The brass doors of Bergdorf Goodman parted with a soft, expensive exhale, and Poppy Hartwell stopped mid-stride. The perfume counter to her left exhaled a cloud of something floral and vaguely accusatory, the kind of scent that knew it cost more per ounce than her rent. The marble beneath her sneakers had been polished to a mirror finish, and her own reflection stared back up at her, sneakers and all, like a typo in a manuscript.
Reid Kingsley stood beside her in a charcoal overcoat that probably had a name, holding two paper shopping bags from a store she had never set foot in before today. His expression carried the patient, faintly pained look of a man who had drawn the short straw and intended to make the best of it.
"Ground rules," he said, his voice low enough that the woman behind the cosmetics counter could not hear. "You are not here to shop. You are here to be fitted. There is a difference. The difference will save us both roughly four thousand dollars and a small crisis of confidence."
"I don't have a small crisis of confidence," Poppy said, too quickly. "I have a medium one. Possibly a six."
Reid did not smile, but the corner of his mouth twitched, which she had already learned was the Kingsley equivalent of a standing ovation. He steered her gently toward the escalator, a guiding hand at the small of her back that hovered without quite landing. Up they went, past a wall of handbags displayed behind glass like artifacts in a museum, each one tagged with a number that looked like a misprint.
On the second floor, the lighting shifted from museum hush to something softer, more conspiratorial. Racks of silk and crepe fanned out in pale rainbows. A woman in a black sheath dress materialized from between the displays. Her hair was pulled back so tightly that Poppy suspected it was load-bearing. She carried a tablet in one hand and a small, metallic smile in the other.
"Mr. Kingsley," the woman said, with the warmth of a marble countertop. "We have the private suite prepared, as requested."
"Thank you, Marguerite." Reid set the shopping bags on a low console and shrugged out of his coat, revealing a suit the color of a thunderstorm. "My associate and I are working against a rather unforgiving timeline."
Associate. Poppy filed that word away. She had been called many things in her life, most of them by her mother, but associate was not one of them.
Marguerite turned the full force of her professional assessment onto Poppy. The assessment began at Poppy's paint-stained tote bag, lingered on her faded jeans, and concluded with her sneakers, which had once been white and were now the color of a well-loved dog.
"And we are shopping for," Marguerite said, in the tone of a woman bracing for bad news.
"An entire wardrobe," Reid said. "Three days. Cocktail attire, daytime appropriate, one black-tie option. She has a fitting at the tailor on the fourth."
Marguerite's left eyebrow rose a quarter inch. It was the most expressive Poppy had ever seen a quarter inch be.
"Of course," Marguerite said, in the tone of a woman who had seen everything and intended to survive it. "If you'll follow me."
The private suite was a small room with a single chair on a low dais, three full-length mirrors arranged in a triangle, and a carpet so thick Poppy's sneakers sank into it like treads in fresh snow. A tray of sparkling water and a small dish of candied ginger sat on a side table, untouched, the way a still life is arranged for a painting no one intends to buy.
"Shoes first," Reid said, and pointed at the chair.
Poppy sat. The chair was the softest thing she had ever touched. It might have been made of clouds that had been properly educated.
Marguerite returned with a rack of shoes that glided in on silent wheels. They came in colors Poppy associated with paint chips at the hardware store: bone, oyster, taupe, midnight. Each pair looked like it had been designed by someone who had never stubbed a toe in their life.
"These," Marguerite said, holding up a pair of black pumps with a heel like a stiletto's more elegant cousin, "are a foundation."
"Ha ha," Poppy said, because she could not help herself.
Reid, who had settled into a wing chair by the window with the ease of a man who had been born in such chairs, glanced over the rim of the sparkling water he had not asked for. "Poppy."
"I know. I know. I'm being fitted. I am not shopping. I am being fitted."
"For shoes," Marguerite clarified, as though Poppy might have misunderstood the category.
"For shoes," Poppy confirmed.
