Chapter Text
The Ridgeline Books Southwest Reception occupied the second floor of a renovated adobe building on Canyon Road, the kind of venue that tried very hard to communicate that it wasn't trying at all. Exposed vigas overhead, saltillo tile floors, a courtyard visible through arched windows where someone had strung lights between two old cottonwoods. The invitation had described it as an “intimate gathering of Ridgeline authors, partners, and friends of the press,” which Carol translated as sixty to eighty people and at least three conversations she'd need Helen to extract her from before the night was over.
It was November, and Santa Fe had already turned cold. Carol had felt it the moment they'd stepped out of their car in the parking lot off Delgado Street, the dry bite of high desert evening settling against her skin through the brown checkered blazer. The skirt had been a tactical error. She'd said so in the hotel room an hour earlier, standing in front of the bathroom mirror while Helen curled her hair.
“It's forty-six degrees, Helen.”
“You look beautiful.”
“I look like someone who's going to freeze to death at a publishing event. They'll find me behind an hors d'oeuvres table, stiff as a board, still holding a cracker.”
“You'll be inside the entire time. The building has heating.”
“New Mexico heating. Which is a space heater and optimism.”
Helen had said nothing to that, just unplugged the curling iron and set it on the counter with the quiet finality that meant the clothing discussion was over. Carol had looked at herself in the mirror, the blazer over the long flowing skirt, the loose waves, the red lip Helen had applied for her because Carol's hand had been unsteady from the cold, and she'd thought she looked like a woman who wrote books for a living. Which she was. The problem was never the costume. The problem was the play.
Helen had emerged from the bedroom ten minutes later in a dark green midi dress that Carol had never seen before. It had a modest neckline and fitted through the waist before falling to just below her knees, and the color did something to her skin that made the freckles across her collarbones look like they'd been placed there on purpose by someone with an eye for composition. Her dark hair was down, falling past her shoulders, and she'd paired the dress with heels and a small black clutch that she held loosely in one hand like an afterthought. She looked, Carol thought while pretending to adjust her own earring, like the kind of woman who ruined dinner parties by making everyone else feel underdressed.
“New dress,” Carol had said.
“Mmhm.”
“Green.”
“Dark green. It was on sale.”
“Since when do you buy dresses on sale.”
“Since I found one I liked at forty percent off. Are you ready?”
Carol had been ready in the sense that she was dressed and vertical and had not yet started drinking. She was not ready in any of the ways that mattered, but she had followed Helen out of the hotel room and into the car, where the breathalyzer interlock blinked its familiar green, and they'd driven to Canyon Road in the kind of comfortable silence that twenty years produced, the kind where neither person needed to speak because the silence itself was a conversation.
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Val was already there when they arrived, standing near the entrance with a glass of red wine and her reading glasses pushed up onto her forehead. Valerie Okafor was tall and angular, her silver-streaked locs twisted up into a knot, wearing a black blazer over a silk blouse. She spotted them crossing the courtyard and raised her glass in greeting.
“There she is. My favorite misanthrope.”
“Val.” Carol accepted the brief, firm hug that Val always gave, the kind that communicated affection and efficiency in equal measure. "How long have you been here?"
“Twenty minutes. Long enough to case the room and identify three people you're going to hate and one you might actually tolerate.”
“That's generous.”
“I'm an optimist.” Val turned to Helen and her expression softened into something warmer, more personal. “Helen. You look stunning. That dress is criminal.”
“Thank you, Val.” Helen smiled and touched Val's arm, and the gesture carried the ease of genuine friendship rather than professional courtesy. Val was one of the only people who got to see the seam where their public and private lives met. She'd been at their wedding. She knew what the gold ring on Helen's left hand meant, the one Helen was not wearing tonight because Helen never wore it at work events, because nobody here knew and nobody here could know. Carol's ring was absent too, tucked into the pocket of her suitcase back at the hotel, and the tan line where it usually sat was hidden under the dim lighting of an adobe building on Canyon Road.
“So,” Carol said. “Walk me through this.”
Val shifted into publisher mode. “It's mostly Ridgeline people. A few regional press contacts, a couple of bookstore owners from the Santa Fe and Albuquerque circuits. The Collected Works people are here, which is good for you because they've been hand-selling Winds of Wycaro since March. There's a small contingent from the New Mexico Literary Arts Council who fund some of the regional programming. A few plus-ones and spouses I don't know.”
“And what am I doing tonight, specifically.”
