The Evolution of Man

by Skye Warren

  His lips press together. It’s as if the words are torn from him. As if each one pulls a piece of his skin when he speaks it. “When did you speak to Sutton?”

  “When I hired him to restore the library.”

  “Restore. Restore? It’s not a goddamn painting in a museum. It’s a building that isn’t structurally sound. There’s no way you can get a contractor to work on it.”

  My eyes narrow. “Wait a second. Did you talk to contractors about this building?”

  “Of course I talked to them,” he says, his voice clipped. “I owned it.”

  “You bastard.”

  “The only thing to do is raze the building and start over.”

  “You bastard. You blackballed me. Told the contractors not to do business with me. What did you offer them? Some of the money I paid for the library? God. You are unbelievable.”

  “They’re welcome to accept any job they find suitable.”

  “That’s the only reason you sold it to me, isn’t it? Because you knew I wouldn’t be able to restore it.” For two billion dollars. He sold me the library knowing I couldn’t fix it.

  “You can rebuild. Make it look exactly like it did before, if you want.”

  “It won’t be the same.”

  “You’re damn right it won’t be the same. It will be structurally sound.”

  “Well, the joke is on you, because Sutton already said he would help me. And in case you didn’t notice? People actually like him. They want to work with him, because he’s not an arrogant jerk face.”

  Christopher looks around with fake curiosity. “Then where are the workers?”

  “They’re coming,” I say through gritted teeth. There is a ball of fire inside me. It’s an entire sun, its rays struggling to find a path out of my body. He doesn’t give a fuck about me. About the library. So why is he so damn intent on ruining this?

  “And in the meantime, you’re… what? Living here?”

  “So what if I am? Maybe I camp out under the circulation desk with a sleeping bag. Maybe I use the antique books as kindling for more fire and eat roasted pigeons for dinner.”

  “What about your mother?” He says it as a challenge, which only serves to piss me off.

  “What do you care about her? You didn’t want her to have the treatment, and now she’s not having it. The hospital doesn’t get their expensive new butterfly garden. Happy now?”

  “It’s not safe here,” he says flatly.

  “Then why don’t you leave?”

  He turns away from me, and for a moment I think I’m going to see the back of him. It feels momentous, that his broad shoulders might walk away from me one last time. I don’t know what my life would be like without his hard disdain. Without his censure. I long for the freedom as much as I ache for him to stay. One step. Two. He makes it six feet away before he stops.

  I need him to hold me. To tell me everything will be okay.

  “There’s no way I can convince you to go?” He asks the question without looking at me.

  He does worry about me, in that terrible white-knight kind of way. Terrible because it’s how he keeps his distance. Like I’m someone he has to save instead of a woman he can hold. There’s no life raft in this particular ocean, though. There’s no saving me.

  “Why did you come here?” I ask instead of answering.

  Then he does face me. “I always come here. I can’t seem to stop. It’s the reason I bought this building, the reason why I planned to revitalize the west side.”

  “If you love the carving, why did you want to tear it down?”

  A slight smile. “It’s a bad habit of mine, destroying the things I love.”

  The word love coming from his mouth falls on me like a ton of bricks. The library walls falling on top of me couldn’t hurt this much. My lungs burn from lack of air. Christopher Bardot has never loved anything. He’s controlled and owned and protected—but never loved. Has he? He never cared about anything beyond ambition. Beyond money.

  “Please,” he murmurs, gentle as if he can sense my turmoil.

  And Christopher Bardot has definitely never begged.

  “I’m done for today,” I say, my voice uneven. It’s hard to breathe in the face of this new side of him, still protective, still controlling, but somehow more real. Less like a stylized carving. More like a man who hurts and feels and wants. It makes me want to wrap myself in his arms, but what if he turns back into stone?

  I met Avery at Smith College, where she was the quintessential good student and I had a reputation as a wild child. It was easier to explain how I didn’t know about a universal family tradition because I had been stuck in an Austrian boarding school. Easier to act unaffected by the infamy of my dysfunctional trust fund by pretending to obsess over parties and frat boys and reckless stunts.

  It would be easier to really be as self-absorbed as people thought I was, but I felt every whisper, every criticism, every cruel smile directed at me as if my skin were made of paper.

  I pull my leased BMW into the wide circular drive as the electronic gates swing open. Around back there’s an eight-car garage with empty bays for Rolls-Royces and Aston Martins, the kind of cars befitting a house like this. I would have bought them, too, if Mom cared anything for cars.

  Or if she could go anywhere.

  “Helloooo,” I call into the wide marble-floor foyer, hearing my voice echo back to me.

  There’s only silence.

  I didn’t feel guilty about the incident with that statue and the campus police. Those kinds of things were hobbies. Or maybe defense mechanisms. I didn’t have the paralyzing doubt and self-recrimination I have now, when I dread coming home every evening.

  Upstairs I find my mother napping even though it’s already almost bedtime. She looks peaceful on her side, her hands resting one on top of the other. There would be no sign that she was unwell to someone who didn’t know her. The main difference is her weight, something she’s fought to keep down her entire life. Now she can’t eat enough to even maintain her weight.