The first pair pinched at the toe. The second slid off the heel. The third fit like a rumor. Marguerite clucked, a small, professional sound, and disappeared behind a curtain, returning with a pair of soft beige flats that looked, to Poppy's eye, like a very small boat.
"Walk," Marguerite ordered.
Poppy walked. She walked to the mirrors, where three Poppies stared back at her. The left one looked skeptical. The right one looked faintly amused. The middle one, Poppy decided, was the real one, and she was trying her best.
"Turn," Marguerite said.
Poppy turned.
"No," Marguerite said. "From the hips."
Poppy turned from the hips. It was a revelation. Her entire life, she had been turning from the shoulders like a woman flagging down a bus. From the hips, she moved like she had been doing it in secret for years.
"Excellent," Marguerite said, and Poppy felt as though she had been handed a small medal.
Reid set down his water. "The trick," he said, "is to walk as though the floor belongs to you and you are merely inspecting it."
"The floor belongs to me," Poppy repeated. "I am merely inspecting it."
"Exactly."
"I feel like a revolutionary."
"You feel like a woman who has not yet realized she has been underestimated by every room she has ever walked into." Reid's voice carried no warmth, no encouragement, just a flat, observational certainty that landed in the room like a coin tossed onto marble. "Marguerite, the dress. The gray one we discussed."
Marguerite vanished again, a woman on a mission from a higher paycheck. She returned with a column of fabric the color of a rain cloud that had decided to be elegant about it. The dress had long sleeves, a high neck, and a hem that fell just below the knee. It looked like something a woman would wear to disappoint her enemies in style.
"The gray," Reid said, "is non-negotiable."
"Non-negotiable," Poppy echoed. "What does that even mean? Who negotiates with a dress?"
"Your mother," Reid said, without missing a beat.
Marguerite made a sound that might have been a laugh, professionally suppressed. She held the dress against Poppy's shoulders, then stepped back, tilting her head.
"It will require a hem," Marguerite said, the words delivered like a verdict.
"Of course it will," Poppy said. "I have a complicated relationship with hems."
"You have a complicated relationship with being looked at," Reid said, quietly, to his water.
Marguerite drew the curtain around the dais with a practiced flick, and Poppy found herself alone with three mirrors and a dress that hung on a hook like a question. She stepped out of her jeans. She stepped out of her faded sweater. She stepped into the gray.
The fabric whispered against her skin. It was heavier than it looked, weighty in a way that felt like being held rather than wearing. She pulled it over her shoulders, fumbled with a back zipper she could not see, and then turned to the mirrors.
Three Poppies stared back. The left one looked startled. The right one looked regal. The middle one, the one that mattered, looked like herself, only more so. The neckline drew her chin up. The sleeves narrowed her shoulders into something that suggested she had once considered fencing. The hem, unhemmed, brushed the floor like a small, polite apology.
"Okay," she whispered to the middle Poppy. "Okay. We can do this."
She drew the curtain back. Marguerite inhaled through her nose. Reid set his water down with a soft clink and looked up.
The room went very quiet.
"No," Reid said, finally. "That is not the dress."
"Excuse me?" Poppy said.
"The dress is fine. You are not." He stood, crossed the suite in three strides, and stopped just short of the dais. His hands did not reach for her. His voice did not soften. "Your shoulders are doing the thing again."
"The thing," Poppy repeated.
"The apologetic thing. The 'I do not belong here and I would like to be excused' thing." He gestured, a small, precise motion, somewhere in the vicinity of her collarbone. "You are wearing a three-thousand-dollar gown and you are wearing it like a hand-me-down."
"I am not," Poppy said, with the conviction of a woman who absolutely was.
"You are." Reid turned to Marguerite. "Give us the room for ten minutes."
Marguerite, who had clearly been retained for emergencies of this magnitude, inclined her head, collected her tablet, and withdrew. The door closed with the soft, decisive sound of a woman who knew when to leave.
Poppy stood on the dais in a dress that cost more than her car, and Reid Kingsley stood three feet away with his hands in his pockets, and the silence between them had a texture.
