Page 47 of Gifted & Talented

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Eilidh awoke to Dzhuliya trying to sneak out, but Eilidh knew every creak of every beam in the turret and Dzhuliya didn’t, so achieving the necessary degree of stealth was always going to be unlikely. Eilidh opened her eyes as Dzhuliya struggled to put one leg in her jeans, nearly toppling over as she attempted the other. She wrestled with the button, giving the air a pained look before she finally managed to fasten them. Then Dzhuliya exhaled and stared down at her stomach, looking at it with a slight foreignness, as if she’d never seen her own navel before.

“Good morning,” Eilidh remarked with amusement, watching Dzhuliya wince at her own surprise. “Love ’em and leave ’em, huh?”

“I have to… follow up on the arrangements we discussed,” Dzhuliya said, clearing her throat and fiddling with her hair, which had been hastily scraped back into a ponytail. “Funeral things.”

Eilidh felt the sinking reminder of her father’s loss, followed by the floating recollection that he wouldn’t waltz into the room that moment; that she would never have to see whatever expression might cross his face after she told him what she’d spent the night doing with his assistant. Former assistant. Whatever.

“What’s on the docket for today?” Eilidh asked, sitting upright. She realized only belatedly that she’d thrown on a white pointelle sleep set without a bra, looking like a small French child apart from the near-transparent material. Her nipples were paying rapt attention to the conversation at hand and she nearly covered them up until Dzhuliya’s eyes drifted longingly down.

Which was, in a word, interesting. (The thing in Eilidh’s chest bloodthirstily agreed.)

“We’re not going to tell anyone about this,” offered Dzhuliya tangentially, “are we?”

“You mean you don’t want to have breakfast with my entire family?” Eilidh replied. “Right now, this instant?”

Dzhuliya gave a long sigh, adjusting her jeans. There was the barest, slightest curve to her belly, which Eilidh had run her fingers down and slid her tongue over several times the previous night. If this was the gestational body, then from an outsider’s perspective, it was highly underrated. Dzhuliya’s breasts were full and sensitive, tender to the (frequent) touch. Eilidh had chosen not to ask questions, largely out of the hope that Dzhuliya would not ask any herself.

“I thought I’d take care of the ashes this morning. Save you a trip,” Dzhuliya said. “Although I’m not entirely sure what urn your father would have wanted.”

“Probably one of those red cups,” said Eilidh. “Or a genie lamp.”

“His coffee thermos,” suggested Dzhuliya. “Or the cup he used to use that kept the coffee warm all day. You know, instead of just drinking it.”

“Oh yeah, my other sibling,” Eilidh said, and Dzhuliya laughed. A husky, morning-after laugh, like lovers did—an unsolicited thought. Eilidh managed a playful, “Maybe one of those little vodka bottles you get on planes?”

“Probably more than one of them, I’m guessing?”

“Yeah, like a treasure chest of those.”

Dzhuliya came around the bed, idly tracing the material of Eilidh’s quilt with the tip of her finger. “I can’t tell if this conversation is wildly inappropriate or just… some kind of coping mechanism.”

“Both,” said Eilidh.

Dzhuliya was quiet for a moment, perching delicately on the edge of the bed and staring down at the quilt before locking eyes with Eilidh. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“For what? Not last night, I hope. Because I’m definitely not sorry.” Eilidh reached out to run a finger over a light bruise on Dzhuliya’s neck. “Even though I maybe should be.”

Dzhuliya leaned into Eilidh’s touch for a moment. “I meant… your father, I guess. I don’t know. Everything.” She exhaled. “I’m not sure last night would have happened if you weren’t… you know. Vulnerable.” She gave a sidelong search of Eilidh’s face. “I can’t help feeling like I should have turned you down.”

“I’m grieving,” replied Eilidh with a shrug, not wanting to engage with what it might mean if Dzhuliya was right. If last week’s Eilidh would have clung to the lie of amicable colleagues forever, then had her father always been the only thing in the way? Were Eilidh’s current feelings the mirage or was it the person she’d tried so hard for so long to be? The thing in her chest flicked an admonishment, like the tongue of a deadly asp. “There are basically no rules right now.”

