing windows were simply dark glass reflecting the city back at me.

I stood in the center of the room.

The painting of the woman in the doorway was on the east wall where I had hung it after it dried and I looked at it in the low lamp light and thought about Victoria Haines sitting across from Gregory Rearden with a cream colored document between them and the practiced composure of a woman who had learned to be several things to several people simultaneously and had been doing it for fourteen months without anyone seeing through it.

I had liked her.

That was the part I was sitting with.

In Damien's apartment that morning when she had walked in with her key and her cold blue eyes I had felt something for her that was complicated and human and not entirely unsympathetic. I had watched her hold Serena's hands in the kitchen and had read it as genuine and had been moved by it.

Had any of it been genuine.

I did not know.

That was the honest answer and I held it without trying to resolve it into something cleaner because clean was not always available and forcing it produced something that felt like clarity but was actually just a simpler lie.

I picked up a brush.

I did not plan what came out.

What came out was a room.

Not this studio. A different room. Darker and more ambiguous with two figures in it whose faces I did not define because the faces were not the point. The point was the space between them. The particular charged quality of a space between two people who are both performing something for the other and are both aware that they are performing and are watching each other perform with the focused attention of an audience that is also a participant.

I painted for an hour.

Then the studio door opened.

I had not locked it.

I turned.

Damien was standing in the doorway.

He was back earlier than I expected. His expression was not the controlled surface of a man who had just had a difficult conversation and was managing it. It was something more complicated than that. Something that had been through several stages of processing on the drive back and had arrived at a place that was neither resolution nor devastation but somewhere between the two that had its own particular texture.

He looked at the painting.

Then at me.

"You're back early," I said.

"Marcus had already gone through everything," he said. He came into the studio and sat on the floor beneath the windows with the unhurried ease of a man who had been sitting on this floor long enough to have a relationship with it. "He had been sitting with Catherine's photograph for four hours before I arrived and had done what Marcus does when he is processing something painful which apparently is to work."

I set down my brush and sat beside him.

"He had documents," Damien said quietly. "His own. Not Catherine's. Different ones. Things he had noticed over the past three months that had not made sense individually and that the photograph assembled into a picture he did not want to see."

"He had already figured out parts of it," I said.

"More than parts," Damien said. "Marcus is not stupid. He has never been stupid. He is wounded and ambitious and those things have been louder than his intelligence for a long time but underneath them the intelligence was always there." He paused. "He knew something was wrong with Gregory. He had been feeling it for weeks. He told himself it was his own guilt about the filing and the withdrawn motion and the general disarray of the past month." He paused. "It was not guilt."

"He trusted him," I said.

"He trusted him because Gregory was useful," Damien said. "And because useful felt like loyalty when you had been without loyalty for a long time and were not being careful about the distinction."

I looked at him.

"How is he," I said.

Damien was quiet for a moment.

"Angry," he said. "The specific kind of angry that is mostly grief with an edge on it." He looked at his hands. "He asked me something tonight that I was not prepared for."

"What," I said.

He looked at me.

"He asked me if I had ever loved Victoria," he said. "Not whether I had been in love with her. Whether I had loved her. As a person. As someone in my life."

I waited.

"I told him the truth," Damien said. "Which is that I had cared for her in the way you cared for someone who was important to you at a specific time in your life. But that love in the way he meant it, the specific accountable daily chosen love of someone you intend to keep, I had not felt that with Victoria." He paused. "He was quiet for a long time after that."

"Because," I said carefully.

"Because he does feel that," Damien said quietly. "For her. Despite everything. Despite the photograph and the documents and fourteen months of being used as a method. He looked at me across his kitchen table and said I love her Damien and I do not know what to do with that when the person I love is the person who did this."

The studio was very quiet.

I thought about what it meant to love someone who had used you. The particular specific cruelty of it. Not the cruelty of being used, which was its own kind of damage. The cruelty of loving them anyway and having to hold both things simultaneously.

"What did you tell him," I said.

"I told him that was his to carry," Damien said. "Not mine to resolve. That what he felt was real regardless of what she did and that real feelings did not require the person who inspired them to deserve them." He looked at the painting on the east wall. "I told him that the feeling was his. The decision about what to do with it was also his."

I looked at him.

"That was the right thing to say," I said.

"I don't know," he said honestly. "It was the true thing. Whether it was the right thing I won't know for a while."

We sat on the studio floor in the lamp light with the city outside the dark windows doing its restless amber burning and the painting of the woman in the doorway on the east wall and the new painting on the easel still wet and unnamed.

"There is something else," Damien said.

I looked at him.

"Marcus told me something about Victoria," he said. "Something she told him three weeks ago that he did not understand at the time and that makes considerably more sense now."

"Tell me," I said.

"She told him she was pregnant," Damien said.

The studio went completely still.

I stared at him.

"Marcus's," he said immediately. "He has no doubt about that. The timing is clear. But the complication is." He paused. "Victoria told Gregory about the pregnancy the same day she told Marcus."

I looked at him.

"Why would she tell Gregory," I said.

"Because Gregory's plan requires Victoria inside the auction on December fifteenth," Damien said. "And a pregnant woman in her first trimester who is navigating that information privately is a different variable than the composed strategic asset he has been managing." He paused. "Gregory told her the pregnancy did not change anything."

I stared at him.

"He told a pregnant woman," I said carefully, "that his plan came first."

"Yes," Damien said.

Something moved through me that was not entirely about Gregory Rearden or his plan or December fifteenth.

Something older and more immediate.