"Here is what is going to happen," Reid said. "You are going to wear that dress into a room full of people who have known my family for three generations. Some of them will smile. Some of them will not. All of them will be deciding, within the first ten seconds, whether you belong there."
"And if I do not."
"Then the next three months of my life become significantly more complicated, and I do not enjoy complicated." He stepped closer. Not too close. Close enough that the room felt smaller. "You do not have to be someone else. You have to be yourself without the apology."
"I don't know what that looks like," Poppy said. Her voice came out smaller than she had intended.
"Yes, you do." Reid's gaze held hers in the mirrors. "You do it every time you draw something. You do it when you are angry. You do it when you think no one is watching. You are simply not in the habit of doing it in a room full of people who are."
Poppy looked down at the dress. At the hem that brushed the floor. At her own hands, pale against the gray.
"How," she said.
"Shoulders back. Chin parallel to the floor. Smile as though you are in on a joke the rest of the room has not heard yet." He paused. "And stop holding the fabric. You are not protecting it. You are wearing it."
Poppy let go of the hem. She lifted her chin. She did not, quite, smile. But something in her spine shifted, the way a branch shifts when the wind lets go of it, and the Poppy in the middle mirror looked back at her with an expression that was, for the first time all day, her own.
Reid exhaled. It was not a sigh. It was the controlled release of a man who had been holding something in reserve.
"Better," he said, which was not a compliment but was the closest thing to one she had ever received from him.
Marguerite returned at the exact ten-minute mark, because Marguerite was a woman of her word. She took one look at Poppy, raised the same quarter-inch eyebrow, and nodded once, as though a bet had been settled.
"The hem," Marguerite said, and produced a pin cushion from somewhere on her person. "We can do it here in fifteen minutes if you do not mind standing still."
"I am very good at standing still," Poppy said. "I have been standing still for most of my adult life. I am an expert."
Reid made a sound. It was quiet, low, and entirely involuntary, the kind of sound a man makes when he has been ambushed by humor in a place he did not expect it. He turned toward the window so the room would not see his face.
Marguerite pinned the hem with quick, surgical motions. Poppy stood very still and thought about her apartment back in Astoria, about the studio above the bakery where the stairs groaned at midnight, about the illustration account no one knew she ran, about the gallery that had rejected her work with a form letter and a postage stamp.
In fifteen minutes, the hem was finished. The dress was hers. She changed back into her jeans and sweater, and Marguerite wrapped the gown in tissue paper the color of cream, and the gown became a parcel that could be carried out the door like a secret.
They moved on to cocktail attire. A silk blouse the color of a just-ripe peach. Trousers that fit in a way that made Poppy suspect betrayal. A jacket with a single button that closed with the satisfying click of a small accomplishment. Reid held up each option with the dispassionate efficiency of a man choosing paint swatches, and Poppy learned, for the first time, that there were categories of fabric that existed solely to behave.
"You have been buying the wrong sizes," Marguerite observed, at one point, with the mild disapproval of a woman diagnosing a chronic condition. "Your blazers are all a half size too large."
"They were on sale," Poppy said.
"Poppy," Reid said, without looking up from his tablet, "if you ever say the words 'on sale' in the Kingsley orbit again, I will personally escort you out of the building."
"Is that a threat?"
"It is a promise."
Marguerite, behind her tablet, allowed herself the smallest possible smile.
By the time they reached the black-tie option, Poppy's feet hurt in a way she had not known feet could hurt, and her head was full of words she had never used before: crepe, charmeuse, peau de soie. A rack of gowns glided toward her like a tide.
"The navy," Reid said, pointing.
The navy had a neckline that plunged and a back that plunged and an overall effect that plunged. It was the kind of dress that walked into a room and rearranged the furniture.
"I cannot wear that," Poppy said, with absolute certainty.
"You can," Reid said. "You simply have not yet decided to."
"That is the most manipulative thing anyone has ever said to me in a department store."
"It is not manipulative. It is accurate." He paused. "And we are not in a department store. We are in a suite that costs more per hour than your studio apartment costs per month."
"Reid."
"Poppy."
