Page 28 of Gagging the Gharial

"Yeah." Sai didn't have to think about it for even a second. "God, yeah. Of course I will. I've spent my whole life wanting exactly this and being too scared to believe I'd ever get handed it. You don't have to ask me twice, you barely had to ask me once." He laughed, wet. "I'll send you pictures. All of it. The Sunday dinners, the peonies, the whole thing staying good. I promise."

She hugged him again, fierce, and this time she let it go long. "Okay," she said into his shoulder, thick. "Okay. Good. That's the whole thing I needed. Now go find my cousin before I cry myself stupid at my own party and lose my reputation for good."

He didn't make it three steps before Lady Leo appeared at his elbow, the way she did, without seeming to have crossed any of the room to get there. She put a glass into his hand that he hadn't asked for and stood beside him a moment, both of them watching the party churn and Bethany get swept back into the middle of it.

"The flowers were a good move," she said. "She'll tell everyone you embarrassed her. She'll also press one in a book and carry it to Los Angeles and never once admit it." She sipped. "You notice things. The cooler. Who slows down where, and what they would never once ask for out loud." She turned the assessing look on him, and then let it go soft all the way to the bottom. "You'll do, Sai. I said as much at my table, and I'll say it here where it's louder and harder to take back. My sister looked at you and saw a man with nothing. I look at you and see someone who notices what people love and quietly makes sure they get it and asks for nothing in return, which is the rarest thing I know how to look for and the one thing I have never once been able to teach." She touched her glass to his. "Welcome to the family. We are a tremendous amount of work. Now go and rescue my nephew. He's about to lose an argument to Reza about a hockey team neither of them has ever watched a minute of."

Sai found him across the room, and stopped a second just to look.

Kyan was wedged into some argument with Amani and Reza that had all three of them laughing, a drink loose in his hand, comfortable in his own skin. He looked like a man at home. He looked like a man who finally belonged somewhere, who'd traded a cold gold tower full of people who used him for a loud warm room full of people who'd handed him a key and meant it. He caught Sai watching, grinned across the whole floor, and lifted his glass, and that look on his face was the entire reason Sai had stopped being afraid of this building.

This was what it was supposed to be. A family. The thing Kyan's mother had never given him and would never in her life understand, gathered loud and golden under one roof, crying over peonies and a sheet cake with a word scraped off it.

Sai crossed the room to his lion, and Kyan made space for him without breaking his sentence, an arm coming around him easy as habit, folding him into the argument and the warmth and the whole loud family without a seam. Bethany would leave in a few weeks. The real goodbye was still out ahead of them somewhere, and it was going to hurt like hell when it came.

But not tonight. Tonight the whole family was in one room that smelled like Sai's greenhouse, and he was standing in the middle of it, and he belonged there.

The music tipped from loud to slow somewhere past midnight, and Kyan appeared at his elbow with his hand out, palm up. They danced badly and did not care, Sai's cheek at his jaw, Kyan's hand spread warm at the small of his back, while Bethany got passed from her brother to Reza to a visibly suffering Harold and laughed her way through all of it. Halfway through the song Kyan stopped pretending to lead and just held him, swaying, his mouth at Sai's temple, and Sai closed his eyes and let the whole loud loved room go on around the two of them.

Chapter Eighteen

Several weeks into the job, Lady Leo handed Kyan the thing she'd been holding back to see whether he'd flinch at it.

"Los Angeles," she said, and dropped a folder on his borrowed desk that landed with the weight of a small sleeping animal. "Bethany is brilliant, and she is green, and she is about to walk into a market that has never once heard her name and owes her nothing. She’ll be living in my sister’s shadow. I have the vision handled. What I do not have is a single person who can sit down with the actual numbers for three days and tell me, honestly, where my daughter runs out of runway before she ever gets airborne. Your mother had you doing exactly this for her from the time you were nineteen. So do it for me. Do it for your cousin." She paused in the doorway. "And Kyan. If the answer is that I've sent her in underfunded, you tell me that to my face. You do not tell me the answer that lets me sleep. The entire reason I hired you over a hundred men with softer hands is that you will not flatter me. Don't make me wrong about that on the first real thing I hand you."