  That’s what the cancer does, takes all the nutrients away so her own cells starve.

  It’s her eyes that look the most different. There are dark shadows underneath her lashes. I can see the blue-green veins in her eyelids. They look sunken, especially when she opens them and smiles.

  “There you are,” she says, her voice rusty with sleep.

  I brush her hair back, the way she did when I was a little girl. “Here I am. And I brought takeout.”

  She scrunches her nose. That’s another side effect of the cancer. She doesn’t even want to eat, when really her body needs even more calories. “I ate a big lunch.”

  “Well, you can have a little fried rice. And some sweet and sour chicken.”

  A disapproving sound. “There’s some quinoa and kale salad in the fridge.”

  “I also got some fried wontons,” I say in a singsong voice because no one can resist fried wontons—not even my mother. She’s into whole grains and organic fruit, but they weren’t enough to save her. Not even the herbalist or the acupuncture made a dent in the cancer.

  She sits up, looking like some sleeping beauty awakened with a kiss. The irony is that if she’d done the rounds of chemo and experimental treatments that the doctor prescribed, she would look much worse. Her hair would be gone, her skin might be bruised.

  And the cancer might have been held back, if only for a few years.

  I fought with her to do the treatments. Begged her. In the end it wasn’t truly Christopher who kept her from having them. I had to accept that she didn’t want that. That she wanted to live out what was left of her life with whatever peace she could find. This house is part of that peace. The fried wontons are part of that peace. But God, it hurts to watch it happen. It hurts bad enough that I dread coming home, and that’s when I feel guilty.

  “How’s the library coming?”

  She knows about the issues with contractors, though I haven’t told her quite how dangerou
s it is for me to work on the restoration with the current structural problems. And I have no plans to tell her about Christopher Bardot, who’s still a tender spot considering he left her destitute after taking the helm of my inheritance. I should not want a man who did that. I never should have been able to love him, in the deepest, most secret part of my heart. “The last shipment of oak looks really good. A close match. I’m going to stain it and see how it holds up. The bigger problem is my own skill with the chisel.”

  “You’ll figure it out. I have faith in you.”

  I make a face. “Are you sure I shouldn’t hire someone? I talked to Professor Basu over e-mail, and she said there’s a really promising woodworking artist who graduated last year.”

  She sits up, moving slowly because I know she gets dizzy sometimes. “I’m sure you’ll do the right thing.”

  That’s what she says when I’m thinking about doing the wrong thing. “The wall is worth doing well, even if I have to find someone else to do it.”

  “Someone else who understands your vision?”

  That’s the part that kept me from e-mailing Professor Basu back to ask for this guy’s contact information. There’s skill and there’s passion. Both are required to do this wall. I don’t have much skill in this medium, despite having graduated in studio art, but I don’t trust anyone else to have the passion. The wall speaks to me, and with my clumsy hands I’m speaking back.

  Mom stands up and then slides back to the bed. I catch her under her elbows, pulling her to standing. “Are you okay?” I breathe even though the answer is clearly no.

  She’s not okay. She’s dying. That’s what this house is—a personal hospice.

  A place to say goodbye.

  Her slender hand cups my cheek. “You’re so strong,” she whispers.

  “I’m not,” I whisper back because even now I want to fight her. I want to beg her to do some kind of therapy, even though I know we passed the point of no return. There’s only death now, and waiting for it is killing me.

  I know something is different as I hopscotch over rubble.

  A sharp mechanical sound cuts through the hum of male voices. The heavy plastic sheeting that protects the library from the elements is my very own looking glass. As I step through it, I find a whole bevy of strange creatures, muscled men with tools and boots, as if they stepped from the wall and became flesh.

  They spare me a few glances, a little curious, mostly wary, before going about their work. It’s almost noon, and though I only got up and showered an hour ago, the sheen of sweat on their brows tells me they’ve been at this a long time. They have hard hats on their heads and smudges on their dark shirts.

  “Harper.” The low voice makes me jolt.

  I turn to face Sutton, who looks more like the old version of himself, the one I first met, wearing black slacks and a white button-down, the sleeves rolled up to reveal golden hair on his forearms. He isn’t covered in smudges or sweat, but he does have a yellow hard hat on, burnished curls peeking out from beneath it.

  My heart thumps a warm welcome for those forearms. “What are you doing here?”

  “Restoring the library.” He raises an eyebrow. “Like you asked me to.”

  “Well yeah, but I thought you couldn’t find a construction crew willing to work on the library. And these people seem like they know what they’re doing. Not like you found them on Craigslist.”

  “Thanks,” he says drily. “They do know what they’re doing, and I didn’t find them on Craigslist. You don’t need to worry about the library. How’s your mother feeling?”

  Guilt clenches my insides, along with worry and fear and a terrible grief that she’s slipping through my fingers. I can’t catch her. It’s like reaching for smoke. “She’s doing okay. How do you know she’s in town?”

  He lifts his shoulder in a vague shrug, which I assume means I wouldn’t like his methods. A worker appears at his side to show him a paper. He scans it quickly, his blue eyes sharp, before nodding. The man hurries away to the next room where the books are kept.

