Chapter 82 LAST NIGHT

Chapter 82 LAST NIGHT
Mei POV

Getting ready for the last night of the festival is a different experience from getting ready for the others.

For one thing I know what I am walking into. The crowds and the music and the lanterns and the particular smell of lilies that has become the smell of this entire week, layered into everything, impossible to separate from the rest of it. For another thing I know it is the last one, which gives the whole process of putting on shoes and brushing hair a specific quality of weight that the previous nights did not have.

Tomorrow the festival ends.

The day after, Toki Miyuki closes the theater.

Unless tonight goes the way it needs to go.

I sit on my bed with the photograph in my hand and I look at the little girl's smile and I think about what I am going to say to Cal when the moment comes. I have rehearsed several versions of this conversation since the afternoon and none of them are satisfying because they all require me to explain why I did not tell him sooner and the explanation is not one that will land well.

The ghost asked me not to, I will say.

And Cal will look at me with the expression he saves for things that are technically possible and professionally indefensible and he will say something precise and devastating about the hierarchy of communication on an active investigation and he will be right, and I will stand there and receive it, and then we will move forward because that is what TFP does.

I look at the photograph one more time.

Then I tuck it carefully into the small pocket of the jacket I am wearing tonight, the only pocket in any item of clothing I have brought to Hollow Crest, and I stand up.

There is a knock at my door.

"Come in," I call, already knowing by the timing and the specific rhythm of it.

Sonja opens the door.

She looks at me once and then her eyes travel the room with the systematic assessment of someone who has arrived to do a job and is checking the available resources.

"Sit," she says, producing her bag from behind her.

I sit.

"The kimono is at the inn apparently," she says, settling behind me and beginning to work on my hair with the focused efficiency of a person who does not consider what she is doing to be optional. "Sachi is sending someone for it."

"I was not going to wear the kimono tonight," I say.

"You're wearing it," she says, in the tone of someone for whom this is not a discussion.

"Sonja—"

"It is the last night. You are wearing it."

I open my mouth and then close it because she has pulled my hair with the specific amount of force that communicates the limits of her patience and I respect those limits.

"Fine," I say.

She works in silence for a moment, her hands efficient and certain. Outside my window the festival grounds are audible even from here, the early evening sounds of everything being assembled for the final night. Music from somewhere, the particular energy of a crowd building toward its own conclusion.

"How is your head?" I ask.

She makes a small sound. "Fine. It was days ago."

"I know but you hit it pretty hard."

"I said it's fine," she repeats, and her voice has the particular clipping that means she is not going to discuss this but she is also aware that being asked is a form of being cared about and she does not entirely hate it.

I let it go.

"Sonja," I say, after a moment.

"Hm."

"Did you find out who left the moon lily on your bed?"

Her hands go very still in my hair for exactly two seconds. Then they resume.

"No," she says.

I look at the mirror in front of me. Her expression is composed and busy and entirely unhelpful.

"Declan—" I start.

"Don't," she says.

"I was only going to say—"

"I know what you were going to say and I said don't."

I press my lips together and look at my own reflection.

Wise Obasan said moon lily dust remains on the hands for days. She saw it on Emeka's hand, she saw it on mine, she saw it on Cal's hand, and she made her declarations. She looked at Declan's hand and she saw it there too.

She looked at Sonja's hand and saw that she received one.

She did not say anything about Sonja's hand having given one.

But Wise Obasan also said that Ren had given no moon lily, which Declan suggested was the explanation for Sonja's, and Ren is the one person whose hand the old woman did not examine because Sonja pulled him away before the ancient matchmaker could get there.

I think about table twelve.

I think about the man who was not tall and not slender and who sent a flower across a dining room with theatrical mystery because he wanted to speak to someone specific and had decided that the language of this festival was the right way to say it.

I think about Declan waving that someone over in the hall and then steering me in the opposite direction very deliberately and very quickly.

I say nothing about any of this.

