🌁 chapter eleven: a seat at the table [let me be your ghost]

“You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.” -Albert Camus, The Fall

“You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.”

-Albert Camus, The Fall

previous: about | chapter one | chapter two | chapter three | chapter four | chapter five | chapter six | chapter seven | chapter eight | chapter nine | chapter ten

The fog hadn’t burned off when I went looking for him.

I found Eze in the kitchen garden below the east lawn, standing on the gravel between Amos’s raised beds with a coffee he wasn’t drinking.

Eze was dressed for the city—charcoal trousers, white shirt open at the collar, no tie yet—but his hair hadn’t gotten the memo, standing ungoverned like he’d been dragging his hands through it since dawn, and the shadows under his eyes were the same gray as the marine layer. The dahlias were still beaded with fog. Bees moved through the rosemary slow and heavy, drunk on the cold. Somewhere below the cliffs, the ocean kept working.

I’d dressed for a writing day—black jeans, an oversized black sweater with the sleeves shoved to my elbows, boots gone dark at the toes from the wet lawn. A strand of black hair had already worked loose from my bun, in keeping with tradition. I’d carried my coffee out with me because my hands had wanted something to do since breakfast.

I held out the envelope to him.

“This came at breakfast,” I said. “Technically it’s addressed to you, but it looks like whoever sent it wanted me to see it as well. Tini crossed herself with a spatula before she’d hand it over, and Tini has stared down health inspectors.”

Eze set his cup on the low stone wall and took the card. His eyes went down it once, fast, and stopped where I’d known they would—on the looping afterthought at the bottom, the plus one the whole valley is whispering about. The muscle in his jaw ticked.

“Dorian Ashcroft,” he said, and nothing else for a moment.

“Tell me about him.”

“Walk with me.” He took the path toward the greenhouse and I fell in step beside him, gravel crunching, our breath showing in the cold Bay Area morning. “He founded a company called Solace. An AI companion—a friend in your pocket. Someone who always picks up at three in the morning when no one else in your life does. Forty million subscribers.” He paused. “Most of them lonely. A lot of them young. Dorian is very good at being needed.”

“That’s either sweet or horrifying.”

“He’s been trying to worm his way into getting streams of our data for two years. Location data, specifically. He wants to know where his users are, who they’re with, how long they’ve been alone.” The gravel kept time under our feet. “My father told him no. Three times.”

“Did your father tell people no?”

“Almost never. Not people with checkbooks.” His eyes stayed on the path ahead. “Which is the part I keep coming back to.”

“So decline the dinner invite. Tell him the memoir has you busy.”

“I can’t.” Eze’s tone was clipped, his gaze stormy. “Eighteen months ago he bought four percent of the company and two board seats that vote the way he votes. I can refuse his data requests all year—I do. But I can’t keep refusing his dinners without handing him a grievance to perform for the other directors.” A breath that wasn’t quite a laugh. “It’s politics. I hate politics. That’s what hurts me in all this, and Dorian knows that better than anyone.”

The path narrowed at the corner of the greenhouse and our knuckles brushed—an accident of closeness, nothing more. He moved his hand away. Not fast. Just final. And put an inch of fog between us that hadn’t been there before. I sucked in a breath, trying to size up this mystery that was Eze.

Was Eze… afraid of Dorian?

“And me?” I asked, hating how careful my voice came out. “Why does he want me at that table?”

Eze stopped walking. “I don’t know.” The words landed one at a time. “I’ve been turning it over all morning, and I don’t know, and I don’t like not knowing.”

“Okay. So I’ll smile and pass the salt and—”

“Rules for Thursday.” He turned to me, and the CEO was all the way on, the warmth gone somewhere I couldn’t track. “You don’t go anywhere in that house alone. You stay by my side. You don’t eat or drink anything that didn’t come from a dish we’re sharing. And whatever he offers you—money, flattery, a story about me—you look bored. Boredom is the only thing men like Dorian can’t buy.”

I stopped walking. “Hold on. What do you mean, nothing that didn’t come from a shared dish?” The edge in my voice arrived before I could file it down. “What’s he going to do, drug me at his own dinner party—”

“Lola.”

“What do I need to know about him, Eze? What has he done?”

“Just trust me.” Eze’s tone was quiet. The kind of tone that ended meetings.

The bees went on with their slow work. I wrapped both hands around my mug like it was a lifeline in the stormy sea of Eze’s emotions. The coffee had gone cold without consulting me, and I drank some anyway, because my body needed a job that wasn’t shaking.

Eze looked down at the invitation still in his hand. Then he folded it once and his fist closed around it—slow, deliberate, until the heavy cream stock gave. When his hand opened, the invitation was a tight crumpled knot, the watermark eye crushed blind, and I understood, finally, that the cold demeanor he wore this morning had never been for me.

“I’ve been bored by richer men than Dorian Ashcroft,” I said, aiming for flippant to fill the silence and landing somewhere just south of it.

He looked at me then—really looked, for the first time since the garden gate—and something raw moved behind the green before he shut it away.

“No,” he said quietly. “You haven’t.”

He tossed the ruined card into a nearby trash bin, picked his coffee up off the wall, and walked toward the drive, where Xavier already had the car idling.

I stood in the fog with my cold coffee, listening to the gravel give under his shoes, and wondered what the fuck I’d just been invited to.