Marguerite had already pulled the navy from the rack and was holding it with the practiced ease of a woman who had dressed women for galas, funerals, and everything in between. She looked at Poppy the way a surgeon looks at a patient before the first incision.
"It will fit," Marguerite said. "And if it does not fit, we will make it fit. You have three days and one ball. You do not have the luxury of modesty."
"I have the luxury of modesty," Poppy said. "I have been luxuriously modest for twenty-seven years."
Reid set down his tablet. He looked at her. It was not a long look, but it was a thorough one.
"You are not modest," he said. "You are careful. There is a difference. Modesty is knowing your place. Careful is pretending not to know your worth." He nodded at Marguerite. "The navy."
Marguerite drew the curtain.
Poppy stood alone with three mirrors and a gown the color of deep water. She unzipped. She stepped in. The fabric climbed her body like a quiet, expensive tide. She looked in the glass, and the Poppy in the middle mirror looked back with an expression that was not startled, not apologetic, not amused.
It was, against all odds, certain.
She stepped out. Marguerite inhaled. Reid looked up from his tablet, and this time, he did not look away.
"No," he said, finally.
"No?"
"The dress is wrong."
"The dress is not wrong," Poppy said, with a certainty that surprised even her. "The dress is the dress. I am the problem."
"Yes," Reid said. "And you have just solved it."
Marguerite tilted her head. The quarter-inch eyebrow rose. She reached for her pin cushion.
"We will take the navy," Reid said, to the room, to the mirrors, to the Poppy in the middle glass. "And the gray. And the peach. And the trousers. And the jacket. And everything else we have collected in the last two hours that did not make me wince."
"That is a very specific compliment," Poppy said.
"It is not a compliment. It is a procurement list."
Marguerite, with the surgical precision of a woman who had been waiting for this moment all morning, began to pin.
At the door of the suite, as Marguerite handed over the tower of tissue-wrapped parcels tied with ribbon the color of a just-ripe peach, Reid paused.
"Your mother," he said, without looking at Poppy, "will hate the gray."
"Good," Poppy said.
Reid made that sound again, the low, involuntary one, the one he thought he had hidden in Bergdorf's window reflection. He pushed the door open, and the perfume counter exhaled its expensive accusation, and the marble floor waited below them like a verdict.
Poppy Hartwell, carrying three thousand dollars of gowns in tissue paper, stepped onto the escalator beside a man who had just bought her a wardrobe and called it a procurement list, and somewhere between the second floor and the first, she decided, quietly, not to apologize for any of it.
The doors opened onto Fifth Avenue. The wind off the park carried the faint, improbable scent of hot pretzels from a cart three blocks south, and Poppy laughed, once, at the sheer improbability of her own afternoon.
Reid handed her into a car that had appeared without either of them summoning it, and the door closed, and the city slid past the window like a film someone else was editing.
"Next stop," Reid said, checking his phone, "the tailor."
The Plaza's Palm Court opened before them like a confection made architecture, all gilt and greenery and the silvery hush of a string quartet tuning their instruments. Sunlight slanted through the glass ceiling in warm geometric panels, catching the motes that drifted above tables dressed in linen the color of heavy cream. The air smelled of orange blossom tea, butter, and the faintly astringent sweetness of champagne being poured somewhere behind a bank of white-gloved hands.
Reid had reserved a corner table beneath a potted palm whose fronds brushed the window like a slow curtain. He pulled out Poppy's chair with the practiced economy of a man who had been taught, somewhere in a stone dining room with silver candlesticks, that this was simply what one did. The napkin landed in her lap a moment later, handled by someone she had not seen approach, a server in a black vest who vanished before she could form the words "thank you."
"You are going to be interviewed," Reid said, "within the first ninety seconds."
Poppy, who had been arranging her silverware into a tidy little fan because her hands required occupation, looked up. "Hi, hello, nice to meet you," she tried, in a voice pitched three notes too bright. "I'm Poppy. I like your house. Do you have any pets?"
Reid's expression did not move. His eyes, however, performed a small, exhausted maneuver.