“ I’d have done it a long time ago, you know, without the grief excuse. For the record.” Dzhuliya looked squarely at her then. “I didn’t think you were interested, given how things went last time.”

The abbreviated tryst in the car, she meant. And all the months of circling each other since then. “It’s not that I didn’t want to. It’s just… this isn’t a priority for me,” Eilidh said with a wave of her hand to gesture at the boudoir and its realm of recreation—something that felt both true and easy to explain, or maybe the easiest version of a heavier truth. “And I’ve been pretty stuck the last couple of years. Longer than that, really.” The thing in Eilidh’s chest seemed to take profound offense. “I just don’t think I had the bandwidth for whatever this was. Is. Could be.” Eilidh grimaced at the uncertainty in her voice, the way she didn’t seem to be answering the question, if there had even been one. “Is it okay if I don’t choose my verbs wisely just yet?”

Dzhuliya looked as if she might say something, but then changed her mind. “It’s fantastic, actually.” She leaned away, straightening her shoulders with a renewed sense of purpose. “But I really should get going.” She stood, seeming winded just from the effort of rising.

“Do you want me to come?” asked Eilidh. The question surprised her, having manifested from nowhere. If someone else had asked her if she wanted to pick out her father’s urn today, at this very moment, she’d have said absolutely not, thank you very much. “It feels like, I don’t know, maybe a cathartic exercise. Plus, I’m executor, right? And I’m kind of going crazy just waiting around for the lawyers to tell me what to execute.”

“Are you sure? I thought it might be… difficult for you,” Dzhuliya said. “Emotionally.”

Eilidh shrugged. “You’ll dry my tears, won’t you?” she joked.

Dzhuliya hesitated, wrestling for a moment with her response, and Eilidh wondered if she was doing it again. Being the boss’s daughter, crossing the line that should have stayed firmly in place. She was perpetually looking down from her vantage point of untouchable safety, making her out-of-touch, amicable jokes.

“I thought we weren’t specifying verb tenses?” Dzhuliya said. “Emotional labor seems pretty grammatically defined, relationship-wise.”

“I didn’t mean…” Eilidh trailed off. “You’re right, I’m sorry.”

“Although you’re not wrong about taking someone with me. Meredith and Arthur might want to weigh in, too,” Dzhuliya seemed to realize aloud.

“No.” Eilidh shook her head. “I doubt it. They never really understood him.” She meant to say that her siblings hadn’t understood their father’s decorative taste, but that phrasing worked just as well.

Dzhuliya must have heard something different, something else. “Maybe you should come, then.” Dzhuliya was looking at her watchfully, overlong. “For practical reasons.”

“Makes sense. I can dry my own tears,” Eilidh agreed.

“No.” Dzhuliya’s intensity then surprised her. “No, I’ll do it for you, if you want.”

Eilidh had an odd sensation of lightness that she realized was the absence of heaviness. The thing that usually sat somewhere around her clavicle and had, up until that moment, been lazing around her shoulders like a shawl seemed to have temporarily lifted, the usual tension evaporating from her skin like midsummer rain. Not gone, but with a satiated presence somehow, as if it had eaten a filling meal and drifted off.

There was a buzz from the floor, where Dzhuliya had set her purse. “Oh, sorry, hang on.” Dzhuliya dug around for her phone, a pained expression crossing her face as she answered. “Hello?”

An explosive feminine voice began to rant from the other end of the call. “Oh, um. De León, you said? Yes, I think… I think so, maybe.” Dzhuliya was silent as the other voice picked up, growing more and more agitated as they spoke. “I can check his calendar if you want, but he did have a few meetings with someone who meets that description. I’m not sure what they discussed.” More intensity. “Right, I’ll check on it for you.” Blahblahblah!!!! From the other end. “Okay. Okay, bye.”

Dzhuliya hung up and gave Eilidh a vacant look. “Your sister is really quite the charmer.”

“Oh,” said Eilidh, shuddering. “Oh, god.”

“Yeah.” Dzhuliya rolled her eyes. “It seemed unwise at the moment to add fuel to whatever that was.”

