Chapter 124 The Last Night
Chapter 124 The Last Night
POV: Carly
The reception wound down around midnight.
Lucien's family had mostly gone by eleven, the older ones first and then gradually the rest, until the terrace was down to the core Monroeson household and a handful of people who seemed comfortable enough to stay until the candles burned lower.
Freida and Lucien had disappeared at some point after eleven without announcement, which Deacon had marked with a theatrical toast that made Reba shove him hard enough to spill his drink, and the terrace had laughed, and even Victor's mouth had done something in the direction of a smile before it corrected itself.
She had been watching Victor all evening.
Not obviously. She had been watching all of them all week in the way she watched most rooms, peripherally and continuously, building the picture incrementally. But Victor specifically she had been watching with the additional lens of what Deacon had said about him.
Victor plays things long.
She kept turning it over.
She thought about the fourth floor office and what had come out of it. She thought about the way Victor had looked at Freida on the aisle. She thought about the silence at dinner on the first night that he had apparently been using as approval for something.
She thought about a man who had raised Niko in a specific way and had then watched him leave and had not stopped him and had not tried to bring him back in the four years since.
She did not know yet what to make of Victor Monroeson.
She knew she was not finished making it.
Now it was past midnight and the terrace was quieter and she was sitting at the edge of it with her shoes off and her feet on the cold stone and Niko beside her looking at the grounds.
The string quartet had packed up an hour ago.
Someone had put on music from somewhere inside the house that drifted out through the open doors, something low and unhurried.
"Tell me something." She said.
He looked at her.
"Something I don't know about this house." She said. "Something good."
He thought about it.
"There's a room on the third floor." He said. "West side. It was mine for a while when I was young. Before I moved to the room I was in now." He looked at the grounds. "It faces west so it catches the last of the light in the evenings. In summer the light in there is." He paused. "It's extraordinary. It lasts longer than it should."
She looked at the dark third floor windows.
"I used to go in there with my sketchbook." He said. "When it was bad. When the house felt the way it gets. I'd go and sit in that light and draw until the light was gone and it was enough." He looked at his hands. "It was usually enough."
She looked at him.
"Is it still there." She said.
"Rooms don't change." He said.
She stood up.
She picked up her shoes in one hand and held the other out to him.
He looked at it.
"Take me." She said.
He looked at her face.
He took her hand.
They went inside.
The room was exactly as he had described and also nothing she could have pictured from the description.
Small. Not cramped but genuinely small, in the way of rooms that had been built for a specific purpose and had not expanded with the house around them. A window seat along the west wall, the glass dark now with the night outside. A small fireplace, cold and clean. The walls bare where everything else in this house was covered. Just plaster and the faint impression of where things had hung once and been removed.
She went to the window seat.
She sat.
He came and sat beside her and they looked out the dark window at the grounds below and the tree line beyond and the specific quality of a view that must have been different in the summer light he had described.
She tried to picture it.
Golden light lasting longer than it should in a small room. A boy with a sketchbook and the specific quality of needing somewhere that was just his.
She looked at him.
He was looking at the window.
"What were you drawing." She said. "When you came here as a child."
He was quiet for a moment. "Everything." He said. "Whatever I could see. The grounds. The tree line. Whatever was visible from this window." He paused. "Whatever was in my head that needed somewhere to go."
She looked at the dark window.
"You've been drawing your whole life." She said.
"Yes." He said.
"And before you drew me." She said. "Was there anyone else."
He looked at her. "No one that I can look back at now and understand the way I understand the drawings of you." He said. "Technically competent. Emotionally absent." He looked at his hands. "I didn't know the difference until I drew you."
She felt that land.
She leaned her head against his shoulder.
He rested his cheek against the top of her head.
They sat in the small west room in the dark house with the night outside the window and the music still faintly audible from the terrace below and the specific quality of a silence that did not need filling.
She thought about the week.
