Lena has been on the lobby stairs for twenty minutes by the time I come down.
I know this because she texted me twice while I was getting ready, once to say she was in position and once to send a single question mark. I ignored both.
Rhett is in the doorway when I reach the bottom of the stairs. Dark suit, white shirt, no tie. He looks the way he always looks, which is like someone assembled him to be specifically difficult to ignore. He sees me, he stops.
He doesn't say anything.
He doesn't have to, because Lena is already leaning forward on the third step with her chin in her hands and she says, "I would like the record to show that I helped her pick that dress."
I walk past both of them to the door. "Let's go."
>>>
The Harrington Foundation dinner is everything I expected and nothing I was prepared for.
It's not the money, exactly. I've been in expensive rooms before. It's the specific quality of how people move inside them, the way every conversation is also a transaction, the way nobody says what they mean but everyone understands each other perfectly. There's a grammar to it that I don't speak natively and I'm aware of that the whole evening, aware the way you're aware of a sound you can't quite identify.
I shoot it because I always shoot things I don't understand. It helps me think.
Rhett moves through the room with the ease of a man who built it, which is more or less accurate. People orient toward him. Conversations redirect. He shakes two hands, declines three conversations in a way that doesn't look like declining, and ends up near a column by the far window where he can see most of the room.
Where he can see me, specifically, though I don't register this until later.
I am apparently interesting to watch tonight. Three different people approach me in the first hour and all three of them look slightly surprised by me, like I'm not what they were expecting to find in this room, which I probably am not. I don't mind. I ask them about themselves and they talk for ten minutes each and leave looking pleased, and I move on.
>>>
The woman finds me near the bar.
She's elegant in the way that requires maintenance, put together with the precision of someone who has thought carefully about the impression they intend to make tonight. She smiles at me first, which means she already knows who I am, and introduces herself before I can introduce myself.
Nadia Hartwell.
"You must be Caden's sister," she says, warm, like we're old friends completing an introduction that should have happened long ago. "He spoke about you. I was sorry to miss him before he left."
"Did you know him well?"
"We moved in the same circles." She means Rhett's circles. She says it easily, naturally, and in the same breath mentions Rhett in the tone of someone who has known him for years, close enough to read him. Far enough to still find him interesting.
"He's been different lately," she says. Almost to herself. Almost. "Have you noticed?"
I tell her I've only just met him.
She asks me about my photography. She asks where I'm studying, what I'm working on, what I'm hoping to do next. The questions feel like curiosity and I answer them genuinely, and it is only later, much later, that I will think about how one-directional the exchange was. How much she now knows about me and how little I know about her.
I dislike her immediately. I spend the next ten minutes convincing myself this is jealousy, which it might be, because she is beautiful and clearly comfortable in Rhett's world in a way I am not and will probably never be. Then I spend another ten minutes convincing myself I have no reason to be jealous of anything, which is when I realize the first round of convincing was itself evidence of something I'm not ready to name.
I get a fresh drink. I move away from the bar.
>>>
The man who corners me twenty minutes later is older, well dressed, and about eight inches too close from the first word. He asks what I do, then immediately answers for me based on something he has apparently decided about me from looking at me. He is telling me something about a gallery space he sits on the board of when I become aware that the space around me has changed.
Rhett is there.
He hasn't touched me. He hasn't said anything to the man. He's simply present, positioned, and the older man looks at him and something recalculates behind his eyes. He makes an excuse. He moves away.
Rhett doesn't comment on it. I don't either. We stand near the bar for a moment in silence that is not uncomfortable and then he drifts back toward the window and I go back to my camera.
>>>
The car is quiet on the way home.
I watch the city move past and think about three hours of tracking a room I don't belong in, of performing ease I don't entirely feel, of watching Rhett watch me without appearing to.
"You didn't have to do that," I say. The older man.
"I know."
"Thank you."
He doesn't answer. I look out the window.
I am tired in a way that has nothing to do with the hour. The specific exhaustion of paying attention to someone all night without admitting that's what you're doing, the kind that settles into your shoulders and stays.
I get out of the car. My phone rings before I've closed the door.
My father.
I answer because it's late and Warren doesn't call late without a reason. His voice is wrong before he finishes my name. Too careful. Like someone who has rehearsed a casual thing so many times it has stopped sounding casual.
"I was just thinking about you," he says. "Have you been sleeping all right?"
I wait.
"The dreams," he says. "You haven't been having the dreams again, have you?"
I stand on the pavement outside my building and the city moves around me and I think about every version of the nightmares I have never once described to my father.
"What dreams?" I say.