**Part Two**

The carving knife sat in the turkey like a flag no one had the right to pull.

Bellamy’s phone was still face up. I could read the sender from across the table because she did not think to tilt the screen. Alden Voss. The man whose fund had tried, last spring, to buy Aetherion outright. The man whose assistant had sent flowers to Selene after I said no, as if grief were a merger nicety. The man Bellamy had been circling for eighteen months—introductions, a committee, a charity board she had joined because Voss’s wife chaired it.

*Tell Riven the offer still stands.*

Holden saw the name and made a sound that was not quite a word.

Dad said, “Who is Alden Voss?”

Bellamy did not answer him. She looked at me as if I had reached down the length of the table and opened her briefcase in front of thirty-two people.

“You know him,” she said.

“He knows the company,” I said. “That isn’t the same.”

Camden, still holding his phone so Aunt Corinne could squint at the valuation, asked the only useful question in the room.

“Is that the guy who wanted to buy you?”

The article had a paragraph about it. Of course it did. We had allowed that much.

“Yes.”

Bellamy’s laugh this time had no audience left in it.

“I’ve been trying to get a meeting with him since February.”

“I know.”

“You *know*?”

“You posted the gala photos. His name was in the caption. I can read.”

Mom whispered my name as if we were in church.

Dad sat down hard enough that the chair complained. “A multibillion-dollar company. In Queens.”

“Not in Queens,” I said. “Not for three years.”

That landed worse than the headline. The studio had been their favorite exhibit in the museum of my failure. Take away the studio and they had to find a new story before the pie.

Grandma Odessa took Camden’s phone, read the first three paragraphs, and handed it back.

“Well,” she said. “That explains the hoodie.”

—

Holden found his private-equity voice the way some men find a life jacket.

“If Voss still wants it, the number in that piece is a floor, not a ceiling. Riven. Have you run a process?”

“I’m eating dinner.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one that belongs at this table.”

Bellamy stood up. The place card in front of her said *Bellamy Mercer* in Mom’s calligraphy. The chair scraped across the floor my father had refinished twice for occasions exactly like this.

“You sat here,” she said, and her voice had begun to fray in a way no courtroom would have permitted. “You sat here and let Dad offer you informational interviews. You let Camden ask about a paycheck. You let me call it a hobby in front of people I work with—”

“You didn’t let me do anything,” I said. “You performed. I was the set dressing.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Neither was *failure*.”

The word hung over the gold pumpkins and the white roses. A cousin I liked better than most looked down at her plate. Dad’s business associate—the one who was going to make calls after the holiday—became suddenly devoted to his napkin.

Mom tried to save the room the way she saved rooms: by renaming the weather.

“This is wonderful news. This is—Riven, why wouldn’t you tell us? We would have been so proud.”

I thought of two Christmases of *when are you going to get serious*. I thought of the year she introduced me to a neighbor as “our son who’s taking a little time.” I thought of Bellamy’s toast to the people who finished what they started.

“You were proud of the version of me that fit the place cards,” I said. “This version didn’t.”

My phone vibrated against my thigh. Selene, unencrypted now, because the embargo was dead and so was subtlety.

*Voss just pinged me. He saw the byline and your sister’s firm on a conflicts list. He wants to know if Cross-adjacent counsel is trying to insert themselves into a deal you already killed. Also your mother is calling the office main line. How.*

I typed under the table.

*Do not put my mother through. Tell Voss I am at dinner. Tell him the answer is still no. If a firm using my last name calls, we have no comment.*

Bellamy saw me type. She had always been able to read my face better than my work.

“You’re declining him again. In my parents’ house. While he’s texting *me*.”

“He’s texting you because the article spelled my last name and someone on his team is competent.” I slid the phone away. “If your firm was positioning to advise a transaction that doesn’t exist, that’s a conversation you should have with your managing partner, not with the turkey.”

Holden said, “Bellamy.”

Just her name. A warning wrapped in a marriage. I understood then that the fear on her face had not only been about Voss. It had been about a memo she had written, or a sentence in a partner meeting: *My brother is in AI; I can get us close.* A sentence that was about to become a problem now that the brother had a valuation, a public refusal, and a COO who kept conflict lists.

Dad finally found the voice he used on tenants.

“You will not sit at my table and humiliate your sister.”

“She sat at your table and called me a reflection of failure,” I said. “The article did the rest. I didn’t write it.”

“You could have warned us.”

“I could have.” I looked at him. “You could have asked a real question in six years. We both chose.”

The business associate cleared his throat and mentioned, faintly, that the stuffing was excellent.

No one rescued him.

—

Grandma Odessa tapped her water glass with a spoon, once.

“Conrad. Maris. Sit down. Bellamy, you too. The boy is not a press release and this bird is getting cold.”

Nobody sat immediately. Then Camden sat, because Camden had always been the first to obey gravity. Then Mom, her pearls twisting once around her finger. Then, after a look from Holden that was half partnership and half damage control, Bellamy.

I did not sit at once. I walked around the table to Grandma, kissed her hair, and said, “Thank you for listening two years ago.”

“I still don’t understand half of it,” she said. “I understand enough. Eat.”

When I took my chair again, Bellamy’s phone was face down. Holden’s was in his pocket. Dad stared at the turkey as if it had personally misled him about the nature of sons.

Plates moved. Silver touched china. It was the loudest quiet I had ever heard in that room.

Camden leaned toward me, voice low.

“Hundreds of people?”

“Yes.”

“And you still came late because of a deployment?”

“Yes.”

