Four Of A Kind

Chapter 284: [4.102] What Makes This So Terrifying

She reached over and took my coffee cup from my hands, setting it on the bench beside us. Then she shifted her weight until she was facing me directly, one leg tucked underneath her, her knee pressing against my thigh.

"You didn’t ask for any of this. You didn’t scheme your way into our lives or try to manipulate us for our money. You just showed up and did your job and treated us like actual people instead of walking bank accounts."

"The bar for decent behavior seems pretty low in your world."

"You have no idea."

Her hand found mine, cool fingers threading through my own. The touch was gentle but deliberate, like she was making a point.

"I’ve watched you for three months. I’ve seen how you are with your sister, how you treat the people you work with, how you handle it when things go wrong. I’ve read your essays for Ms. Vance’s class. I know that you’re smarter than you pretend to be and more tired than you let anyone see."

"You read my essays?"

"Ms. Vance leaves her grading in the faculty lounge. The lock on the door is embarrassingly easy to pick."

She said it casually, like breaking into faculty spaces to read my homework was a perfectly normal thing to do. Which, for Sabrina, it probably was.

"The point is that I know who you are. Not the performance you put on for everyone else. The real version that you only show Iris when you think no one’s watching."

I didn’t have a response to that. She was right, and we both knew it.

"So what happens now?"

"Now we go to the Met and I show you my favorite painting. Then we have lunch at a restaurant where the waiters pretend not to recognize my face. Then we come back to the manor and I read while you do whatever you want. And at some point during the next two weeks, you’ll stop being so nervous around me and start actually enjoying yourself."

"I’m not nervous."

"Your heart rate increased when I touched your hand. Your pupils dilated when I mentioned reading your essays. You’ve been cataloging escape routes since we sat down, even though we’re in a public park with witnesses everywhere."

"Maybe I just have good survival instincts."

"Maybe you’re terrified of letting anyone get close enough to hurt you."

She squeezed my hand once, then released it and stood up. The absence of her touch left my skin feeling oddly cold.

"Come on. The museum opens in ninety minutes and I want to get there before the tourists."

The Met was quiet at this hour, populated mostly by art students with sketchbooks and elderly couples moving slowly through the galleries. Sabrina paid our admission without letting me see the amount, then led me through rooms I’d only seen in photographs.

She moved through the museum like she owned it, which, given her family’s donation history, wasn’t far from the truth. Her steps were unhurried but purposeful, and she didn’t stop to look at anything until we reached a gallery in the European paintings section.

"This one."

The painting was smaller than I’d expected, maybe two feet tall and three feet wide. It showed a woman sitting at a table, her face turned toward a window where afternoon light was streaming in. She was reading a letter, and something about her expression suggested the contents weren’t good news.

"Vermeer," Sabrina said. "Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window. This is a copy, obviously. The original is in Dresden. But it’s still beautiful."

I looked at the painting and tried to see what she saw in it. The colors were muted but somehow warm, and the light coming through the window looked almost real.

"Why this one?"

"Because she’s alone. Everyone who looks at this painting sees the letter, or the light, or the technical skill of the brushwork. But what I see is a woman who has to process something important by herself, without anyone to help her understand what it means."

She moved closer to the painting, her reflection ghosting across the protective glass.

"I used to come here every Sunday with Richard. He’d let me pick one painting to sit in front of, and we’d stay there for an hour while he told me stories about the artist or the subject or whatever he thought I needed to learn. This was always my favorite. He never understood why." ƒreeωebnovel.ƈom

"Did you tell him?"

"I didn’t have the words for it when I was eight. By the time I was old enough to explain, he was already sick."

The gallery was empty except for us and a security guard who was doing a very poor job of pretending not to watch. I wondered how often Sabrina came here alone, sitting in front of this painting and thinking about letters she had to read by herself.

"You’re not alone anymore." freёweɓnovel.com

She turned to look at me, and for just a second her careful composure slipped. Something raw flickered across her face before she caught it and locked it back down.

"I know. That’s what makes this so terrifying."

We stood in front of the Vermeer for another twenty minutes while Sabrina told me things about seventeenth-century Dutch painting techniques that I would definitely forget by tomorrow. But I filed away the important parts: the way her voice softened when she talked about her father, the slight tremor in her hands when she mentioned being alone, the way she kept glancing at me like she was checking to make sure I was still there.

Lunch was at a restaurant I’d walked past a hundred times without ever considering going inside. The kind of place where menus didn’t have prices and the waiters called you sir without a trace of irony. Sabrina ordered for both of us in French, then translated when I raised an eyebrow.

"Duck confit. It’s good."

"I’ll take your word for it."

The food was better than good. It was the kind of meal that made me understand why rich people stayed rich, because once you’d tasted duck that melted on your tongue like butter, it was probably hard to go back to the dollar menu.

"You’re thinking about money."

"How can you tell?"

"You get a specific expression when you’re doing math in your head. Your eyebrows pull together and your jaw tightens."

"Maybe I’m just concentrating on the food."

"You’re calculating how many hours you’d have to work to afford this meal. The answer is approximately six, by the way. But I’m paying, so it doesn’t matter."

She said it without any condescension, just a statement of fact. The girl had been watching me long enough to know my tells, and she wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.

"Does it bother you? That I’m poor?"