Page 9 of Hold On to Me
She wanted to be furious. The fury was there, she could feel it, hot and compact, lodged beneath her sternum. But something else was there too, something more complicated, and it had to do with the way he had said my father died when I was nineteen in the same emptied-out voice she used when she said my father died when I was sixteen. As though the fact had edges and he had learned, through years of practice, exactly how to hold it without cutting himself.
He wasn’t a predator. She had been afraid of that, had lain awake in the new flat, in the better bed, staring at the higher ceiling, and let herself be afraid. But a predator wouldn’t have maintained the exclusion zone. A predator wouldn’t have caught her in turbulence and let go on three. A predator wouldn’t have told her the truth the moment she asked for it, sitting in his own seat on his own jet with nothing to gain from honesty and everything to lose.
He was something worse than a predator. He was a man who had made an insane, extravagant, deeply misguided promise and then moved heaven and three hundred million euros to keep it. And the worst part, the part that made the fury curdle into something she didn’t have a name for, was that he had done it allfrom a distance. He had built a cage around her life, yes. But he had never once tried to step inside it with her.
“You could have introduced yourself,” she said. “You could have explained. You could have walked up to me in a terminal four years ago and said, ‘My father knew your father, and I promised to look out for you,’ and I’d have told you I didn’t need looking after, and we could have gone our separate ways.”
“I know.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
He didn’t answer.
She picked up the coffee pot. Retreated to the galley. Drew the curtain.
She stood there for a long time, gripping the counter, and thought about her father. About a friendship she had never known existed. About a promise made in a language she didn’t speak, between two men she had never seen in the same room, about a girl who had been five or six or seven at the time and had no idea she was being handed from one man’s care to another’s like a debt that passed between ledgers.
It didn’t make it forgivable.
But it made it complicated.
The snowstorm hit somewhere over Lake Geneva.
One moment the Alps were a clean white line against a winter sky. The next, the world outside the windows turned to static: a wall of white that swallowed the horizon and pressed against the glass like something alive. The captain’s voice came over the intercom, steady and French and apologetic: Geneva approachhad closed. They were diverting. They’d be on the ground within twenty minutes.
Twenty minutes became thirty. Thirty became forty. The jet landed in a swirl of snow and taxied to a private terminal that looked like a glass box being slowly buried. The captain informed them, with the particular regret of a man who could see his evening plans dissolving, that Geneva was closed. All departures suspended. Possibly overnight.
Fourteen hours. She did the maths as the engines spooled down and the cabin went quiet in a way it never was in flight, a pressurised, terrestrial silence, the kind that made you aware of every breath, every creak, every heartbeat in the room. Fourteen hours, sealed in a grounded jet with a man who had just confessed to purchasing her professional life as an elaborate form of surveillance he had dressed up as paternal obligation.
She didn’t speak to him for three of them.
This wasn’t sulking. This was strategy. Or self-preservation. Or both. She retreated to the galley and worked through the catering inventory with a thoroughness that bordered on compulsive, counting bottles and plating options and napkins and coffee pods until every item on the manifest had been verified twice. She called Raven.
“We’re grounded in Geneva. Snow.”
“For how long?”
“Overnight, probably.”
“With him?”
“With him.”
A pause. Then Raven, with the dry precision of a woman who could weaponise understatement: “Well. That’s intimate.”
“Raven.”
“I’m just saying. Most people would take a girl to dinner first. He bought you an airline and now he’s got you trapped in a snowstorm. The man has a flair for escalation.”
“He told me why. His father knew mine. There was a promise, look after me, find me someone good. He’s been doing this since before I joined the airline.”
Silence. A long one, by Raven’s standards. Then: “That’s either the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard or the most unhinged. Possibly both.”
“I’m going with unhinged.”
“You’re going with unhinged because romantic would require you to have a feeling about it, and we’ve discussed how you’re about those.”
“Goodnight, Raven.”