“Being seen. Being pleasant. Talking to the Collected Works owner for at least five minutes. Letting people feel like they have access to you.”
“Wonderful.”
“And enjoying yourself,” Helen added, from Carol's left.
Carol looked at her. “I don't enjoy things, Helen. You know this. You married—” She stopped. She felt it land in the silence between them, the ghost of the word hovering there like a missed step on a staircase.
“You manage me,” Carol corrected, smoothly enough that anyone else would have heard nothing. “You manage me, and part of that is knowing I don't enjoy publishing events.”
Val took a very deliberate sip of her wine and looked at the cottonwood trees.
Helen's expression didn't change. Her eyes held Carol's for a beat, and in them Carol saw the faint amusement that meant nice save and the faint warning that meant be careful, and then Helen shifted her clutch to her other hand and said, “Shall we go in?”
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The interior was warm, which Carol would not acknowledge to Helen because acknowledging it would mean conceding the heating argument. A long bar ran along one wall, staffed by two bartenders in black, and the room opened into several connected spaces separated by archways and half-walls in the pueblo style. People clustered in loose groups, drinks in hand, the noise level hovering at that particular frequency where individual conversations blurred into a collective murmur punctuated by occasional laughter. Someone had put on music, something acoustic and unobtrusive, the kind of playlist assembled by a person who'd Googled “sophisticated background music” and hit shuffle.
Carol ordered a club soda with lime. The bartender set it down without comment, and she wrapped her hand around the glass and felt the cold seep into her palm. Helen ordered a white wine, which she would sip slowly for the next hour and a half, rarely finishing more than two glasses in an evening. This was one of the unspoken negotiations of their public life together. Carol didn't drink at events like this, and Helen drank moderately, and neither of them discussed the reasons for this in any space where someone might overhear.
They worked the room the way they always did, with the synchronized efficiency of two people who'd been performing the same routine for years. Carol talked to the Collected Works owner, a woman named June with short gray hair and wire-rimmed glasses who had been selling Carol's books with genuine enthusiasm since before the first Wycaro novel. Carol thanked her with the particular warmth she reserved for booksellers, which was closer to real warmth than what she offered almost anyone else, because booksellers were the only people in publishing who actually touched readers, and Carol respected the labor of that even if she had complicated feelings about the product.
Helen hovered nearby during this conversation, close enough to intervene but far enough to signal that she wasn't eavesdropping. She shook hands with a regional press contact, exchanged business cards with someone from the Literary Arts Council, checked her phone briefly and typed something with her thumb. From a distance, she looked like what she was supposed to look like: a capable manager doing her job at a publishing event. The green dress moved when she turned, catching the warm light from the wall sconces, and Carol noticed, as she always noticed, the way Helen's shoulders sat in the fabric, the line of her neck above the modest neckline, the small hollow at the base of her throat where, in private, Carol had pressed her lips probably a thousand times.
Carol talked to June about hand-selling and display placement and upcoming titles, and did not look at Helen's throat again.
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She noticed him at around eight fifteen.
He was leaning against the archway that separated the main room from the smaller lounge area, holding a lowball glass with something amber in it and talking to another man Carol vaguely recognized as a Ridgeline sales rep. He was tall, perhaps six-one or six-two, with the kind of build that suggested a gym membership he actually used. Brown hair, neatly trimmed, graying just slightly at the temples in the way that men aged without consequence. His suit was charcoal, well-fitted, no tie, the top button of his shirt undone in a way that was supposed to look casual and probably did to people who weren't Carol. He had a strong jaw and an easy, wide smile, and he laughed at something the sales rep said with his head tilted back and his teeth showing, and Carol thought you rehearsed that laugh in a mirror at some point in your life, you absolutely did.
She wouldn't have thought about him again. Men like this populated every publishing event she'd ever attended, and they were interchangeable in their confidence and their suits and their willingness to take up space. She'd already catalogued him and dismissed him, the way she did with most people, when she saw his gaze drift across the room and land on Helen.
Helen was standing near the bar, talking to Val about something that involved Val's phone screen, both of them leaning in slightly to see whatever Val was showing her. Helen's dark hair fell forward over one shoulder as she tilted her head, and the green dress caught the light again, and from where the man was standing, Carol realized, the view was unobstructed. He had a clean sightline across the room, and he was using it.
His eyes locked on Helen for four or five seconds. Then he looked away, said something to the sales rep, and looked back. This time his gaze moved deliberately, starting at Helen's face and traveling downward with the unhurried appraisal of someone examining something in a shop window. Carol watched him do this from across the room, standing near a display table of Ridgeline titles with a club soda sweating in her hand, and felt something hot and tight coil in her belly.
