by Sophie Lark
As awkward as these conversations were to witness, they did free Anika up to do what she wanted, which was talk to James.
Honestly, she would be content just to sit and look at him across the table. He had such an easy confidence to his movements—the way that he tore a piece of his roll and buttered it, his large, flexible hands manipulating the knife. It gave her a little shiver, remembering how warm those hands were, how strong.
Even though it was a smaller dinner, he had taken just as much care in his appearance as he had for the gala. He looked tall and trim in his nicely cut suit. The suit was light gray, no tie, the collar of his shirt slightly open at the neck to show just the smallest bit of his throat. He had shaved earlier, his jaw clean and sharp below the soft line of his lips.
She dropped her gaze to the table—she shouldn’t stare at his lips. But, irresistibly, she looked up again. His mouth was curved in a slight smile, he was looking at her. She looked back into his blue eyes beneath their straight, dark brows—his eyes in which she could read almost any expression, as though he was speaking his thoughts directly to her.
What was he thinking right now? She would know if she kept looking in those eyes.
But at that moment, someone sank into the seat next to her. Marco had arrived at last, looking flushed and hot, and not in the best of moods. He wasn’t made more cheerful by the sight of their dinner companion.
“I didn’t know you were coming,” he said rudely to James.
“Neither did I,” James said, his tone easy. “Liam asked me last minute.”
“Oh is that Liam Doyle?” Marco asked, glancing over. “He has your house now, doesn’t he Anika? My father told me about that.”
“Liam is a friend of James as well,” Anika said. “They knew each other in California.”
Marco nodded, distracted. Anika had made sure the waiters left a salad for him, and he set to work eating it.
“I’m starving,” he said. “I missed lunch. And I couldn’t get away any earlier than this.”
“It’s fine,” Anika said. “Dinner just started.”
“What was all that today?” Bennet asked, breaking away from his conversation with Liam.
“Pardon?” Marco said, eating his salad.
“What was that group you had in the studio today? Wandering around everywhere?”
“They’re an investment group out of Asia,” Marco said shortly.
“Why were they there so long? It’s very distracting you know. And you really shouldn’t have so many people in without proper clearance. Plagiarism is rampant in our industry. At the very least, you have to confiscate everyone’s phones. They take pictures of the materials and the design boards, and the next thing you know some two-bit hack has ripped off half your ideas and sent some Frankenstein version walking down the spring runway.”
“Why don’t you let me handle our visitors,” Marco said through gritted teeth. “You can focus on those fabric samples you’re so concerned about, so maybe next time we’re not paying twice as much for materials as our competitors down the block.”
Bennet looked furious at this rebuke, but he didn’t dare argue. He swigged his champagne, muttering under his breath, “‘Axiom Investing’—sounds made-up to me. Bunch of corporate saboteurs most likely. Those Asian groups have more spies than legitimate employees. There’s no intellectual property laws over there, you know.”
Anika saw James glance up sharply at her father’s muttered complaint, but he didn’t say anything out loud. A moment later she saw him take out his phone, typing and scrolling quickly under the table. He might have been bored because Stella had tried to change the subject by launching into a debate about horse racing with Liam.
“Stallions are faster because they’re bigger and they have a longer stride!” she insisted.
“They’re bigger, sure,” said Liam, “but they don’t have any better stamina. The only reason you don’t see more fillies win the Triple Crown is because there’s less in the sport to begin with. Look at Black Caviar who just retired, she was one of the biggest winners the sport ever saw. No horse could beat her for consistency—twenty-five consecutive wins!”
“Then why are there more males at all?” Stella said, with the smugness of someone who has made an unarguable point.
“You know why,” Liam said. “Think about it—where’s the real money to be made? Not in prize money.”
Stella didn’t seem to see what he was getting at.
“The stud fees!” Liam said, “Three hundred thousand dollars per shot for Tapit. Once your winning horse retires, you can stud out a male horse as many times as you please. A female can only have so many colts.”
The waiters removed the empty salad plates and brought out the entree—filet with glazed carrots and goat cheese mashed potatoes.
Across the table, Stella and Liam were still at it. Stymied for statistics, Stella tried to argue intangibles like temperament. Liam, clearly enjoying himself, entreated Stella to consider the similarity between ability ratings.
Now that he had gotten some food in him, Marco seemed to chirk up as well.
“So these are all your protégés,” he said, glancing around the room at the students. “The ones who keep you away from me all week long.”
“These are the ones that graduated this year, yes,” Anika said.
“Do you keep tabs on them?” Marco said. “Do you make them pay your investment back if they become, say, Republican senators or garbage men?”
Anika knew he was joking, but she felt a bit sensitive. She was extremely protective of the program participants.
“There’s no expectation of what type of job they’ll get after school,” she said stiffly.
“But really, how necessary is it all anyway?” Marco asked lazily, sawing off a chunk of his filet. “Can’t they just get student loans?”
“Is that what you did?” James asked from across the table. “Graduated with a hundred and twenty K in debt and paid it back at a six percent interest rate with a forty-five-thousand-per-year job?”