My hand moved without thinking to my own stomach and then I became aware of it moving and stopped and looked at Damien and found him already looking at me with those dark eyes that had already made the connection and were waiting with the careful patience of a man who understood that some realizations needed to arrive on their own.

"She is on the wrong side of this," I said quietly.

"Yes," Damien said.

"And she is pregnant," I said.

"Yes," he said.

"And Gregory told her that did not change anything," I said.

"Yes," he said.

I looked at my hands in my lap.

Two women. Different situations. Different choices. Different men.

But the same particular specific moment of looking at a positive result and understanding that the arithmetic had permanently changed.

"Damien," I said.

"I know," he said.

"She might not be as committed to December fifteenth as Gregory believes," I said.

"No," he said. "She might not be."

I looked at him.

"I want to talk to her," I said.

He was quiet for a moment.

"Mia," he said carefully.

"Not as strategy," I said. "Not as a way to remove an element from Gregory's plan. I want to talk to her as one person to another about something that is not December fifteenth at all."

He looked at me for a long moment.

"You understand who she is," he said. "What she has been doing."

"I understand who she has been," I said. "I am interested in who she might choose to be." I held his gaze. "People make different choices when the stakes change. Her stakes changed the day she told Marcus about the pregnancy and Gregory told her it did not matter."

Damien looked at the painting on the east wall.

The two figures in the charged ambiguous space.

"Call her," he said quietly.

I picked up my phone.

Then I set it down.

"Tomorrow," I said. "Tonight is ours."

He looked at me.

The lamp was warm above us and the city burned outside and the studio was quiet in the way it was quiet when it was just us in it and I looked at Damien on the floor beside me and felt the particular specific accumulated weight of the day. The folder and the photograph and the shell companies and the corrupted board members and Victoria and Marcus and Gregory and December fifteenth and all of it sitting on the studio floor between us like something that needed to be set aside for the next several hours.

I moved toward him.

He went still in the way he went still when I moved toward him. That complete arrested attention.

I pushed him gently back against the wall beneath the windows and he let me and looked up at me with those dark eyes that were doing the thing they did in rooms like this one at times like this one which was stop managing everything and simply be present.

"Mia," he said. Quiet and low.

"I know," I said. "I just need it to be quiet for a while."

"Okay," he said.

I kissed him.

Slowly and without urgency in the way I had learned from him, taking his time and applying it to both of us, and he kissed me back with his hands warm at my waist and then warm at my back pulling me closer and the studio was warm around us and the city burned outside.

I pulled back just enough to look at him.

His face in the lamp light was the most open version of itself. All the architecture down. All the careful management dissolved. Just him, entirely present, entirely mine, looking at me with those dark eyes that were warm and wanting and entirely focused.

"The floor is hard," he said quietly.

"I know," I said.

"We have a bed," he said.

"I know," I said.

"Mia."

"In a minute," I said.

Something moved across his face. That almost smile becoming the real one.

Then his hands moved and mine moved and the lamp stayed warm above us and the city went on burning outside the dark windows entirely indifferent to what was happening inside the studio with the north facing windows and the painting of the woman in the doorway watching from the east wall.

Later we lay on the studio floor with his jacket spread beneath us and my head on his chest and his hand moving in those long slow strokes up and down my back and the lamp casting its warm circle above us.

His heartbeat was slow and steady beneath my ear.

"I want to ask you something," I said into the quiet.

"Ask," he said.

"December fifteenth," I said. "The plan. Walking into the auction with everything Catherine gave us and doing it publicly and ending Gregory's plan in the room he chose." I paused. "Are you afraid."

He was quiet for a moment.

"Yes," he said honestly.

"Of Gregory," I said.

"Of the things I cannot control," he said. "The board members. The timing. The variables I do not know yet." He paused. "Of something going wrong in a way I cannot fix."

I lifted my head and looked at him.

"I need you to know something," I said.

"Tell me," he said.

"Whatever happens on December fifteenth," I said. "Whatever Gregory has planned and whatever variables we cannot control and whatever goes wrong in ways we cannot fix." I held his gaze steadily. "I will be beside you in that room."

He looked at me.

"The whole time," I said. "I will not step back or step away or find a reason to be somewhere else. I will be exactly where I am right now." I paused. "Beside you."

He reached up and touched my face.

His thumb along my cheekbone.

I leaned into it.

"You know what I am going to say," he said quietly.

"Say it anyway," I said.

"I love you," he said. Simply and completely and with the full weight of everything it had taken to get to a place where he could say it like that. Without management or architecture or any of the structures he had built to keep it at a manageable distance.

Just the words.

Just true.

"I know," I said.

He pulled me back down and I settled against him and the studio was warm and quiet around us.

And then his phone on the floor beside us lit up.

We both looked at it.

Not Marcus. Not Eleanor. Not Catherine.

A number neither of us recognized.

Damien picked it up.

He read the message.

His entire body changed.

Not the controlled management of something difficult arriving. Something faster and more immediate than that. Something that moved through him like a current and left a different quality of stillness in its wake.

He sat up.

I sat up with him.

"What," I said.

He turned the phone toward me.

The message was from the unknown number.

It said three things.

The first was Gregory Rearden's home address.

The second was a time. Tonight. Forty five minutes from now.

The third was six words that made the December fifteenth plan, carefully assembled over the past three hours in Eleanor's brownstone and the studio floor and Marcus's kitchen, irrelevant.

Six words that meant everything had to change.

Tonight.

The six words were.

He knows. He moved the date forward.

I looked at Damien.

He was already standing.

Already reaching for his phone.

Already calling Catherine.

Because December fifteenth was no longer December fifteenth.

And Gregory Rearden was no longer waiting.