Chapter 246 Celebratory Dinner

Chapter 246 Celebratory Dinner
Chapter Two Hundred And Forty-Three

Nathan looked at her.

He thought about the parking garage and Clara Beaumont in her good coat standing in front of his car with the desperation of someone who had run out of options.

He thought about the comments and the awards and the eight hundred thousand shares on an interview.

He thought about Adam’s lawyers and the deteriorating timeline and the chain that had his name in it.

He thought about not having a plan and Monica knowing he did not have a plan and the specific quality of being in this kitchen with that truth between them.

“I am working on it,” he said.

“That’s not an answer,” Monica bit out, closing her eyes in frustration, “That’s just a useless statement that sounds like an answer. Why do you do this?!”

“Monica.”

“Come up with something,” she said. Her voice had come back down from the heat but had not arrived at warmth. It was flat and direct and tired in the way of a woman who had been carrying more of a shared problem than she had agreed to carry. “Or I will. And you won’t like my version.”

She left the bar, and stormed back to the living room.

He stood at the counter with his drink and the silence of a room that had just contained a significant amount of feeling and was now empty.

He thought about her last sentence.

He thought about what Monica’s version would look like.

He thought about what his version needed to look like.

He set the glass down.

He stood in the front for a long time, alone, with no plan, in a house that was not peaceful, in a city where a woman he had underestimated was winning everything, and he thought with the focused, unpleasant attention of a man who understood that the time for waiting for the right moment was over.

The moment was going to have to be made.

He just did not yet know it.



The argument had reached the particular stage where both of them were no longer arguing about the specific things they had started arguing about and were instead arguing about the accumulated weight of everything that had preceded this conversation.

To Nathan, this was the stage that meant nothing useful was going to be resolved and both of them knew it but neither had found the exit.

Monica was in the living room now, with her phone face up in front of her.

Judging from her jaw which was clenched, it was clear she was still reading coverage and was using the reading as fuel rather than information.

Nathan was at the counter, refusing to walk back to the living room and share the tension with Monica.

He had refilled his drink twice and was feeling a bit heady.

They had been in this configuration for approximately twenty minutes when the maid appeared in the kitchen doorway.

Her name was Freda and she had worked in the house for four years and had developed the specific professional instinct of someone who had learned to read the atmosphere of a room before entering it.

She read the atmosphere of the South wing now and absorbed it without reacting to it.

All she needed to do was deliver her message, and she did just that with the careful neutrality of someone who was going to say what she had been sent to say and then remove herself.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said, to the middle distance between them. “I wanted to let you know, in case you hadn’t heard. The Graves house called this afternoon while you were out, Mr Graves. There’s going to be a celebratory dinner at the main house this weekend. For Mrs Aria.” She paused. “The madam wanted to know if you’d be attending. I said I’d pass along the message.”

She left.

The living room was very quiet.

Nathan looked into his drink.

A celebratory dinner.

For Aria.

Another one.

He thought about the last celebratory dinner, which he had attended with the composed professionalism of a man who had spent years performing loyalty he did not feel, sitting at a table with people who were celebrating a woman he had been watching with increasing dread for months.

He had sat through it and smiled and raised a glass when the glass was raised and had gone ipsyairs with rage sitting on his chest.

He thought about sitting through another one.

He felt the thing that had been building in him for months, which he had been managing with the specific discipline of a man who understood that emotional displays were vulnerabilities, begin to move past the reach of his management.

“Nathan,” Monica said.

He muttered something in response.

He was not entirely certain afterward of the specific words.

He knew the register and the volume and the general content, which was the register of a man whose management had failed, at the volume of someone who was no longer interested in containment, with the content of accumulated months of fury finding the nearest available exit.

He knew it was loud.

He knew it was specific in the way that was not useful.

He knew, from Monica’s face, which had gone from the heated expression of their argument into something more alarmed, that it had been more than she had expected.

He picked up his keys from the counter.

He walked away from the bar, and went down the stairs. He went through the hallway and through the front door without stopping.

He got into his car, and drove off away from the house.

He did not have a destination when he started driving. He had direction, which was away, and he had speed, which was slightly above what the residential streets permitted.

He had the particular focused blankness of a man who was moving because movement was the only thing he was currently capable of.

The city moved around him.

He ended up at a bar in the mid-city district, the kind of bar that was not attached to any restaurant and did not serve food and had the specific quality of a place that understood its purpose was to provide alcohol to people who needed it without requiring them to also have dinner.

He sat at the bar and ordered whiskey.