Page 107 of Don't Tell

The whole image is rendered in warm golden light. It's the light that comes through the big window of a hotel suite at 11:00 a.m. when the curtains have just been opened. The kind of light that makes a thing that should be ugly into a thing that is beautiful.

I don't speak for a long moment.

"Suzanne."

"Mmm…"

"When did you paint this?"

She shrugs.

A small one-shoulder shrug. Her eyes are bright.

"You see," she tells me, "I can keep a secret."

I cross the room.

I take her face in my hands.

I kiss her.

I kiss her for longer than is wise given that we are forty minutes late for a five-hundred-person auction at which I have already arranged with my brother the moment that is going to redefine the rest of my life.

I pull back.

"I know you can."

"Cade."

"I know you can, baby."

"Do you like it?"

"Suzanne."

"Do you?"

"I love it. I love you. I cannot — I cannot look at this properly right now or I will not make it out of this apartment, and I have a very specific reason I need to make it out of this apartment tonight."

She laughs and wraps the painting back up in the soft cloth she had it in. She sets it by the door and takes my arm.

We leave.

The auction is full.

Five hundred people. The same room I have been coming to for ten years. The same view of the bay through the long bank of windows on the north wall. The same string quartet Beau hires every year because the cellist is the daughter of his second-grade teacher.

Heads turn when we walk in.

I'm used to heads turning for me, but I'm not used to them turning for her.

I like it.

Vivienne finds us first. She kisses Suzanne on both cheeks. She squeezes my arm in the small specific way that tells me she knows exactly what is in my inside pocket and has known since I called her three weeks ago to ask what stone color her own mother had worn.

Henry's behind her in a gray suit, looking slightly drawn at the temple. That's how he looks when he's had a migraine that day and is pretending he hasn't.

"Henry."