It was the kind of gallery that sold art like some restaurants sold food, not for consumption or use but for the performance of consumption, so that to buy mattered more than to have and the price tag was the product.
Alora learned this within a span of four minutes.
She also knew, in those same four minutes, that she was the only person in the room who had ever had to choose between groceries and a bus pass, and that this could be seen in some frequency beyond her control, some band beneath conscious presentation that the people in this room were tuned into like animals tuned into weather.
They didn't react to it. Too perfect for reaction. But they noted it. Filed it. She sensed the filing going on behind the warm smiles and outstretched hands.
Ares had filled her in on the drive: gallery owner, Henri Lacasse, a partner at Miller Enterprises via a cultural investment fund James established in 2019. Three board members in attendance. A publication journalist in the arts. Be friendly, be short, allow me to take the lead on the business talk.
She had nodded. She had been short and cozy, allowing him to take the lead.
She was now good at the events. She didn't love them, but she had ceased dreading them, found the particular groove of performing us with Ares, learned the weight of his hand small of her back and the shorthand they were developing, a hint of pressure when he wanted her to deflect a conversation, her briefly resting hand on his arm when she needed an escape from one.
He and she meshed in public. This was what she tried not to think too directly about, because if she did, it led her down other trains of thought she didn't feel ready to board.
She was gazing at a large canvas — dark blues, something that could have been a coastline or could have been something else altogether, the kind of artwork that was whatever you brought to it — when she registered another person standing next to her.
She turned.
He was tall. Wider than Ares, constructed in a way that implied more ease than effort, hair dark and even a little lighter than Ares's and a jaw with the same architectural quality but softer, less like something carved and more like something shaped.
He was in a suit that cost as much as Ares's but wore it differently looser, more look how comfortable I am in expensive things, the precise radiance of a man who'd discovered that relaxed confidence registered as warmth to people who hadn't been paying enough attention.
His eyes were a light shade compared to Ares's. Grey-brown. And warm genuinely, convincingly warm, the sort of warm that one practiced to reach this degree.
He smiled at the painting.
He added: "It's meant to be the coast of Brittany. Henri purchased it at auction in Paris three years ago. I always thought that more like a bad dream."
She almost laughed. She caught it.
"You know Henri pretty well," she said.
"Long enough." He turned and reached for his hand with the ease of a man who had never once in his life needed to think about whether he belonged in a room. "Marcus Miller. And you're Alora. We're practically family."
Marcus.
She shook his hand.
Her face remained fixed precisely where it was.
He was very good.
That was the first item on her catalogue, while smiling and engaging in the lazy small talk of a gallery event and monitoring Ares's vicinity from the edges of her vision — Marcus Miller did this very, very well. The warmth was tried on to the extent it became hard to tell whether it was real.
The inquiries arrived in the natural cadence of conversation, mitts on, scrubbed clean of knowingness, interleaved with comments about the art, funny things said about a city that were actually funny and therefore completely disarming.
How are you finding the city? Have you always lived here? What do you do? I mean aside from the obvious, I mean what do you really do, what did you used to do?
Before.
The word too precise to be casual placed with a lightness.
She answered the easy ones and spun off the sharper ones with all the polish of four years playing difficult tables, and she watched him take in the spin without reacting to it — registering it, she got, making a record of it just as she was making a record of him.
He was gathering information. She could feel the architecture of it beneath the heat, how each question landed on top of the last question and put her in a particular way — it was not going in many directions; all they were quietly heading.
He wanted the shape of her. What she knew, what she wanted, who she was.
He wanted to know if she was the kind of problem you could fix or the kind that needed to be buried.
She smiled. She sipped her wine. She gave him surfaces.
She also noticed, out of the corner of her eye (the peripheral attention she'd been developing since she was old enough to know that rooms had dynamics and dynamics had consequences), that he'd put himself precisely in the quadrant of the gallery toward which Ares's back was turned.
Not accidentally.
And Ares shifted; every time it did, so did Marcus. A half-step, a hair's-delay, always the geometry of not being visible to Ares while somehow remaining all-visible to everyone else. Plausible, normal, unremarkable to anyone watching.
She was watching.
"You must find all this fairly overwhelming," Marcus said, sympathy painting his voice with a glossy finish so perfectly it was almost believable. "It's a lot to walk into. The name, the expectations, the —" he made a brief gesture at the room " — world."
"I manage," she said pleasantly.