"Cordelia does not require small talk," he said. "Cordelia requires data. She will ask you where we met, how long we have been involved, and what you believe my greatest flaw to be. She will ask this in front of our mother, who will be watching to see whether you are a suitable ornament for the brand."
"I don't want to be an ornament," Poppy said, before she could decide whether to say it. "I mean, that came out louder than I meant. I just. I have a spine. Several of them, actually, I'm a vertebrate enthusiast, but I don't want to be carried around like a handbag."
"I am aware," Reid said. "It is one of the more alarming things about you."
A waiter arrived, murmured something about seasonal selections, and Reid ordered for both of them without looking at the menu: lobster bisque for her, the chef's salad for him, a sparkling water with lemon for each, and a pot of the orange blossom tea because, he explained without inflection, it was the only thing at the Plaza worth ordering.
"You have a thing about the Plaza," Poppy observed.
"My mother had her wedding reception here. My sister had her engagement party here. I have been threatened with holidays here." He paused. "The bisque is adequate. Do not order the duck."
A different waiter set down a small silver dish of warm olives. Poppy took one, bit into it, and discovered that she had never previously had an opinion about olives and was about to develop several.
"So," she said, around a mouthful she was trying not to apologize for, "your family."
"Our family." Reid's fingers turned his water glass a quarter rotation. "My father is not coming. You will be relieved to hear this. It will also, when you meet him, confuse you. He is alive. We are estranged. These two facts are not the same fact."
"He lives?"
"In London. He does not attend gatherings. He does not return calls. He is, by all reliable accounts, alive in the same way a piece of furniture is alive, present in a room, contributing nothing to the temperature."
"That's bleak," Poppy said, surprised by the small, hot feeling in her own chest, which was not pity exactly, more like recognition.
"Arthur Kingsley," Reid said, "made a great many things, buildings mostly, and one of those things was a family. He then decided he did not care for the family. He left it on a credenza somewhere around 1998. We have not dusted it since."
He said this the way he said most things, in a voice like good paper, smooth and a little cool, and if there was anything beneath it, anything that had been carried for thirty years, he did not invite her to look.
"Your mom," Poppy said, gentler. "Is that Vivien?"
"Vivien Kingsley. My mother. The family matriarch. She will be wearing something pale, something that costs more than a mid-range sedan, and she will be kind to you in a way that feels like a weather system. You will want to please her. You will fail. This is not a reflection on you. She is not trying to be pleased. She is trying to be certain."
"Certain of what?"
"Whether you are a phase." Reid lifted his water glass, did not drink, set it down again. "I am forty-one. I have had a number of phases. She has catalogued each one. A pottery instructor in Vermont. A colleague with a nervous laugh. A man at a fund-raiser who turned out to be a journalist. She will be kind, and she will be cataloguing."
Poppy's lobster bisque arrived, a small white lake in a wide bowl, scattered with chive and a single curl of cream. She wrapped her hands around the bowl more for the warmth than the elegance.
"And your sister," Poppy said.
Reid set his fork down with a small, deliberate click.
"Cordelia," he said, "is the CFO of the Kingsley Foundation. She is recently separated from her husband, a man named Simon, who is a perfectly pleasant person and was, by all accounts, perfectly pleasant throughout. Cordelia does not love pleasantly. Cordelia loves precisely. Simon was, in the end, insufficiently precise. She will be wearing something dark. She will have a list. She will, when she is not looking, be hurting, and she will, when she is hurting, be the most formidable person in any room she enters."
"Should I be scared of her?"
"You should be prepared for her." Reid's voice had dropped half a register, the way it did when he meant something. "She is not cruel. She is correct. This is, in my experience, worse. Cruelty you can identify. Correctness requires you to examine your own position."
Poppy ate a spoonful of bisque. It was, she had to admit, extremely good bisque.
"Tell me about your mom," she said, softer. "Not the matriarch part. The mom part."
The string quartet had begun something by Debussy, or possibly by someone who wanted very much to be Debussy, and the music arrived at their table in soft, indecisive waves. Reid did not answer for a long moment. He looked at the small silver dish of olives as though it contained something he had misplaced.