She recognized the feeling immediately. It was old and familiar and ugly, and she'd spent twenty years learning to manage it in public because the alternative was unacceptable. The alternative was Carol Sturka, bestselling author, crossing a room at a publishing event to tell a stranger to stop fucking looking at her wife.
She took a sip of club soda. The lime had gone sour.
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Over the next forty minutes, Carol tracked him the way a hawk tracks movement on the ground, with a peripheral awareness that required no direct attention. She continued to do her job. She talked to a young journalist from the Santa Fe Reporter who wanted a quote about the role of genre fiction in contemporary literature, and Carol gave her a quote that was thoughtful and diplomatic and mentioned the Garrett Foundation's literacy work because Val had once told her to connect everything back to literacy when talking to press, and the journalist wrote it down with visible gratitude. She talked to another Ridgeline author, a man named Peter Haas who wrote historical fiction about the Santa Fe Trail and was pleasant in the way that people who write about the Santa Fe Trail tend to be, which is to say thoroughly.
The entire time, she was aware of the man in the charcoal suit moving through the room like a satellite adjusting its orbit. He talked to several people. He got a fresh drink. He laughed his practiced laugh near the courtyard windows. And every few minutes, his orbit brought him incrementally closer to Helen.
At eight thirty-five he was at the bar, two stools down from where Helen had paused to check her phone.
At eight forty-two he was in the lounge area, where Helen was talking to a bookstore buyer from Albuquerque.
At eight fifty he was refilling his glass at the exact moment Helen returned to the bar for her second wine, and Carol watched him turn to her with the manufactured surprise of a man who wanted to appear as if he hadn't been engineering this moment for the better part of an hour.
Carol was standing fifteen feet away, partially obscured by a cluster of people near the Ridgeline display table. She couldn't hear what he said, but she could see Helen's face, and Helen's face did what it always did when a stranger initiated contact: it went polite. Professional. The slight smile and the body language that said I am listening to you because I am a courteous person and not because I have any interest in continuing this interaction beyond what civility requires. Carol knew this expression intimately. She'd seen Helen use it on fans, on vendors, on hotel concierges who talked too much. It was Helen's public shield, as practiced as Carol's public warmth.
The man said something else. Helen responded. He leaned against the bar, turning his body toward her, and extended his hand. An introduction. Helen shook it. Carol watched their hands meet and release, and the coil in her belly tightened another quarter turn.
She forced herself to look away. She found Val.
“Val.”
Val was mid-conversation with someone from the Literary Arts Council, but she read Carol's face and excused herself within three seconds. “What.”
“Who is that? The man at the bar talking to Helen.”
Val looked. “Ah. That's Graham Hensley. He's a literary agent out of Denver. Represents a couple of Ridgeline authors. Why are you asking?”
“No reason.”
Val looked at Carol with the specific expression she reserved for moments when Carol was lying and they both knew it. “He's harmless. Divorced, I think. Likes to work the room.”
“Likes to work something.”
“Carol.”
“I said no reason.”
Val took a sip of her wine and did not press the issue, because Val understood things without needing them explained. “Your reading is in twenty minutes. Maybe go review your notes.”
“I don't have notes. I've read this passage four hundred times.”
“Then go review your composure.”
Carol looked at Val. Val looked back, steady, with the particular authority of someone who had seen Carol at her worst and her best and could tell when the distance between the two was narrowing dangerously. Carol exhaled through her nose, took her club soda, and walked to the far end of the room where a bench sat beneath a window overlooking the courtyard.
She sat. She didn't review anything. She watched Helen.
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Graham Hensley, literary agent out of Denver, divorced, harmless according to Val's generous assessment, did, in fact, not leave Helen alone. The conversation at the bar lasted five minutes, then eight, then ten. Carol sat on the bench and watched Helen do what Helen did brilliantly, which was navigate an unwanted social interaction with grace and not a single visible crack in her composure. Helen smiled at appropriate moments. She sipped her wine. She angled her body slightly away from him in a way that was too subtle for Graham Hensley to register but that Carol read like a road sign, because she knew the language of Helen's body the way she knew her own handwriting.
At one point, Helen gestured toward the room and said something that Carol was fairly certain was an attempt to excuse herself. Graham Hensley responded by touching her elbow. Lightly, the kind of touch that was technically innocent and practically proprietary, a fingertip claim on the arm of a woman he'd known for ten minutes.
