I Pour My Own Glass

In my last life, the first thing Delphine Asher ever gave me was a compliment about my shoes.

I want that on the record, because it is the kind of detail that tells you everything if you know how to read it, and I did not, then. She crossed a gallery floor in borrowed-looking couture that I now know she had not borrowed at all, she had budgeted, and she arrived at my elbow and said, with the exact warmth of a fire that has been lit specifically to draw you nearer, that she had been admiring my shoes from across the room and did I know they were the only honest thing in here, the only thing not pretending to be art. And I, twenty-five and starved and freshly orphaned of every relative who had not wanted my money, had felt the warmth land on the cold part of me that Margot kept frozen, and I had thought, oh, here is a person who sees me, and I had given her three years and a place at the head of my wedding table and the back of my own throat.

So when she came at me across this floor, on schedule, exactly on schedule, with the chosen-you smile coming up in her face like a coin surfacing in dark water, I knew what she was going to say before she said it. I knew it as you know the next stair in your own house in the dark. She was going to admire my shoes.

I had a half-second. I have told you what being murdered does to the half-second.

The strategist in me, the Margot-built part, ran the board in the time it took Delphine to cross the last six feet, and the board was bad. Behind me stood Tristan with a glass of perfect poison in each hand and his arithmetic freshly broken. At my shoulder stood Roan, who could not lie, with the question how do you know I can't lie still standing between us unanswered. And here came Delphine, the third leg of the table they would one day lay me out on, and she was about to offer me the one thing I had wanted my whole life, which was to be seen, and which she had only ever offered as bait.

One: take the friendship. Keep her close, the way I keep Tristan close, let her think she is inside, let her pour the wine where I can watch the pouring.

Two: decline it.

And reader, I had written One on a list six hours ago. Keep-them-close. Let them hang themselves. It was item four of the plan I threw in the river, and it was, on paper, the cleverest play available to me, because Delphine's entire power, the only weapon she had ever owned, was being trusted. She was a woman who could only ever stab you from the inside of the embrace. Refuse the embrace and you take the knife out of her hand. But you also tip her off, you also tell her she is not getting in, you also let her start improvising, the way Tristan had started improvising the moment I said no, thank you, the way the whole evening had started coming off the rails of my memory the instant I touched it.

Keep her close was the plan. Keep her close was the strategy. I had it numbered. I had it ready.

She arrived. She tilted her head the precise charming degree. She opened her mouth, and I watched her eyes flick down, on schedule, toward my shoes.

"Those," she began, warm as a hearth, "are the only honest thing in this whole room. I've been admiring them from over there. Everything else in here is pretending to be art, and your shoes are just shoes, and thank God for it. Delphine Asher."

She put out her hand.

And I looked at it, the manicured offered hand, the hand that in another life had held the head of my own bridal table, the hand that had, somewhere in a future I had already buried, tipped a vial into the last glass I ever drank, and I felt the warmth come up off her like it always had, the warmth aimed straight at the frozen Margot-place, and the terrible part, which I will admit here and nowhere else, is that it still worked. Even knowing. Even dead and reborn and standing in the ashes of my own wedding, the cold part of me leaned toward that fire, because that is what Margot built, a girl who would rather be poisoned by someone warm than left alone by someone safe.

That is the moment I stopped numbering.

I did not decide to. I have told you this is my flaw, that I plan the joy out of everything, that I make a list the way other people flinch, and that the lists are armour and the armour is the disease. And I have told you the other one, the thing the lists are always one weak moment from losing to, which is that the second feeling overrules the plan, the plan is gone, every time, and early on it terrifies me. This terrified me. Because the smart play, the close play, the live-to-bury-them-all play, required me to take that hand and smile and let Delphine Asher into my life like a draught under a door, and I found that I could not do it. Not the cleverness. Not the strategy. I could not put my hand in the hand that poured the wine. My body had reached for Roan's honesty before my mind could stop it, an hour ago, and now my body refused Delphine's warmth before the list could finish, and I am telling you that both of those are the same broken, healing thing, the same instrument, the one judgement Margot could not quite kill, finally pointing the right way.

So I did not take her hand.

I poured my own glass instead.