The studio at four in the morning. Freida in the morning room. Victor's sealed expression cracking for sixty seconds on an aisle. Harrison in the library. Isabel in the garden saying I am going to have to ask instead of arrange. The dagger in its box. The ceremony. The reception. Deacon dropping the performance and putting it back on.
She thought about all of it and felt the shape of it settling into something she could hold.
"I'm glad we came." She said. Again. Meaning it more now than she had on the dance floor.
"I know." He said.
"Not for the covenant." She said. "Not for any of the larger reasons. I'm glad because of this room." She looked at the window. "Because you told me about it and I wanted to see it and now I have."
He turned his head and pressed his lips to her hair.
She closed her eyes.
"I love you." She said.
The room went completely still.
She felt him go still under her cheek.
She had not planned to say it.
It had come out the way things came out around him, with their own momentum, before she had decided to let them. She had felt it for a while. She was not certain when she had started feeling it and was not going to try to locate the exact moment because the exact moment was probably somewhere she could not reach.
She had said it.
It sat in the small west room between them.
His hand, which had been resting on the back of the window seat, moved to her hair. Slow and careful. His fingers moving through it the way they did when he was in the process of deciding something.
"Carly." He said. Her name in the specific register he used when something was too large for other words.
She lifted her head.
She looked at him.
He was looking at her with the expression. The full version of it. The one that was not managed or performed or aimed at anyone else in the room because there was no one else in the room.
"I love you." He said back. Quietly and completely. "I have been loving you since October without knowing what to call it and I know exactly what to call it now."
She felt it everywhere.
She kissed him.
He kissed her back with everything, his hands on her face, the cold of the window seat and the dark of the room and all of it reduced to this specific moment in this specific place.
She pulled back.
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
"Okay." She said softly. Almost to herself.
"Okay." He agreed.
She leaned back against his shoulder.
He put his arm around her.
They sat in the room where he had come with his sketchbook when it was bad and the house felt the way it got, and she thought that the light in summer must be extraordinary and that she was going to come back in June to see it.
She was going to come back.
She closed her eyes.
The music drifted up from the terrace below.
The night kept going.
POV: Niko
He did not sleep.
She fell asleep against his shoulder at some point after one and he sat in the window seat in the dark and did not move because moving would have woken her and he was not ready for this room to change back into whatever came after it.
He looked at the dark window.
He thought about the last time he had been in this room.
He had been nineteen, in human terms. The year before he left. He had come here the way he had always come here, with his sketchbook and the specific intention of staying until the feeling passed, and he had sat in this window seat and drawn the tree line until his hand stopped shaking and then he had looked at the drawings and felt nothing and had known something had changed.
The light had stopped being enough.
He had left a few months later.
He looked at Carly asleep against his shoulder.
I love you, she had said. With the specific quality of something that had been true for a while and was being said for the first time, and the two things were different but both of them mattered.
He had said it back because it was the truest thing he had said in this house in four hundred years of being in it.
He had been loving her since October.
He could locate it now, more specifically than he had been able to say in the moment. The first time she had shoved him in the shoulder in the classroom. The way she had looked at the church window. The festival. The bus. The first time she had laughed the real one in his presence. The sketchbook opening under his hand before he had decided to open it.
It had been accumulating since October.
He pressed his lips to her hair.
He thought about the dagger.
He thought about what it meant that she had been in that room and the family had allowed it. He thought about trust and what it cost and what it built and the specific architecture of a thing that had to be chosen repeatedly to stay intact.
He was going to keep choosing it.
He looked at the dark window.
In summer the light lasted longer than it should.
He was going to bring her back in June to see it.
He closed his eyes.
He stayed exactly where he was.
The house was quiet all around them.
For the first time since he was a child, the quiet of it felt like the right kind.
Author's Note:
She said I love you in the small west room where he used to come when it was bad and it was not planned and it was the truest thing the room had heard in a very long time and he said it back and I need everyone to sit with I have been loving you since October without knowing what to call it because I wrote that line and then sat with it for an hour.