Carol's jaw tightened. She made it relax. Then it tightened again.
A waitress passed with a tray of small plates, and Carol took one without looking at what was on it. Some kind of bruschetta. She ate it mechanically, tasting nothing, watching Graham Hensley lean closer to Helen and say something near her ear that made Helen pull back slightly and give a small laugh. The laugh was performed, Carol could see the machinery of it from across the room, the way Helen's eyes stayed flat while her mouth cooperated. But Graham Hensley couldn't see that. Graham Hensley saw a beautiful woman laughing at something he had said and interpreted it as encouragement because men like Graham Hensley always interpreted courtesy as encouragement.
Helen glanced across the room. Their eyes met for a fraction of a second, and in Helen's gaze Carol saw two things: I'm handling it and I know you're watching. Then Helen looked back at Graham Hensley and said something that redirected the conversation, her posture shifting into something more formally managerial, straighter-backed and business-voiced, a gear change that Carol recognized as Helen attempting to re-establish professional distance.
It didn't work. Graham Hensley smiled wider.
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Carol did her reading at nine ten. She stood at the small lectern near the courtyard windows and read a passage from Winds of Wycaro with the clarity of someone who was not, at that exact moment, calculating how many steps it would take to cross the room and physically insert herself between her wife and a man from Denver. The passage was about Lucasia standing at the helm of the Mercator, watching the horizon for a sail that might be Raban's, and Carol read it with the controlled emotion that audiences wanted and critics praised and that Carol herself felt nothing about except a professional obligation to deliver it well.
The applause was warm. She thanked the room. She thanked Ridgeline. She thanked Helen Umstead, her manager, who had organized her schedule and kept her on track, and Helen, standing at the back of the room in that green dress, inclined her head with a professional smile.
Graham Hensley was standing four feet from Helen. Carol noticed this because Carol had not stopped noticing where Graham Hensley was since approximately eight fifteen, and the fact that he'd migrated to Helen's vicinity during the reading suggested that he'd been watching Helen watch Carol, which meant he was watching Helen even when Helen was watching someone else, which made the thing in Carol's chest twist into something closer to fury than she was comfortable naming.
She stepped down from the lectern. People approached with compliments and questions. She smiled and thanked them and did not rush through any interaction because rushing would be visible and Carol was never, ever visible about things that mattered.
It took her seven minutes to cross the room to where Helen was standing, because three separate people intercepted her along the way, and by the time she arrived Graham Hensley was gone. Helen was alone near a pillar, typing something on her phone.
“Where is he.”
Helen looked up. “Where is who?”
“Helen.”
Helen put her phone in her clutch. “He went to the restroom, I think. Or to get another drink. I wasn't tracking him.”
“What did he say to you.”
“That his name is Graham Hensley, he's an agent in Denver, he represents two of Ridgeline's midlist authors, and he asked what I thought of the wine selection. We talked about the event. He asked how long I'd been managing you.” Helen paused. “Just normal things, Carol.”
“He touched your arm.”
“He did.”
“And that was normal?”
Helen's expression shifted, almost imperceptibly, into something softer. She stepped closer to Carol, not enough to breach the professional distance they maintained at these events, but enough to lower her voice. “He's a guy at a party who thinks he's interesting. I've been handling guys at parties who think they're interesting since before you and I met. I'm fine, babe.”
“I know you're fine. That's not the point.”
“Then what is the point?”
Carol opened her mouth and then closed it, because the point was something she couldn't say in a room full of publishing professionals and press contacts and bookstore owners from the Santa Fe and Albuquerque circuits. The point was that Graham Hensley had touched Helen's arm and looked at Helen's body and leaned into Helen's space, and Carol wanted to put her hands on Helen in front of every single person in this building and make the geometry of their lives unmistakably clear. The point was that the ring was in the suitcase at the hotel and the word married had almost slipped out in the courtyard and Carol was standing three feet from the woman she'd loved since 1998 pretending that the distance was real.
“The point,” Carol whispered carefully, “is that he's been circling you like a realtor at an open house and I simply don't like it.”
Helen looked at her for a long moment. Something passed behind her eyes that might have been tenderness, or amusement, or both. “I know,” she said quietly. “I'll handle it.”
She moved away before Carol could respond, crossing toward Val with the unhurried stride that Carol had watched cross a thousand rooms, and Carol stood alone near the pillar and finished her club soda and wished the lime hadn't gone sour forty-five minutes ago.