"Of course you do." He smiled. "You seem remarkably — grounded. For someone in your position."
For someone in your position.
She turned the phrase over. You heard the thing under it — not quite of a piece with someone like you, but close enough to be its cousin.
"It's a gift," she said, with the smile she saved for customers who had to think she hadn't gotten them.
He laughed. Easy, warm, appreciative — and she caught a glimpse, just for half a second, just at the corners of it, something recalibrating behind his eyes. She'd surprised him. He'd expected easier.
Good.
Twenty minutes later Ares found her.
He materialized at her elbow with the quiet efficiency of a man who had been monitoring the room and that had come to a conclusion, his face this time even though his hand still sought out the small of her back as it always did while they were at events — automatic, practiced, except tonight there was something just a little different about it, something slightly more determined.
"Marcus," he said.
"Ares." Marcus's smile didn't waver. "Your wife has been such good company. You're a lucky man."
"I know," Ares said. Flat. The two words hitting like a ton that had nothing to do with warmth.
Marcus's smile lasted for another three seconds. Then he bowed out with utter nonchalance, a dip of his head to Alora, a meander in the direction of the bar that seemed instinctual.
Ares watched him go.
The quality of his stillness next to her changed.
The car.
Ten minutes from the gallery, the city doing its nighttime thing outside windows and the quiet between them felt differently textured than car silences often do — not charged at all but also precise, careful. The tight kind. The kind that had a shape.
She glanced at her hands resting in her lap.
"When your back was turned, he went straight for me," she said.
"I know," Ares said. To the window.
"He was very cautious about that. "He shifted every time you moved.
"I know."
She looked at him. "You saw."
"I see most things." His jaw tightened in that way that signaled something was being held back. "What did he ask you."
She endured it — the questioning, the order of questions asked, the particular ones that most closely had been swaddled in comradeship. She named them in order. She saw his jaw clench piece by piece, slow bubbling escalation, like a vice.
He was silent for a very long time.
The city passed. A red light. The amber of a tunnel specific.
She waited.
She had discovered that his silences came in different species and this was the processing kind, the kind that culminated in something precise instead of something reactive, and to interrupt it was like interrupting a calculation mid-step — you just needed to let it finish.
The car climbed out of the tunnel and into the night.
He said, "The before question.
"Yes."
"He was searching for the join," Ares said. "The part of the story that falls apart. Something he can pull." His voice was even. Perfectly even, in the way that meant being even was costing something. "He has been making a case for six months. The inheritance challenge isn't only legal. He depends on the marriage appearing criminal. If he gets something that makes you look strategic anything from before, like evidence you knew who my father was, that you pursued the relationship intentionally, he can build a timeline."
"I didn't know who James was," she said.
"I know that," he said. Immediately. No qualification.
She looked at him.
He stared out the window, his jaw locked, a mirror of the city in his eyes.
She said: "He's going to keep trying."
"Yes."
"He'll find another angle."
"He'll try several." A pause. "Marcus is patient. He's been patient for years. He was only moved to act once my father got sick, which tells you the type of patience we're talking about."
She sat with that.
She considered the gallery, how Marcus's exact positioning had made a triangle with the walls around him, his questions covered in heat like something disgusting when it is wrapped up nicely and given as a gift. She remembered Cole Mercer and Todd Greer and the text from the unknown number, and she thought: now there were two of them.
"One man and one method, the same thing two men, two methods but they're coming for the same target."
Her.
"What do we do?" she whispered.
He withdrew his gaze from the window.
He was looking right at her, and in the dim light of the car his eyes were doing the electric thing, the switched-on thing, and beneath that something she'd been collecting since their time in the ICU elevator, not cold this wasn't professional not the assessing look she'd been a subject of since day one.
He added: "You never interact with him in solitude. Not if they're at an event, not on the phone, not in any context. His voice was steady and final. "I mean that."
And he'll discover how to reach me when —"
"Alora." He said her name the way he did when he wanted her full attention and knew he already had it. "Don't be alone with him. Not ever."
Three words. The weight of a wall.
She scanned him.
"You're worried."
He gazed up at her for a moment.
He said: "I'm thorough."
She almost responded: that's not what I said. She looked at his face — the jaw and the eyes and that thing beneath evenness which was not professional concern, not strategic assessment, and was nothing she had a clear label for — and made the decision, tonight anyway, to let this one have thorough.
She turned her gaze back at the window.