“Did you say de León?” Eilidh asked, recognizing my surname. “That’s my sister’s ex–best friend.”

“I know,” said Dzhuliya. “Your dad met with her three times over the summer. He was interested in something she was developing. As far as I know, negotiations were tentatively moving forward until, you know. This.” She waved an unsteady hand at the sharedness of their circumstance. “But he had Legal draw up an offer, which is currently in his inbox awaiting approval. If he intended to pull the trigger, he would have done it this week.”

The answer was so coolly informed that Eilidh was a little taken aback. “Really? But you just made it sound like—”

“I told you, I didn’t think it was in anyone’s best interest to make Meredith angrier. Nothing I just told you is public knowledge, and if she wants to ask her friend about it, she can.” Dzhuliya’s tone and expression appeared intimately informed, the air of someone—like many of the people Eilidh worked with at Wrenfare—with a shrewd awareness of the industry.

Eilidh felt another pang of fundamental wrongness, though she couldn’t say why. She had always known Dzhuliya was part of Wrenfare’s ecosystem in a way Eilidh wasn’t; the entire purpose of Eilidh’s amicable shield had always been that Dzhuliya was a Them and not an Us. (Which of course begged the question of what remained of “us” without Thayer, the answer being something Eilidh couldn’t bear.)

There was also, again, Eilidh’s inability to imagine Dzhuliya separate from Thayer in the context of his life, while being equally unable to imagine herself with Dzhuliya without the necessity of his death. The three of them triangulated inexplicably in Eilidh’s head—though perhaps the real concern, less urgently, was the realization that Dzhuliya knew and understood Thayer’s business in a way that Eilidh, despite the possibility of being tasked with it, never had.

“You won’t say anything,” Dzhuliya posed hesitantly, which was sort of a question, Eilidh noted, but also not.

The thing in Eilidh’s chest woke up again, gleefully cavernous, ready for any passing excuse to swarm. For the first time, Eilidh wondered just how closely Dzhuliya had worked with her father—whether Dzhuliya’s level of familiarity was somehow Eilidh’s loss.

“Of course not,” said Eilidh, shaking herself. Thayer had always been a father first when it came to Eilidh, and unlike Meredith’s tendency for obsessive micromanagement, Thayer’s long reign meant he barely deigned to open a file without an assistant’s help. Of course Dzhuliya would know more than Eilidh, if only by osmosis. She handled Thayer’s calendar, she booked his meetings, she voiced his correspondences. Obviously Dzhuliya knew things that were never meant to be Eilidh’s concern—she probably understood countless things about his daily life that Eilidh didn’t, purely by virtue of circumstance, not design.

Unless—

Eilidh reconsidered what Dzhuliya had said, the lies she’d told Meredith about Thayer’s potential willingness to go into business with me. If Dzhuliya knew who I was in relation to Meredith, that meant Thayer must have been aware of it, too. But that knowledge wasn’t administrative, it was personal. And the possibility that Thayer would go behind Meredith’s back, maybe even betray her—was that something he would do?

Eilidh realized she didn’t know the answer. She hadn’t the faintest idea whether Thayer’s intentions could have been to taunt Meredith or punish her. Eilidh knew only what Thayer would do for her, which was protect her. Shelter her, go so far as to ensure she never felt a moment’s worry or pain or doubt, and yes, that was different than anything he’d do for Meredith or Arthur. But either Meredith and Arthur were right and Thayer hadn’t actually loved them—this Eilidh didn’t believe; it didn’t fit with her understanding of him, nor her understanding of them —or the lengths Thayer routinely went for Eilidh, the things about his life he was willing to divulge to his assistant but not his daughter, those were driven by… something other than love.

Suddenly the thing in her chest felt grainy, minutely particulate. Eilidh tasted disintegration on her tongue like floating ash, the shattering of an old illusion.

“Are you going to get dressed?” Dzhuliya ventured, her gaze lingering slightly southward.

Abruptly, Eilidh remembered the pointelle fabric, the louche triangulation of her breasts as she lounged in bed, waging an endless war of loyalties with her sister.

“Right,” she said, leaping to her feet. “Just give me five minutes, and then let’s go.”