Then she was gone, and Kyan sat there looking at the folder, and felt something he had never once felt in front of a spreadsheet in his whole life.

He wanted to be good at it.

Not because someone would punish him if he wasn't. Not to keep an allowance, or earn a cold woman's approval, or avoid being named the family disappointment for one more quarter. He wanted to be good at it because Bethany was about to bet everything she had on a city that didn't know her name yet, and the numbers in that folder were the difference between her flying and her going down, and he could read numbers like that better than almost anyone alive. For the first time in his life, that same talent was pointed at building something up instead of stripping something down.

He caught himself on stripping down and almost laughed. Even his own brain still reached for his mother's vocabulary. He set the phrase down and opened the folder.

He worked for two days nearly straight.

He found the soft spots one at a time. A lease in the LA build-out hemorrhaging money on terms some panicked negotiator had signed under pressure. A staffing ramp that came online a full month too early and would burn through cash before there was a dollar of revenue to cover it. A marketing line so generous it bordered on reckless, the kind of number a person wrote to look brave for a boss. None of it was fatal on its own. All of it stacked together was exactly the gap between Bethany making the whole thing look effortless and Bethany lying awake at three in the morning doing the exact thing she'd warned the whole family she'd be calling about. He tore the model down and rebuilt it three times. And by the end he'd found her four extra months of runway without asking Lady Leo for another cent, just by moving things to where they should have been sitting from the start.

When he walked Lady Leo through it, line by line, she went quiet, which from her was a standing ovation with the lights up.

"You're certain," she said when he finished.

"I'm certain. She isn't underfunded. She was badly sequenced, and now she's not. She'll still have a hard first year, but she'll have the runway to live through a hard first year, which is more than most people get and exactly as much as she needs." Kyan closed the folder. "Don't tell her I touched it. Let her think it came to her this clean. She's spent her whole life being the one who quietly holds the door for everyone else. She doesn't need to find out her cousin caught her on the way out before she even knew she was falling."

Lady Leo studied him for a long moment over the top of her glasses.

"My sister spent thirty years telling you what you were," she said finally. "A tool. A closer. A thing she aimed at problems and fired. She was entirely right about the skill and entirely wrong about everything that mattered." She tapped the folder once. "This is the same skill she used you for. Look at what it does the second you point it at keeping someone up instead of taking someone down. That was always the only difference, nephew. Never the talent. Only the aim. Your mother could never once tell the two apart, and it's going to cost her everyone she has left, one at a time." She slid the folder back across the desk to him. "Good work. The best I've seen since I opened the doors. Now go home. You've been in this building for two days and you smell like a man who badly needs to go be loved by his gharial."

Kyan got out of her office, and made it all the way to the elevator before his eyes did anything embarrassing.

He sat in his terrible secondhand car in the lot a while before he turned the key, and thought about the thing Sai had said in the garden center break room, back when Kyan had been quietly grieving over having nothing in the world that was his. Give it more than a few days. It had been more than a few days. And somewhere in the last two of them, hunched over a model that would catch his cousin before she fell, he'd built the first thing in his whole life that was actually his. Not handed down. Not stripped off anyone. Made, with his own two hands, out of a skill his mother had only ever used as a blade. He still hadn't heard from her. He'd stopped checking the phone for it days ago. That was its own slow kind of healing, the kind that happened while he was busy doing something that finally mattered.

He drove home to the studio with his chest fuller and lighter than it had been in a month.

Sai was watering the window plants when he came in, barefoot, a watering can in one hand and the gray evening light pooling on all the green, and he turned at the sound of the door and took exactly one look at Kyan's face.

"You did the thing," Sai said. "Whatever it was, you did it. You've got the look all over you."

"I caught her." Kyan crossed the nine steps, took the watering can gently out of Sai's hand, and set it on the only empty spot on the sill. "Bethany. She was going to run out of money four months early and not know until it was far too late, and I found it, I fixed it, and Leo told me not to tell her, just let her fly thinking it was always that clean." His voice cracked on it and he kept going. "I built something, Sai. With the exact skills my mother only ever used to wreck people. I aimed it at holding somebody up instead, and it worked. It's the first thing I've ever made that belongs to me."