He sat back, shook his head once, and almost smiled. “That’s the most Riven sentence I’ve heard in years.”

It was not an apology. It was closer to a beginning. I would take it.

Aunt Corinne asked, too brightly, whether we were hiring. Two cousins discovered they had “always known I was brilliant.” Holden asked, as if we were already in a conference room, whether the cap table was clean. I told him I was not going to discuss a cap table over cranberry sauce. He looked briefly offended, then professionally impressed, which was Holden’s version of growth.

Bellamy did not eat.

When Mom passed the sweet potatoes, Bellamy said, without looking up, “You could have let me have the introduction. You could have said, *My sister is excellent; take the meeting.* You didn’t even have to sell the company.”

“You didn’t ask me for an introduction,” I said. “You asked the table to agree that I was a detour.”

“I was trying to push you.”

“You were trying to win.”

Her eyes flicked to mine, bright and furious and, under that, afraid.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” she said, quiet enough that only our end of the table heard, “to be the one they point to when they want proof the family works. Every dinner. Every client lunch. *Bellamy’s at the firm. Bellamy’s in Tribeca.* And then they ask about you, and I have to invent a sentence that doesn’t make me look cruel or you look lost.”

“You could have said I was building something.”

“I didn’t know you were building something.”

“You didn’t ask.”

She had no answer for that which would survive the roses.

—

Dad waited until the pies came out—pumpkin, pecan, a cranberry tart Mom only made when she wanted the house to look like a life.

He found me in the hallway outside the powder room, where the wallpaper still had the tiny gold bees I used to count during arguments as a child.

“I would have invested,” he said.

Of course he would have. Ownership was the language he spoke when love felt inefficient.

“I didn’t need it.”

“That’s not the point.”

“It is exactly the point.” I leaned against the wall. The hoodie looked suddenly childish under the hallway sconce, and I left it on anyway. “You don’t get to buy the ending and call it belief.”

His mouth tightened.

“I built something too,” he said. “From nothing. You think I don’t recognize it?”

“I think you recognize buildings,” I said. “You don’t recognize a son who wouldn’t let you name the lobby.”

He looked older in that light. Not defeated. Recalculating, which for Conrad Cross was the nearest thing to prayer.

“Voss is not a man you say no to twice.”

“I already did.”

“If he goes around you—”

“Then he goes around me. Aetherion isn’t a building, Dad. It doesn’t transfer because a richer man wants the view.”

He nodded once, a gesture that meant he had heard the sentence and would argue with it later, in a quieter room, with better whiskey.

“Your mother will want a party.”

“Please don’t let her.”

“I’ll try.” He paused. “The hoodie stays, I suppose.”

“The hoodie stays.”

When I came back, Mom was telling Grandma that we must have a proper announcement, something at the club, nothing vulgar. Grandma said, “Maris, the newspaper already announced it. Sit down before you invite the state of Connecticut.”

I loved her more than pie.

—

I did not stay for coffee.

At the door, while coats created a second weather system in the foyer, Bellamy caught my sleeve.

Holden was already on the phone in the driveway, using the voice he used when a deal had grown teeth.

“What do I tell the firm on Monday?” she asked.

It was the most honest thing she had said all night.

“Tell them you didn’t know,” I said. “It’s true. Then tell them you will not use my name to book a room. If they wanted Aetherion, they could have called the number on the website like everyone else.”

“And Voss?”

“If he contacts you again, you say you don’t represent me. Because you don’t.”

Her hand dropped from my sleeve.

“I am glad,” she said, and the words cost her. “That it isn’t a hobby.”

“I know.”

“I’m not glad it happened like this.”

“I know that too.”

She went out into the cold with Holden, two beautiful people walking toward a car that would be full of strategy before they hit the Merritt.

Camden hugged me, sudden and brief. “Text me the office address. I’ll bring decent coffee. Not a paycheck joke. I swear.”

“Okay.”

Mom kissed my cheek and called me brilliant in a tone that was still arranging seating.

Dad shook my hand as if we had closed on a property.

Grandma walked me to the steps.

“Don’t disappear for six years again,” she said. “I am too old to pretend I prefer ignorance.”

“I won’t.”

“And don’t sell it because they finally learned the name.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

She patted the hoodie. “Good. It looks like work.”

—

In the car I sat for a full minute before starting the engine. The house glowed behind me, white roses and gold pumpkins and a table that would talk about me until the candles drowned themselves.

Selene called.

“Well?” she said.

“They know.”

“I gathered. Voss left me a voicemail that sounded like a Christmas card written by a shark. Your sister’s firm already emailed our general counsel with a sentence so careful it might be art. And a woman named Maris asked reception whether we do family tours.”

“No tours.”

“I assumed. Are you all right?”

I looked at the dark road, at my own hands on the wheel, at the laptop bag that had been a punchline until it wasn’t.

“I will be,” I said. “The answer to Voss is still no. The answer to my father is still no. The answer to a party at the club is a restraining order if necessary.”

Selene was quiet a moment.

“For what it’s worth,” she said, “the deployment held. That’s the only headline I cared about tonight.”

“Same.”

I drove back toward the city through the kind of late-November dark that makes Connecticut look like a secret. Somewhere behind me, thirty-two relatives were practicing a new sentence.

Not *What does Riven do?*

*That’s Riven. He founded Aetherion.*

Some of them would say it with pride.

Some of them would say it like an apology.

Bellamy would say it like a conflict check.

And I would go into the office on Friday—because Thanksgiving was a calendar, not a commandment—and I would sit at a table where nobody asked me to name a client to earn my plate.

The offer could still stand.

I already had.