“Hit a nerve, did I?” Marco said coolly. “No trust fund for the wunderkind? Well, you seem to have connected yourself anyway.” He looked over at Liam. “Did Anika set you up there? Were you one of her charity kids too?”
“Marco!” Anika said angrily.
“It’s alright,” James said. “I know it’s hard for him to imagine getting a job or starting a company without Daddy’s influence or Daddy’s money.”
“That’s quite the chip on your shoulder,” Marco said. “Especially since you’re one of the wicked one-percent yourself now. But you like to hold a grudge, don’t you?”
Anika cut across him, trying to diffuse the argument and return to the central point.
“It’s more complicated than getting a student loan,” she said. “Sixty-eight percent of the people in our program have to support one or more siblings as well as themselves. We don’t just help with tuition money, it’s also funding to cover living expenses. A lot of bright students from bad circumstances do get scholarships and grants, but they end up dropping out anyway because they get hit with too many other issues—illness in their families, abusive relationships, loss of housing—and they burn out. We try to provide support to help equalize the playing field for more than just tuition costs.”
“Very generous,” Marco said.
“It’s more just fair,” Anika said. “It’s hard to compete with your fellow students if you haven’t eaten all week.”
“You convinced me,” Marco said. “I can’t argue with someone so beautiful. If I don’t watch it, I’ll be a socialist by dessert.”
He was smiling at her in his charming way, but Anika was annoyed with him. She would have preferred to convince him with her argument, not her looks.
“I’m going to say hi to the others,” James said, pushing aside his half-eaten plate.
He walked over to the next table, to cries of welcome from Gwen, Hannah, and Calvin. Anika couldn’t help w
atching out of the corner of her eye to see if he pulled up a chair next to Hannah. James took the open seat on the opposite side of the table instead.
Hannah had her foot, still in its cast, propped up on an extra chair. This inconvenience hadn’t stopped her from wearing a stiletto on the other side, or from enjoying herself as much as ever from the look on her face and the glass of champagne in her hand.
Anika waved to them all. Honestly, she’d rather be sitting over there. Stella had given up on racehorses and was quizzing Marco about some resort in Palermo. Bennet was telling Aunt Molly what she ought to have done with her time in Portugal. Anika wished they wouldn’t talk so loudly, since most of the people in the room had probably hardly had a vacation in their lives, except maybe to Disneyworld.
Bennet and Stella would say she was being a martyr. But sometimes Anika felt that being born into wealth had balanced her on the blade of a knife. Every choice she made would pull her in the direction of either a spoiled, selfish, brat, or a relatively decent person. And sometimes it wasn’t obvious what direction you were going in at any given moment, or which way somebody else wanted to pull you.
The dessert course came out at last—lavender creme brûlée—and as the majority were finishing their food, Anika got up to introduce their first speaker: Rose Diaz, a woman who was one of the Red Line’s first graduates, back when Anika’s mother was still running the charity. She had since gone on to start a moving company with three locations.
Everyone clapped as Ms. Diaz took the stage and began talking about her experience growing up as the child of immigrants, and then developing Lupus in high school. Anika was annoyed to see that Marco and Stella were still talking, not listening to the speaker at all.
After Rose Diaz, they heard from Peter Walsch, who had become a chemistry teacher at a school in the Bronx. Then Anika got up once more to thank everybody for coming and asked everyone to give a final round of applause for this year’s graduates.
She called each one up on the stage in turn to receive a grab bag stuffed full of gift cards and items from local businesses, making sure to give each person plenty of time to have photos taken by family members in the audience.
As she descended the stairs of the stage for the last time, Anika felt her sapphire earring brushing against her left cheek, but not her right. Reaching up, she found only a bare lobe where her earring out to be.
A sick sense of horror washed over her. Trying to stay calm, she checked her hair and the folds of her gown to see if it had fallen and caught on any part of her person. But I t was nowhere to be found.
Frantically, Anika began to search the stage and the floor space around her table. By this point, Marco had noticed her distress.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I lost my mother’s earring,” Anika said.
Marco got down to help her search. Gwen, walking over to chat, soon joined them in their efforts, as did Hannah a moment later, hobbling around on her crutches. James enlisted the help of some of the waitstaff who were still in the process of clearing dishes and bringing refills of coffee.
Though in the end they had almost a dozen people looking, there was no luck. After an hour or more of combing the floor, after the banquet hall had cleared of guests, Anika had to resign herself to the fact that the earring would not likely be found.
“Maybe after the cleaners come,” Marco tried to console her. “Or someone might find it in their cuff or their bag tomorrow.”
Blinking back the tears that threatened to spill down her cheeks, Anika nodded dully.
It was only an earring, but of any object she owned, that was the thing that connected her most closely to her mother. She had seen Eleanor wear them dozens of times, and when she looked at herself in the mirror and saw those points of blue light glimmering on either side of her face, she had always felt safer, stronger, more capable, as if a small piece of her mother’s spirit lived inside those stones. Though she had the necklace and one earring still, the set had been broken. She cursed her carelessness.