There was an attendant by the plinth with a tray, and I turned, easy, gracious, a woman simply attending to the small business of a party, and I took an empty flute and the bottle from the ice and I poured it myself, the whole way, watching it the whole way, and the act of it answered Delphine's hand without ever once refusing it out loud. Because you cannot shake a hand with a bottle in one and a glass in the other. I had given myself something to do with my hands that was not touching hers, and I had done it as the most natural thing in the world, and the only person in the room who understood what he had just watched was the one at my shoulder, who had taught me the gesture in a life he was not supposed to remember.

"Ines Calloway," I said, and I smiled at her over the rim of the glass I had poured, the warm one, the one that reaches the eyes, the smile I had practised on my own killers for three years. "Forgive me. I never shake hands at these things, I always end up holding a drink. It's a character flaw. I pour my own, you see. Only superstition I have."

And I watched it land on her the way the empty box had landed on Tristan.

It was the smallest thing. It was nothing. It was a woman declining, charmingly, to free up a hand, and any normal person would have read it as exactly that and moved on. But Delphine Asher was not a normal person, Delphine Asher was a woman who had read the precise temperature of other people's welcome since girlhood, because the welcome was her livelihood, the welcome was her weapon, and she had walked across this floor knowing, the way she always knew, that the lonely rich orphan would lean into the fire. They always leaned. I had leaned. And I had not leaned.

Her hand came back to her side, smooth, no break in the smile, but I saw it. I saw the recalculation go behind her eyes the way I had watched it go behind Tristan's by the empty box, the lock turning on nothing, the small cold note being made. Two of them in one evening. I had broken two arithmetics in one evening, the golden boy's and the borrowed-dress girl's, and I felt the old satisfaction come up sweet and vengeful and immediately, hard on its heels, the cold understanding that I had just done it again. I had changed the input. I had burned another inch of my map. In my last life Delphine spent three years certain she was inside, and I always knew where she was, because she told me, because best friends tell you everything they want you to know. Now she would spend the evening certain she was outside, and a Delphine on the outside is a Delphine I cannot see.

"A woman who pours her own," Delphine said, and the warmth had gone nowhere, that was the frightening part, the warmth was a furnace she could run on nothing, "I think you might be my favourite person here already, Ines. May I call you Ines?" She let her gaze travel, slow, deliberate, to Tristan behind me with his two glasses, and to Roan beside me with his bad reputation, and back, and the thing she did with her mouth then was the one honest thing she would ever show me, a small private amusement, a woman appraising the value of a property and finding it higher than advertised. "You've collected the two most dangerous men in the room and you're drinking alone. I had no idea tonight was going to be interesting."

In my last life she said the same thing. Three years later. At my engagement party. Word for word, the dangerous men line, except the dangerous man she meant then was Roan, and she said it to warn me off him, with her arm linked warm through mine, and I had laughed and agreed and let her steer me. I felt the sentence land in me now like a stone dropped down a well I already knew the depth of, and I understood that she had not improvised it, that it was a thing she kept, a polished thing she brought out, and that I had just heard it three years early, off-script, aimed wrong, because I had moved the pieces.

"You have no idea," I agreed, and I raised my own poured glass to her, light, friendly, a toast between new acquaintances, and behind me I heard Tristan set one of his two perfect glasses down on the plinth, very quietly, the way a man puts down a tool he has decided not to use yet.

And then Delphine's eyes moved past my shoulder, to the man beside me, and she did the thing she does, the warm conspiratorial lean, the lowering of the voice into the register that says we are friends now, you and I, we are on the same side, and she said the line that went through me cold to the elbows, because it was the wrong line, the right line, three years too soon and aimed at the wrong life:

"You really should be careful of him, you know." A flick of her lashes toward Roan, sweet, sisterly, the warning I had taken from her once before and let it cost me everything. "Roan Maddox. Whatever he's told you he is. I only say it because I'd hate to see a lovely thing like you get hurt." She smiled, and reached out, and laid her cool hand on my bare arm, the way she had a hundred times in a life she did not know she had already lived, the warm hand and the cold purpose arriving together, indistinguishable, which was the whole trick of her. "We girls have to look out for each other."

And beside me, very low, in a voice gone strange and flat, before I could move, before I could steer the car from the wall, Roan Maddox looked at Delphine's cool hand on my bare arm, and something passed over his face that I had no word for yet, a recognition that arrived too fast and too whole, and he said, not to me, almost to himself:

"She always does this part the same way."