St. Catherine's smelled of flowers and rich antiseptic, the specific mix of a place that had decided that dying ought to be easy enough to forget.
Alora had been around in St. Helena long enough to know better. It smelled of fluorescent lights and reality. This stank of a very nicety lie, and she'd never hated a smell more than she did as her head skimmed the cream corridors beside Ares, their footsteps devoured by flooring selected for its specifically noiseless nature.
Diane greeted them at the ICU entrance. Small, composed, the tentative vocabulary of someone handling the periphery of grief for a job: stable for now, resting, asked after you both by name. She pushed open the door.
Alora wasn't prepared to see how small James had become.
A network of Iv tubes and monitors snaked around him.
His eyelids peeled back in slow-motion, and they finally found them standing in the doorway, and remained still.
Electric brown, warm. In between already, moving between them and across their fingers and reading the eighteen inches of careful air between their bodies with the concentration of a man who had spent sixty years doing crosswords in pen so he knew what a pattern looked like when he saw one.
Something unfurled in his face that was still not quite a smile yet but moving in that direction.
"You came together?" He rasped.
"You asked for us together," Alora said her voice soft.
Moving towards him with grace, gravitating toward the left side of the bed, pulling the chair side, and pushing it closer to James, the scent of him faintly woodsmoke beneath the sharp bite of antiseptic rose meeting her. She was close engouh now and could see the shattered light in his eyes. The James she knew still flickering behind the exhaustion.
Ares took the right, didn't bother to take a seat.
James glanced back and forth between them for a moment.
"Give an old man your hands." He rasped.
Alora put hers out. He took it, thin fingers but grip still deliberate, still purposeful.
Then he looked at Ares.
Ares looked back.
A pause.
"Ares," James said, with the patience of a man who had all the time in the world and planned to take it.
Ares reached out.
He took Alora's other hand.
She felt it, his fingers curling around hers with the deliberate care of a man who wasn't sure it was safe to touch. She kept her eyes on James. She did not look at Ares. She knew that if she looked at him right now there would be something on his face that she was not yet equipped to handle, and she needed to be equipped before she looked.
James held both their hands, and looked at the ceiling.
"I want to tell you something." He whispered.
He told them about the winter of 1987.
He and Eleanor Ares's mother, dead twelve years, of whom Alora had only the photographs on the wall in a lower hall to remember and some cadence in James's voice that grew when he spoke her name, had been married fourteen months. And those fourteen months had been, by his reckoning, a complete education in how two people could seem utterly ill matched on the surface yet be absolutely essential to one another underneath.
"We fought," he said, tracing his thumb slowly over Alora's knuckles.
"Not loudly. Eleanor didn't do loud. She went quiet. The type of quiet that is more deafening than anything. I would say something and she just stop. And the stopping was worse than anything she might have said back."
He paused and closed his eyes for a heartbeat, the memory seemly heavier than the illness.
"The radiator broke in our first apartment that January. The city was the coldest it had been in thirty years and we had no heat and we'd hardly spoken for a week and I said this is me sleeping on the sofa." A slight shift at the corner of his mouth.
"I lasted forty minutes. In that apartment, it was seventeen degrees. Seventeen. So I went to the bedroom and she was lying there in every piece of clothing she owned and when I got in she didn't say a word. Neither did I."
The room was very quiet.
"On the mornings she would make coffee for me. Exactly how I took it. We had been married fourteen months and arguing for three of them and she still knew exactly how I drank my coffee without asking.' He stopped. That moment I knew. Now you can see them there." I'd been trying not to love her. And I'd already failed. Completely. Well before I did so publicly."
He let the story sit.
He glanced past both of them. He simply held their hands and stared at the ceiling in the manner of a man taking an old, dear trip.
"I'm not telling you two nothing. I'm just an old man with a radiator story." He murmured.
Alora looked at him.
She squeezed his hand. He squeezed back, the corner of his mouth doing that thing it did — the real smile, the one that had been making her feel like she had all week since the first Tuesday she'd brought him the wrong order and he'd drunk it anyway.
They stayed forty minutes.
She observed the energy drain even as the James-ness of him persisted — the sentences growing shorter, the pauses wider, his eyes remaining closed between them longer each time. She told him about the diner. He asked about her mother. He had asked Ares about the Meridian acquisition fully expecting a comprehensive answer, and Ares had provided one, unsimplified, unsoftened, James had never once said that he wanted to be managed, nor was there anyone who knew him better than Ares.
She listened to them talk you know, practical and specific, the language of two people who were forced to learn how to love each other through the medium of work because other mediums had been harder for them to find and she thought about what James had said in this very room weeks earlier: that he was a radically different boy, once.
She remembered the boy who would bring home wounded birds. She wondered how much it cost to bury that boy nine hundred and fifty billion dollars' worth of armor, and how insane he had been to call it preparation.
When James's eyes ceased to open between pauses, Diane stood in the doorway.
Alora stood. She leaned down. She kissed James's forehead, something she had done on every visit for the previous four months without ever consciously deciding it, that had just come to be what she did, and he shut his eyes as he always would, wearing the look of a man receiving something it turned out he wanted.
She straightened.
And Ares was staring at his father.
All things had been subject to that gaze from AresAres. She had filed away his expressions with the involuntary precision of someone who had learned that reading him was as much a survival skill as food and water. She had seen the assessment look and controlled look and almost-laugh look and 1 AM window look.
She had not seen this one.
She looked away before he could see her look.
Their hands had disconnected the instant they cleared the ICU doorway.
No decision. No withdrawal. The door slammed and the air changed and their hands were just no longer joined, the way things cease when the reason for their existence ceases.
Neither mentioned it.
Diane accompanied them to the elevator with her gentle words and Alora responded as she was supposed to and Ares said nothing, which was in itself a language, his language. The elevator arrived, they got in. The doors closed.
She watched the numbers count down and she thought about Eleanor and seventeen degrees and coffee brewed just so after fourteen months of fighting, and she thought about a kitchen counter every morning, just the way you liked it, without even being asked, and she wondered: James Anthony Miller, you did this on purpose. Every single bit of it. You absolute menace.
Ares remained still beside her.
She looked at him.
He was facing forward. Jaw set. The complete deployed architecture — every control surface extended. Except his eyes. His eyes were bright in a way she hadn't seen before, lit from something beneath the electric coldness she'd taken note of over weeks of booths and cars and gilded rooms.
This was different. This was the brightness of someone bearing something immense at the very edge of containment — grief, pressing against its own boundary, still undecided whether to become itself.
He was not going to let it.
She could almost see the effort it took not to. The jaw. The stillness. The forward gaze. Some of it in the service of holding the line.
Without thinking she put her hand on his arm.
He went very still.
Not the controlled kind. Something else under that — older, the stillness of a person touched precisely where they needed to be touched and hadn't looked for it. His breath changed, a little, enough that she sensed it.
The elevator counted its floors. And still she did not move her hand and so did he.
The doors opened into the lobby. Cream-colored floors, fresh flowers, the tasteful lie of whatever was being served up around them.