"My mother," he said, "died when I was nineteen. Cancer. The quiet kind, the kind that does not announce itself until it has taken the relevant rooms. She taught me to draw. She was the only person who ever looked at a thing I had made and said, without qualification, that it was good. Not perfect. Good. There is a difference. One is a verdict. The other is a permission."
The sentence ended, and the Palm Court continued around them in its gilt and greenery, and Poppy did not say anything, because the moment had a shape and she was not going to interrupt it.
"She would have liked you," Reid said, and then, in a voice that had returned to its usual cool, "for reasons that are not entirely to your credit. She had a weakness for people who laughed during their own catastrophes."
"I have done a lot of that," Poppy said, and her voice was thicker than she wanted it to be, and she took another spoonful of bisque to cover it.
"My father," Reid said, returning, perhaps deliberately, to the earlier topography, "is a man named Arthur Kingsley. He built the Kingsley Foundation on the back of an architecture firm he founded in 1979, when I was three. He was, by all accounts, a genius. He was also, by all accounts, a man who found other people to be a kind of weather he preferred not to walk in. My mother understood this. My mother understood a great many things about him. She did not, in the end, need him to be different. She needed him to be present. He was not present. He was present at openings. He was present at board meetings. He was not present at the kitchen table at six-fifteen, which is, if you are a child, the only place a father is required to be."
"Reid," Poppy said.
"It is all right," he said. "It is information. You require information. I have a great deal of it. Some of it is in a box in a cabin in Oregon. Some of it is here." He touched, very briefly, the left side of his chest. "Most of it is correct."
"You don't have to do this," Poppy said. "The briefing. We can just, I don't know, wing it. Fake a stomach bug. Say we eloped in secret and couldn't get the license."
The sound he made was not quite a laugh. It was the ghost of one, the memory of one, the architectural drawing of one.
"If you fake a stomach bug," he said, "Cordelia will send a doctor. If you claim we eloped, Vivien will faint, and we will spend the rest of the weekend managing her disappointment rather than our own. The only viable strategy is to arrive, in something you like, with a story we can both tell without flinching, and to be, when asked, a person. Not a performance. Cordelia can smell a performance the way a dog smells a forgotten sandwich."
"So I just, what, tell her the truth?"
"Not the truth. A truth. A selected truth. The truth is that you are a struggling artist in your hometown because a gallery in the city rejected your proposal, and I am a man in a cabin because a building of mine collapsed and a great many people decided, quite reasonably, that this was my fault. We met, in the selected truth, at a coffee shop. We argued, charmingly, about the proper angle of a roofline. I asked you to dinner. You said yes, because, and this is the part Cordelia will not believe, you found me funny."
"Did I find you funny?"
"You will have to decide." He looked at her, finally, directly, and the look had the quality of a window thrown open in a room that had been closed for some time. "I am, occasionally, in the right company, capable of being funny. You are the only person in recent memory who has laughed at me without afterward looking sorry for me. This is, to me, a notable feature."
Poppy set down her spoon. The bisque was going lukewarm. The string quartet had moved on to something French and deliberate, and a woman at a nearby table was laughing into her champagne glass.
"All right," Poppy said. "I'm a graphic designer. You're an architect. We met in a coffee shop. I laughed at a joke you made about load-bearing walls. You asked for my number. I gave you a fake one. You tracked me down. This is, in fact, the truth."
"Cordelia will want details," Reid said. "She will want the name of the coffee shop. She will want the date. She will want to know what you ordered."
"Coffee," Poppy said, with enormous conviction. "Black, for you. I had a latte with oat milk. The latte was a mistake. The coffee was a decision."
Something moved in Reid's face, the smallest possible softening around the eyes, the faintest easing of the line of his mouth.
"You will do," he said, in a voice that sounded, against his intentions, like a compliment.
"I will do," Poppy agreed. "I will absolutely, under duress, in an expensive dress, in front of your terrifying sister and your regal mother, do."
