it’s making me antsy. And he keeps eyeballing the door.
“This is Reese Carlisle,” Chris says, nodding at me.
I forget to breathe for a second. It’s been a long time since I’ve been introduced as myself, and I’m not sure how I feel about it.
Angela turns, her eyes lined with thick dark pencil. They widen as she gives me a second look, something I don’t think she would have deigned to do had my name not rung a bell. I meet her stare with a bland gaze of my own.
“Huh,” she says, fingering the end of her braid. “Interesting.”
“Tell her about Alex.”
Numbness floods me, the body’s first line of defense. This is what I came here for, but now that the moment has arrived, I don’t know if I’m ready for it. I don’t want to know that my brother wasn’t the person I thought he was. I already went through this with my father. And with Chris. Enough.
“I liked Alex,” Angela says, after a moment. She trails a nail around the edge of her empty sake glass. “He was fun.”
I don’t reply, just watch her drawing circles.
“He was... generous,” she adds, in a way that clearly says “generous” is not the right word. Could he really have been twenty million shades of generous?
More lunch people come in, and every time they enter Chris grows more and more tense. I eye the sake contemplatively.
“And he was addicted.”
I look up from the drink. Chris already told me, but still I ask, “To what?”
“He liked to gamble.”
“How would you know?”
She turns to Chris, and they exchange some unspoken promise. “Because I’m a dealer.”
“What?”
More diners arrive, and Chris presses his hand on the table, hard enough the sake glasses slide half an inch in his direction. “Just take us back,” he says. “She’s not going to tell.”
Angela smirks. “Who would believe her?”
I want to kick her, but I feel Chris’s warning stare before I see it, so I keep my feet to myself. Angela stands and strides toward the kitchen doors, and I look at Chris and roll my eyes so hard I almost fall off my chair.
“Play along,” he orders.
“Can I have the sake?”
“No.” He pushes me after our guide. “Hurry up and follow.”
The kitchen is long and sterile, bare walls and polished steel countertops. A handful of prep cooks work silently, their white jackets pristine. It smells like garlic and warming oil, and my stomach rumbles.
Angela’s skin-tight red dress guides the way like a beacon, and we follow her through a door on the opposite side of the kitchen. The small glass inset has a tattered paper sign taped to it that reads Deliveries Only, but ten steps down a dim, narrow hallway is a set of intricately carved double doors that almost definitely don’t lead outside. There are no windows. A large man in a dark suit stands to the side, and, with a murmured word from Angela, he retrieves a key from his pocket, opens the doors, and moves back.
Before the scandal I would have sworn up and down that I knew every nook and cranny of this city’s party corners. And I would have died before I believed that Alex knew of something cool from which I was excluded.
But I never knew about this.
Never had a clue.
A cavernous space extends in front of us. The walls are again covered in fabric, but this time it’s a deep, muted red that helps Angela blend in. There must be a hundred different tables in play, roulette and craps and poker and games I can’t identify. The room is full but quiet. The gamblers range in age from young to exceedingly old, mostly male with a few women sprinkled in, all races represented. Everyone is dressed well, except Chris and me. The air is cool and, when I inhale, I feel a strange surge of energy. I think of Vegas casinos and the pumped-in oxygen that keeps gamblers awake and spending.
“Do you play?” Angela asks.
I shake my head.
“Only with other people’s money,” she remarks. “Smart. This way.”
I open my mouth to point out that I was a financial advisor and dealing with people’s money was my job, but she’s already weaving her way through the room, expecting us to follow.
“That was my job,” I mutter to Chris. “I wasn’t playing.”
“I know,” he says reassuringly. “Of course.”
He’s still tense, eyes darting around, scoping out the room. Only a handful of people appear to have even registered our arrival, and none of them care.
Enormous