Chapter 8 - THE KING AND THE MIND
The winter that followed was the first one Harper had spent warm.
She noticed that, of all things. Not the money, not the tower, not the city that had started to make way for her in rooms where she had once carried trays.
The warmth.
She had spent twenty-six years being cold. Cold in her apartment, cold on the walk home, cold in the four minutes between the service door and the alley. She had stopped noticing it, the way you stop noticing a sound that never stops.
And then one night in January she was standing on the balcony of the penthouse in a coat that fit her perfectly, and she realized that she had not been cold in a year, and that she had not noticed *that* either.
Gabriel came out and stood beside her.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Heating bills,” she said.
He looked at her. “Heating bills.”
“When I was a waitress, I used to keep the radiator off and sleep in two sweaters, because the difference between the radiator on and the radiator off was eleven dollars a month, and eleven dollars a month was a thing I could not afford.” She watched the snow come down over the lake. “And now I am standing on a balcony in a coat that costs more than my old apartment, thinking about eleven dollars.”
Gabriel was quiet.
“Do you want me to buy the building?” he asked.
Harper laughed. “No.”
“I could buy the building.”
“You could buy the building,” she agreed. “You could buy the block. You could buy every radiator in Chicago and turn them all on.” She turned to him. “But that’s not the point, and you know it isn’t.”
“Then what is the point?”
“The point is that I am allowed to remember it.” She looked back at the snow. “For a long time I thought that if I got out — if I ever got out — I would have to pretend the whole thing had never happened. I would have to become somebody who had never been cold and never been afraid and never carried trays. And then I would be a lie, and I have spent three years being a lie for a man who hit me. I’m not doing it again.”
Gabriel reached over and put his hand over hers on the railing.
“Then be exactly what you are,” he said.
“Which is what?”
“The woman who reads ledgers at four in the morning and keeps a folder in her desk and tells logistics brokers to address the door.” He paused. “And who is, I am told, extremely difficult to argue with.”
“I am impossible to argue with.”
“I stand corrected.”
They stood there until the snow stopped.
Later that winter, she asked him a thing she had been turning over for months.
“Why me?”
Gabriel was in the armchair, reading. He set the book down.
“You will have to be more specific.”
“You have had women. You have had money and power and a city that does what you say. You could have anyone.” She sat on the arm of the chair. “Why me?”
He considered the question for a long time. That was one of the things she had come to love about him — that he did not answer quickly, and that when he answered, it was true.
“Because you looked at me,” he said, “and you were not deciding what to ask me for.”
“What?”
“Everyone who looks at me is deciding what to ask me for. Money, protection, a favor, a job. I can see them doing the arithmetic. It takes them half a second and I have never once been wrong.” He looked at her. “You looked at me and you were deciding whether I was worth trusting. That is a different calculation. I had not seen it in twenty years.”
“You were not worth trusting,” Harper said. “You put me on the street.”
“I did.”
May you like
“You were very wrong about me.”
“I was.” He reached up and took her hand. “But I was right about one thing, and I have been right about it every day since. You do not ask for things. You build them.”
