Chapter 23: The Floor

"Yes," I said. "I say so."

Donovan held out his good hand, and I put mine in it.

The quartet played something slow, and he turned me out onto the polished floor.

Behind us the room emptied.

The house's members filed out in twos.

The dealer wheeled my father toward the service lift, and Emmett lifted two fingers to me without turning his head.

An attendant pushed Lowell away, and Odette walked beside him with her pearls in her fist.

Neither of them looked back.

Then the doors closed, and the lights dimmed to the low amber ones, and it was only the quartet and the two of us.

One by one the musicians put down their bows and slipped out, because I had paid them to.

We danced in the silence.

"This is the spot," Donovan said at my ear.

"What is?"

"The head table was there. Thirty feet. I pictured it the morning after, lying in a hospital bed."

I looked across the floor at the long table with its white cloth and the empty chair at the end.

"Walk it," I said.

"Now?"

"You stood still for thirty feet. Walk it for me. I want to see you do it."

He let go of my hand.

He crossed the parquet to the head table without hurrying.

He turned and walked back to me across the same floor, and he did not stop until he was close enough to feel my breath.

"That's it?" he said.

"That's it."

"It was easier than I thought."

"It was never hard," I said. "It was only a thing you hadn't done."

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