Chapter 23: The Unveiling Eve

Ansel found me in the hotel restaurant at seven, stirring a cup of coffee I had not drunk.

He sat down opposite me with a bandage on his chin from the night before.

"Rory's eating toast," he said. "He asked if the big man is coming to breakfast."

"What did you say?"

"I said it was up to his mother."

He put his hands around a glass of water and looked into it.

"You didn't tell me," he said. "In three years, you never told me he was Lachlan's."

"I did tell you."

"You told me he had a father who didn't deserve to know. That's different."

I opened my mouth to argue and could not.

"I'm not angry," he said. "I held your ladder. I told a lawyer that kid was mine and I'd do it again."

"Then what?"

"I'm just asking one thing."

"Ask."

"Are you doing this for him, or for Rory?"

"For Rory."

"Good." He drank some water. "Then here is what I think."

"Go on."

"The man carried your son through thirty cameras. That counts. It doesn't pay anything off. Make him earn the rest slowly, where you can see it."

"That's what I intend."

"And if the answer is no in the end, you come home to Chicago. The gallery has your name on the door."

My eyes stung.

"You're a very good friend," I said.

"I'm an excellent liar," Ansel said. "It's a different skill."

I laughed, and it broke in the middle.

At nine that night I went down to the ballroom alone.

The Showcase was the following evening.

The room was empty and vast, with four hundred chairs already set in rows and forty round tables dressed in white.

Under the high windows the east wall stood bare.

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