  “So what did you have to offer them?” I ask.

  He steers me by my elbow away from the workers, his touch a delicate burn. “It occurred to me how strange it was for no one to take the job. Tanglewood isn’t exactly in a construction boom right now, which is partly why we wanted to revitalize the west side.”

  “Christopher,” I say grimly.

  Blue eyes turn speculative. “How did you know that?”

  I don’t really want to tell him that Christopher was here last night—or that I was here, alone. “An educated guess. He’s always been the meddling type.”

  “Meddling. That’s one word for it. He hinted that they would get a big contract with his high-rise condos if they refused a renovation. It was rebuild or nothing, he told them.”

  “That bastard,” I say faintly, hurt anew to hear it spelled out.

  “Unfortunately he hinted that to every construction company. Once I convinced them of that, I had three bids on the table and more on the way if I waited for them to get their shit together.”

  “And you picked the lowest one?”

  “Nope, I didn’t go with any of those bids. Instead I brought in a company from Louisiana. Cost a pretty penny to transport the equipment and house the workers temporarily, but it’s the principle of the thing. I’m sure you understand.”

  “That sounds like something Christopher would do.”

  A faint smile. “There’s a reason we went into business together. If I’d let one of them take the job, they’d think they could get away with that next time. We deal honestly or not at all.”

  “Maybe Christopher was worried about our safety. About the safety of restoring the building now that the foundation has been compromised.” The words ring false even as I say them, but admitting that Christopher screwed me over that completely still hurts.

  Sutton gives me a droll look. “He’s only worried about himself. It bothers him when the puppets don’t dance on his strings.”

  There’s a fist around my throat, making it hard to breathe. “You’re probably right.”

  “Speaking of safety, I couldn’t help but notice some loose carvings near the back. The wood is almost the same color, but they didn’t come from the wall.”

  My cheeks heat. “Oh, I did a little work.”

  He takes off his hard hat with a knowing look and places it gently on my head. “You shouldn’t be here without me. You shouldn’t be here at all until the building is stabilized.”

  The yellow hard hat looked like a normal size on him, but it feels like an umbrella on my head, like I’m a little girl playing dress up. I peer up at him from beneath the brim. “This thing is heavy. How do you work with this on?”

  “Only have to get hit with a falling chunk of concrete once before the hard hat looks appealing.”

  “There weren’t any falling chunks of concrete last night, I promise.”

  He frowns. “But if there had been, if you had been injured, there would have been no one to help.”

  “That’s not quite true.” As soon as the words are out, I wish I could take them back. From the suspicion in Sutton’s blue eyes he already knows what I have to say next. “Christopher came by.”

  He curses softly. “Of course he did. One of the construction companies probably gave him hell when I turned down their bid, which serves him right. Goddamn him.”

  Something warm and mysterious moves inside me, responding to the anger Sutton feels for Christopher. It’s almost intimate, this fury. More like betrayal than a dissolved business partnership. It makes me wonder if they ever shared another woman. “Was it only me between you two?” I ask, hesitant. “Am I the only reason you resigned?”

  A raised eyebrow. “Are you feeling guilty?”

  “You’re both big boys. I’m sure you can make your own decisions. I’m just curious.”

  He sighs, rubbing his hand at the back of his neck. “There was always some competition between us, b
ut I’m pretty sure you could guess that. We’re both ambitious.”

  “It’s what helped you work well together,” I guessed.

  “It’s what broke us apart in the end. You were part of it. Most of it, maybe. The physical side of it, but Bardot and Mayfair wouldn’t have lasted even if you never came to town.”

  I have the sense of something beneath the surface, of watching a shadow move beneath a seemingly placid lake. “Why wouldn’t the company have lasted?”

  “Because it wasn’t about the money,” he says, his frustration almost tangible.

  I hold my breath because I’ve wanted to hear those words forever. Wanted them to be real. Wanted something that wasn’t about the money—but Sutton isn’t talking about me right now. He’s talking about Christopher Bardot while his deep inner turmoil vibrates through the air around us.

  “What was it about?” I whisper, knowing he won’t answer me.

  The closed look on his face reminds me of Christopher. He can be just as cold and ruthless, even with his handsome golden-boy features, even with his easy charm. “It doesn’t matter,” he says finally. “The company is over. Dissolved after the library was purchased and the assets distributed.”

  I take a step closer, needing to know the answer. Feeling it at the tips of my fingers. Reaching for it. “Come to dinner with me, Sutton. We can go to L’Etoile again.”

  And we can fall on each other in a hallway. He can lift my couture skirt and make me see stars. It doesn’t matter what restaurant we go to. That’s how the night would end.

  His blue eyes turn dark. I don’t mistake the desire. “We’re business partners. That’s it.”

  “The way you and Christopher were business partners?”

  Something flashes across his face. “Yes,” he says. “Like that.”

  “Then we can meet where you met him. At the Den, for cognac or whiskey or whatever the hell rich men like to drink these days. We work together now. You don’t have an excuse.”