Terms

You don't sleep much after that conversation, and you don't regret a word of it.

You read it again in the morning on the subway, thumb hovering over the screen, like someone checking a stove. It's all still there. Whatever else you said, and whatever he said back, the last thing on the screen is the rule, in his words, because he asked if he could write it down so neither of you could pretend later.

You will never analyze me. I will never ask you to. Dr. Okonedo has Tuesdays and Fridays. You don't have any days. That's the point.

Below it, your answer: Agreed.

Below that, at 1:12 a.m.: Go to sleep, Ava.

You did. Eventually.

"You're going," Adwoa says on Thursday, standing in your bedroom doorway in a green column dress with her braids piled on top of her head and her red glasses on, holding up a black dress of yours like evidence. "My firm bought a table. Half the table bailed. You have been a photograph for three weeks, and a photograph needs a night out."

"It's a cancer benefit at a library, not a night out."

"There's an open bar and a string quartet that plays Beyoncé. Put on the dress, Ava."

You put on the dress.

The Aldine Library is a white marble box on Fifth Avenue that has never once been used for reading. Tonight it's full of candles and money. Adwoa hands you a glass of champagne you don't want and introduces you to four partners at her firm, all of whom ask what you do and then, when you say psychologist, tell you about their mothers.

By the fourth mother you excuse yourself and find the terrace.

It's cold out, the first real cold of October. Central Park is a dark mass across the avenue, a few lit paths threaded through it. You put your glass on the stone balustrade and breathe.

"I was told the terrace was closed," says a voice behind you.

You know it before you turn. You'd know it in a stadium.

Joachim Vantreight is standing in the doorway in a black suit, no tie, collar open, a glass of water in one hand. In candlelight he is, frankly, unfair. You watch two women just inside the door watch him, and then watch you, and then lean together to whisper.

"It isn't closed," you say. "It's cold."

"Is it all right that I'm here, Ava?" He doesn't come closer. "I didn't know you'd be at this. I give to the hospital every year. I can go back inside."

"It's all right."

He walks to the balustrade and leaves exactly one person's width between you. You notice. You think he means you to.

"So," he says. "How do two people who agreed on a rule at one in the morning talk to each other at a party?"

"Badly, probably."

"I'm willing to try badly." He sets his water next to your champagne. "Ask me something that isn't about my childhood."

You laugh before you can stop it. His eyes go to your mouth when you do, quick and then away, and something warm unfolds low in your stomach.

"What do you actually do all day?" you ask. "Not the magazine version."

He tells you. Batteries, it turns out, enormous ones, the kind that sit in deserts and hold the sun overnight so a city can run on it at three in the morning. He tells you about a site in Nevada where the wind sounds like a train, and a chemist on his team who sings opera in the lab, and the first prototype, which caught fire in a garage in Queens and took his eyebrows with it.

"Not the scar," you say.

"No. The scar is from being seventeen and stupid on a bicycle." He touches it absently. "The board's meeting is December seventeenth. They'll vote on whether I stay. I've done everything they asked. I go to Dr. Okonedo. I haven't so much as jaywalked. It may not matter."

"Why wouldn't it matter?"

"Because some of them have already decided what I am." He looks out at the park. "And because a company is worth more to certain people without the man who built it in the way."

You want to ask which people. You want to ask how he sleeps, whether he does, what he's thinking about when he looks out at the dark like that. Every one of those questions sits on your tongue in your work voice, and you swallow every one of them.

He sees you do it. Of course he does.

"You're doing it right now," he says softly. "Not asking."

"I'm trying."

"I can tell." He turns toward you, just slightly. "Can I tell you something honest that isn't a question for you to answer?"

"Yes."

"You're the only person at this party I wanted to talk to. I'd have said that even if you'd been inside telling the managing partner of your friend's firm about his mother."

"How do you know about the mothers?"

"I could see you through the window. You have a face you make." He demonstrates, a polite, attentive tilt of the head that's so exactly yours that you laugh again, too loudly, and two people inside turn to look.

That's when the terrace door opens again.

The man who steps through is in his early fifties and dressed better than anyone at the party, a navy suit cut like it was sewn on him, silver at the temples, a tan that has never seen a New York October. He is very handsome in the way of men who have been told so their whole lives. His smile is warm and practiced and reaches nowhere near his eyes.

"There you are," he says to Joachim. "Georgina's been looking for you." Then he turns the smile on you. "And this must be the famous Dr. Ambery. Emerson Cheswick. I co-founded the company with this one, back when he still had eyebrows."

"Mr. Cheswick," you say, and shake the hand he offers. His grip is dry and lingers a half second too long.

"Emerson, please. I'm on the board, God help me." He glances between the two of you, the one-person space at the balustrade, the two glasses. "So you're the doctor who said no to him. Brave. Nobody says no to Joachim."

"Emerson," Joachim says, very quietly.

"I'm only admiring her." Cheswick lets go of your hand at last and pats your arm, lightly, the way you'd pat a horse you were thinking of buying. "And don't you worry, Doctor. I'm sure everything you wrote about him is locked up tight."