"Almost done," Sonja says, which is her way of changing a subject she has decided to leave behind.

"Thank you," I say.

She makes another small sound that is not quite acknowledgment and not quite dismissal.

There is a knock at the door.

"The kimono," she says, and goes to get it.

The kimono is more beautiful the second time.

I do not know why this should be true but it is, standing in front of the mirror with the purple brocade and the silver threads catching the lamplight, the whole thing feeling less strange and more simply right than it did on the first night. Sonja has done something with my hair that involves the hairpin Declan gave me from the archive hall and several other small clips that she has not explained and I have not asked about, and the result is something that makes me look, briefly and surprisingly, like someone who knows what they are doing.

I look at myself for a moment.

I think about Cal saying you looked beautiful tonight.

I think about room fifteen and the way he said it to the space between his door and mine, not quite directed at me and not quite not, and the way I leaned against my door in the dark afterward and felt the words land in my chest and stay there.

I think about over my dead body, said under his breath in a room full of men, when someone suggested Jasper might be proposing to me.

I think about a moon lily on my bed in the moonlight.

I breathe in slowly.

"Ready?" Sonja says from behind me.

I look at my reflection one more time.

The photograph is in my pocket. The case is almost done. After tonight everything changes regardless of how it goes, and I have been holding things for five days and tonight I am going to let them go and see what happens when the whole shape of what I know is finally in the hands of the person who knows how to do something with it.

"Ready," I say.

The halls of the inn are loud with the energy of a last night.

Doors opening and voices and the particular excitement of people who have been building toward something all week and have arrived at the end of it. We navigate through it toward the dining room where the group agreed to meet before heading out, Sonja slightly ahead, her long dress cutting through the crowd with the authority of someone who expects space to appear and generally finds it does.

I follow in her wake.

Emeka finds me first, appearing from the dining room doorway with a warm smile and the particular relief of someone who has been managing a crowd and is glad to see a familiar face.

"Mei. You look wonderful."

"So do you," I say, and he does, in the same near-formal clothes as the previous nights with a small lily tucked into his lapel that catches me off guard.

He notices me noticing.

"From the festival grounds," he says. "Naomi gave them to the whole cast. A thank you."

Something in the way he says Naomi's name has a careful quality that I file but do not mention.

We go in.

The dining room is full and warm, all of TFP present except Ren who arrives a moment later with the specific unhurried pace of someone who has never once in his life been late for anything important and knows it.

Cal is at the far end of the table.

He looks up when I come in.

His expression does not change. It never does in public, in a group setting, in the ordinary visible moments of a workday. But I have been cataloguing the quality of his attention for two years and the specific quality it has right now is different from the one it had at breakfast this morning and from the one it has when he is looking at camera screens or listening to Ren's reports.

I look down at my tea cup and sit next to Emeka.

Declan appears beside me, drops into his chair, and immediately leans toward me with his voice lowered.

"Ready for tonight?"

I think about the photograph in my pocket.

"Yes," I say.

He studies my face for a moment and whatever he sees in it satisfies him.

"Good," he says.

Across the table Xiao Shen is sitting with the composed stillness she always has in group settings, her hands folded, her attention moving between the door and the table with the systematic quality of someone tracking multiple things at once. She glances at the kimono. Something moves in her expression briefly and settles back into composure.

Sachi arrives last, flushed and slightly breathless, and takes the empty chair beside Xiao Shen with a smile that has a different quality tonight than his usual ones, something underneath the warmth that is not theater and not performance.

He looks at me for just a moment.

I look back at him.

Tonight, I think.

He looks away.

"Well then," Cal says, setting down his tea cup with the particular finality of a person ending a preparation and beginning a next thing. "Shall we?"

Everyone begins to stand, collecting themselves, and in the movement and the noise of it I feel the photograph in my pocket like a small weight that has been there for five days and is about to not be there anymore.

I stand.

I look at the door.

The last night of the Festival of Lilies is waiting for all of us on the other side of it.

I follow everyone out.