About what she lets herself want in case nobody's told you. Nobody had to, Andre said. Another nod. Ryan looked back at Clare. Something moved across his face that he let her see just for a second.
Just clearly enough to be honest before he put it away. Take care of yourself, Clare. You, too, Ryan. He walked away. Clare didn't watch him go.
She looked at the sidewalk, breathed. Then she looked at Andre with the expression of a woman who had just survived something and wasn't sure yet whether surviving it felt like victory or loss. Thank you, she said. For tonight. Really?
Don't thank me yet, he said. The night's not over. She looked at him. What does that mean? It means there's a terrace, he said, nodding toward the side of the building where a rot iron railing was visible past the corner.
And you've been holding something back since the soup course. And I'm not driving you home until you say it out loud. Her lips parted slightly. Andre, you set the rule, he said. Actually, I set the rule.
And it said no lying, which includes lying by omission. So he gestured toward the terrace. You've got something to tell me. For a long moment, she looked at him with the expression of a woman, measuring how much it was going to cost her, to be honest. Then she walked toward the terrace, and he followed.
The terrace was empty at this hour. The dinner rushed long past, just the ambient light from the city, and the sound of traffic. Two streets over and the particular quiet of a Friday night that had tipped past on into something slower and more honest. Clare stood at the railing with her back to him for a moment. Her fingers wrapped around the iron.
He could see the tension in her shoulders, not the social tension of the dinner, but something deeper. Something she'd been carrying long before tonight. "There's a job," she said. He waited. "In New York, a six-month contract to lead event production for a major cultural foundation.
It's the kind of project that I've been working toward for 4 years. The kind that she stopped, started again. The kind that changes what's possible. After something like this, the doors that open are different. The work I could do after it would be different.