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Graham Hensley returned from wherever he'd been at roughly nine twenty-five. Carol was talking to Peter Haas about the Santa Fe Trail again, or rather she was standing within conversational range of Peter Haas and making sounds of interest at regular intervals while watching the room with the vigilance of a woman whose patience was eroding by the minute. She saw Graham Hensley reenter through the main archway, scan the room with a quick sweep, and locate Helen.
Helen was talking to June from Collected Works near the courtyard windows. The fairy lights outside cast a warm glow through the glass that caught the green of Helen's dress and turned it almost luminous, and Carol thought with sudden, violent clarity that Helen looked so beautiful it was insulting.
Graham Hensley crossed the room toward Helen. He waited for a natural pause in Helen's conversation with June, then stepped in with a greeting that included June but was directed at Helen. June said something pleasant and excused herself, and then it was just the two of them again, Helen and this man in his charcoal suit with his gym-membership build, and Carol watched him say something that made Helen tilt her head.
Then she watched him extend his hand toward the small area near the courtyard doors where two or three couples had been dancing intermittently throughout the evening, swaying to the acoustic playlist with the self-conscious gentleness of people at a publishing event.
He was asking her to dance.
Carol set her empty glass on the nearest surface, which happened to be Peter Haas's table, and said, “Excuse me, Peter,” and Peter said, “Of course,” and Carol didn't hear him because she was already moving.
She didn't cross the room to them. She made herself stop. She stood near the display table of Ridgeline titles and watched Helen shake her head with a smile, a gracious, firm decline, her hand raised slightly in a polite wave-off. Graham Hensley said something else. Helen shook her head again. He leaned in and spoke close to her ear, and Carol saw Helen's shoulders go still for a moment, just barely, the smallest tightening of her posture, and then Helen stepped back and said something in return.
Whatever she said, she said it with the composed authority that Helen brought to every professional situation, the warmth in her voice supported by a firmness that left no room for misinterpretation. Graham Hensley straightened. He nodded. He said something brief, possibly conciliatory, and took a step back, the practiced smile still in place but diminished now, contracted by the reality that Helen Umstead had declined him and meant it.
He walked away. Helen watched him go, then turned and found Carol's eyes across the room with the accuracy of someone who always knew where Carol was standing. Her expression was calm, and beneath the calmness there was something else, something that Carol recognized because she had spent twenty years learning to read the things Helen kept beneath the surface. Helen was not upset. Helen was not rattled. Helen was looking at Carol with the quiet focus of a woman who understood exactly what was happening and was waiting to see what Carol would do about it.
Carol looked back. The thing inside her chest was no longer a coil. It was a fire.
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She didn't go to Helen immediately. She went to Val.
“Hey Val, I need five minutes.”
Val was mid-sip. She lowered her glass. “Five minutes for what?”
“Helen and I need to discuss something. About scheduling. For tomorrow.”
Val looked at her. “Scheduling.”
“Correct.”
“At nine thirty at night. At an event.”
“It's urgent scheduling, Val.”
Val studied Carol's face with the forensic attention of a publisher who had known this woman for six years and had attended her wedding and understood with crystalline precision that whatever Carol Sturka was about to do had nothing whatsoever to do with scheduling. Val took a slow breath. "Fine. Five minutes."
“Ten, maybe.”
“Carol.”
“We'll be back before anyone notices.”
“I'll notice.”
“You don't count. You already know everything.”
Val set her wine on the nearest table. “If anyone asks, I'll say you're on a call.”
“Thank you.”
“Don't thank me. Just be back in ten.”
Carol turned and crossed the room to Helen, who was standing alone near the bar, her phone in her hand. Carol stopped beside her, maintaining the professional distance. Her voice was low and even.
“Come with me.”
Helen looked up from her phone. She searched Carol's face. Whatever she found there made her put the phone back in her clutch without asking a question.
“Where,” Helen said.
Carol's gaze swept the room. Past the main archway, a narrow hallway led toward the restrooms and, beyond that, a door she'd noticed earlier in the evening while looking for an exit strategy. A coat check area, unstaffed tonight but still set up, with a counter and a room behind it where guests' coats hung on a long metal rack. She'd noticed it the way she noticed all exits, because Carol always noticed the ways out of a room.
“This way.”
She didn't touch Helen. She walked, and Helen followed, because Helen always understood the things Carol couldn't say in rooms full of people. They moved through the main archway into the hallway, past the restrooms, to the coat room door. Carol tried the handle. It opened. She stepped inside and Helen stepped in after her and Carol pulled the door shut.