“Come over to my place,” Marco whispered to her, his arm around her shoulders, “I’ll pour some wine, give you a massage—I can make you feel better.”
“That sounds really nice,” Anika said. “But honestly, I’m exhausted. I think I’ll just go home to bed if it’s all the same to you.”
She knew Marco was doing his best to cheer her up, but at the moment she just wanted to be alone.
Gwen offered to see the last of the people out the door and pay the waitstaff so Anika could leave.
“Thank you,” Anika said, giving her a hug.
She didn’t see James anywhere. Maybe he had already left. Bennet and Stella certainly had, after only a cursory glance around for her earring.
“You should have kept it in a safe, like I do with Mama’s diamonds,” Stella had said.
“You still have the other pieces,” Anika whispered to herself as she climbed in a cab. But she drove home feeling very empty inside.
19
Monday morning Anika went to work, still feeling melancholy over the loss of the earring. She was trying to shake it off, but she felt a strange sense of doom, as if her carelessness had caused a curse to fall upon her.
Marco had planned to meet her for lunch, but he texted her in the morning to say that Dominic had another relapse and was back in the hospital. It was clear from his follow-up messages that the prognosis wasn’t good.
That was the awful thing with a terminal illness. Though the end result was determined, the uncertainty of timing, combined with the inevitability of pain and suffering, were terrible to endure. Anika offered to come to the hospital, if only to bring lunch or to keep him company for a moment, but Marco declined.
I have a lot of work to do. I brought my laptop, he wrote.
Anika was busy herself. With Hannah unable to dash in and out of the office on errands, Anika was appreciating how very many things Hannah actually managed to get done in a day. Most of these now fell on Gwen’s shoulders, and much of Gwen’s work came to Anika.
Calvin had been admirably patient with Hannah’s requests to please grab her a sparkling water from the fridge, or turn down the air conditioning, or switch the record playing on their old radio. Now he was wearing headphones full time so he could politely ignore her. Anika had to holler at him or send an instant message if she wanted to get his attention.
At lunchtime, a car pulled into the lot behind their building and honked. Anika went to the window, thinking that Marco had found time to get away after all. Instead, she saw a tall, bearded blond man waving from the window of a silver Mercedes.
“Holy shit,” Anika said aloud, “is that Dr. Thor?”
“We’re going with Dr. Dreamy,” Gwen said. “It’s more alliterative.”
“His name is Adam,” Hannah said cheerfully, gathering up her crutches.
“I didn’t know doctors did house calls anymore,” Anika said.
“Oh, he’s been calling every day,” Hannah said. “He’s very attentive.”
Anika held the door open so Hannah could get through.
“And they say our healthcare system is no good,” she said with a smile.
Anika felt decidedly more buoyant the rest of the afternoon. She told herself it was because she was happy for Hannah.
The next day, Marco called Anika at work to ask if she would come meet him in the evening.
“Of course,” she said. “Do you want me to come to the hospital?”
“No,” he said, “I’ll pick you up. Dress warm.”
As it was still summer weather, Anika found it an odd request, but she didn’t press him on it. Instead, when she changed out of her work clothes that evening, she put on a dress with 3/4 sleeves and brought a denim jacket to go over it. When she looked through her jewelry for a pair of silver studs, she saw the box containing her sapphire set still open, the lone earring sparkling against the velvet.
Marco was waiting outside the car for her, looking sligh
tly nervous. He had probably come straight from the office, as he was wearing a dark suit. He ran his hands through his hair, tousling it. She supposed he was anxious about his father.
“You look incredible,” Marco said, taking her hand to help her down the steps from her building. “It’s been such a shit day and now just looking at you I feel completely light again.”
“How’s your dad?” Anika asked.
“Not good,” Marco said, “but let’s not talk about that right now. You’re making me so happy, and I want to be happy for a while.”
As he started the car, Anika said, “Where are we going?”
“It’s a surprise,” Marco said.
“Not another trip I hope,” Anika said, laughing nervously. “I mean, that was amazing, but I really do have to work sometimes.”
“No, not another trip,” Marco promised, and then amended with, “well, not exactly.”
They drove south to the Flatiron District. Marco pulled into the underground parkade of a tall, nondescript high-rise. There was only a single parking attendant and very few cars. They walked through the dim, empty lobby and took an elevator up. Anika noticed that Marco had selected the top floor.
“Is it another restaurant?” she asked.
Marco only smiled and shook his head. There didn’t seem to be enough people around for a restaurant or a secret speakeasy or anything else Anika could imagine.
When the elevator opened to the top floor, Marco took her through another door, and then up a flight of stairs. From there they stepped out onto the open roof, where Anika saw a huge hot air balloon inflating in front of her.
She had never been up close to a hot air balloon. It was far more massive than she could have imagined, pulsing and undulating like a live thing. It was a deep navy in color, speckled with large silver stars and moons.
The pilot was working diligently to prepare for flight, checking the ropes and the gas output and any number of other things that Anika couldn’t guess. He waved at them both, calling out to Marco, “Not too much wind, luckily. We’re good to fly.”
