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When it’s all quieted down and things have gone back to normal (they’re gotten Jack to finally swear off cruises and Meritt has resumed his drinking problem), and they finally have some time to breathe, Daniel and Henley find themselves at a bar in the East Village. It’s the kind of place Merritt claims he would never step foot in, where the tables are freakishly high and the lights are dimmed so low you can barely see the other person.
Henley swirls her drink in her hand. If you told her this is what life would have looked like 15 years ago, she would have laughed it off easily.
They would have never been able to do this 10 years ago with their faces plastered across New York City.
No one bats at eye now. Sure, there’s a few curious looks in their direction but perhaps if it was June or Bosco or Charlie then people would have been curious enough to approach them, but people don’t care as much about the Horsemen now, especially when it’s been silence from them for months.
On this side of town no one really recognizes them now, not really, because they’re a little older and her hair is up for once and Danny’s hair has grown out so he doesn’t have his signature curls anymore. There’s a part of her that has the familiar urge to run her hands through his hair, just like she’s done a million times before—when she was helping him get ready for shows, when they were sneaking around in dingy bars, when they were jetting across Monaco, Russia, Italy, Turkey, all for the Eye.
They skip the pleasantries, thank God, because she’s always hated small talk. She’s almost forgotten how talkative Danny is until she asks a six-word question and she gets a monologue in return and she wonders how she ever forgot.
And because it’s him, the conversation inevitably drifts back to work. He tells her about some new trick he’s been practicing with the kids—she knows she should probably call them something else but well, that’s what they are to her—and how difficult they’re being.
He says difficult, which is how she knows he means opinionated.
“And then I asked Bosco, ‘How hard is it to do a Bakers Dozen and then a Queen of Hearts?’ and get this, he just walked away.”
Henley shoots him a look, and Danny has the gall to actually look affronted.
“I was never that arrogant,” he mutters and she actually snorts at that.
“Danny, you were worse.”
“If I was worse, it’s only because I was better at his age,” Danny adds, proving her point.
He rolls his eyes, but there’s an obvious fondness somewhere under it. It even almost sounds like pride, she thinks.
“We both were,” he says under his breath, and then coughs immediately after.
She smiles into her drink. Danny looks at everything but her.
He had been 24 and she had been 22. The years melt into each other and she can’t always remember everything but she remembers when the very first show was. None of it matters and all of it matters somehow.
“You know, the other time, when I asked about your boring suburban life, I meant it,” he says, looking pointedly at the ice in his glass of whiskey.
Henley raises an eyebrow at him.
“How you’re doing, not the part about it being boring,” he jumps in. “I don’t think it’s boring if it’s really what you want.”
This is the closest he knows to an apology. One look at him lets her know that he means it.
“I know.”
A moment stretches on. To an outsider it would have looked like an awkward silence, but they’re well past awkward silences. She doesn’t say anything else because he hasn’t and Danny isn’t saying anything because she isn’t either.
She thinks about her answer to the question for a moment. There are the moments she loves, when her kids say something too smart for their age, or they’ve formed secret pacts with each other about everything under the sun, or when she’s taking a long walk with her husband and their house and all its warmth comes into view. Those are the moments that make it all worth it.
But of course, there are moments when she misses all of it: the thrill of a show, the grandeur of the stage, the roar of the crowd chanting her name. It’s harder then to reconcile the life she’s built and the one she thought she said goodbye to.
If any of this shows on her face, he doesn’t say anything. J. Daniel Atlas would have. Danny knows not to, he’s always known that, even if he purposely pretends otherwise.
“It’s nice,” she says finally, and finds that she means it. “I got to do a lot of stuff I never had the time to do when we were always running around.”
“What’s he like?”
“Who?”
“Your husband.”
She laughs, “Oh my God, are we really doing this?”
“Doing what? For the record, I resent the accusation that there’s anything wrong with what I’ve just asked. We’re friends—“
“Friends?”
“Friends. Colleagues. Co-magicians. People who used to saw each other in half—“
“That was a one way thing—“
”—anything you want. But yes, friends. And I think friends are allowed to ask you what your husband is like.”
“Well,” she says, putting her chin in her hands. “He’s great. Great husband, great father.”
”I suppose he’s not a magician?”
”Financial journalist,” she says.
“He wants to move to Maine, though," she shrugs, stabbing the olive in her martini with a toothpick. “Work made him an excellent offer.”
If she notices Danny stiffen in his seat and tighten his hand ever so slightly around his drink, she pretends not to see it. She can play this game even better than he can.
“But your life is in New York,” he says automatically, though he doesn’t know how true that is anymore. He doesn’t know about her life, because she wanted out and he watched her go when part of him knows he should have asked her to stay.
He shakes his head, “What are you going to do, spend all your time picking apples?”
“Danny, we vanish professionally. Does it really matter where I do it from?”
He already lost her all those years ago and hadn’t seen her in almost a decade before she showed up again. Would another hundred miles make a difference?
Henley looks at him, tilts her head, and offers him a lazy smile. “Nothing is final yet, but I’m not that easy to get rid of. Who else is going to help you guys watch over the kids?”
“Who names their kid Bosco? Did his parents hate him or something?”
“I’m sure you would know all about that, Jonathan,” she says in a low voice.
“I should have never told you that,” he mutters.
He had told her that one night in Brooklyn, when they were drunk and high on the thrill of getting a trick right after practicing for months.
She’d asked him what his real name was and for once he had acquiesced, whispering into her neck, into her collarbone, against her skin.
In the morning he asked her to sign a contract, citing that it would endanger his professional reputation, which she threw into the trashcan right in front of him. She quit six months after that.
She knows Atlas isn’t his actual last name, but she never bothered to ask what it really was. Knowing what the J stood for enough for her then, and it still is. And there’s a part of her that thinks maybe it’s better not to know.
Part of magic was holding belief. She wouldn’t have gone into it in the first place or stayed as long as she did if not otherwise.
Danny taps the table and makes her drink disappear in the next second, before reappearing in his hand.
Despite herself, she chuckles, and she thinks she sees Danny look pleased with himself.
She reaches behind his ear and pulls out the card she knows he always keeps in his pocket.
He raises his eyebrows in return.
It’s a dumb trick she used to do when they were younger. It surprises her a little, how after all those years, it’s still there in his pocket with him. Maybe some things don’t change.
For better or worse, she knows how many nights he spent shuffling cards until he could do it like it was breathing. She knows the reveal behind every one of his tricks before the rest of the audience does, and she knows how well he can convince himself of a lie until he believes it’s the real thing.
He knows how she likes her coffee in the mornings. He knows which buttons to push to get under her skin and how how to talk her down about her fear of heights He sent flowers to her first show even if he’ll never admit that it was him. She’s the first person he makes eye contact with after any big trick the Horsemen do.
She doesn’t think there’s any universe where she doesn’t know him and he doesn’t know her.
Henley looks at him now in the dimmed light, at the slight wrinkle in his eyes and the scratches on his knuckles. Maybe in another dimension these are the first things she sees in the morning and this is what their nights look like. “Would you have let me saw you in half if I had stayed?”
”I trust you more than Merritt to do it.”
"Fair," she says, and clinks her glass with his.