The waiter arrived with the pot of orange blossom tea, and the lid was lifted, and the steam rose, and the Palm Court received it, and somewhere beneath the glass ceiling, in a place Poppy could not have named, something shifted, quietly, the way a foundation settles before a building can be said, at last, to stand.
The palm court held the scent of orange blossom for a long time after the waiter departed, the way certain rooms hold weather, and Poppy found herself breathing it in without intending to, the way one breathes in at the top of a staircase before going down.
"Right," Reid said. He straightened the cutlery that did not need straightening. "Wines. You should know four."
"Four wines," Poppy said. "Is that a regulation number?"
"It is the number that will get us through dinner without Cordelia raising an eyebrow." He signaled the sommelier, a man in a burgundy vest who approached with the specific gravity of a man whose entire education had been in the service of bottles. "We will need the Sancerre, the Chablis, the Pinot, and the red we had with the bisque."
The sommelier inclined his head and withdrew. Poppy watched him go and felt the familiar, vertiginous sensation of being in a place where the word service meant something different than it did in her life.
"Why four?" she asked.
"Because Cordelia will choose the first course. Vivien will choose the second. The third will be a test, and the fourth will be the wine I claim to have brought." He paused. "You must be able to discuss any of them as though you had opinions."
"I do have opinions about wine."
"You have opinions about the wine in a box with the screw top."
"That is an opinion."
"It is a preference. An opinion requires specificity. You must speak of minerality and finish. You must speak of the year as though it mattered to you. You must, at least once, mention terroir with a straight face."
Poppy pressed her lips together. "Terroir."
"Again."
"Terroir."
"Without the expression of a woman who has just discovered the word exists."
She tried again, arranging her face into what she hoped was the correct mask of sophisticated boredom. Reid tilted his head, considering.
"Better," he said. "You will pass."
"High bar."
"The bar is the floor."
The sommelier returned with a tray on which four bottles stood at attention. He presented each with a small bow, naming them in a voice pitched to carry exactly to their table and no further. Poppy watched Reid's hands as he received each bottle, the way his fingers found the glass without looking, the way he turned each one to catch the light.
"You first," Reid said, and slid the Sancerre across the linen.
Poppy picked it up. It was heavier than she had expected, or maybe her arms were lighter than they should have been. She held it the way she had seen people hold bottles on television, by the base, affecting a casualness she did not feel.
"Look at the label," Reid said.
"I am looking at the label."
"No. You are glancing at the label. Look at it. Find the year. Find the producer. Find the region. Sancerre is Loire. It is sauvignon blanc. It is, when it is good, the taste of a field after rain."
Poppy looked at the label. She found the year, which was two years ago. She found the producer, which was a name with many syllables and a small drawing of a chateau. She found the region, which was printed in a font that suggested it had opinions about itself.
"Now the glass," Reid said, and the sommelier poured a small amount into a glass so thin Poppy could see her own fingers through it. "Hold it against the linen. Look at the color. It should be the color of straw, not gold. Gold means it has been fooled around with."
Poppy held the glass up. The wine was indeed the color of straw, a pale, almost nervous yellow, and the linen behind it gave it a warmth she had not known wine could have. She tilted the glass. The wine moved slowly, the way honey moved, the way light moved through water.
"Now smell it," Reid said. "Do not swirl. Swirling is for people who have been taught they should swirl. Just smell."
She smelled it. It smelled, faintly, of something green and then something stony, and then of nothing at all, which she supposed was the point.
"Describe it," Reid said.
"It smells like," Poppy began, and then stopped, because what she wanted to say was that it smelled like the field behind her grandmother's house after the first rain in August, and that seemed too much. "Like a field," she said. "After rain."
Reid was quiet for a moment. The string quartet had moved on to something with more bow and less melody.
"That," he said, "is an acceptable answer."
"I have been educated in fields."
"That is not the same thing, but it will do."
He reached across the table to take the glass from her, and his fingers brushed hers. The brush was small, incidental, the kind of touch that happened between two people passing a salt cellar. It lasted less than a second.
Poppy did not move her hand.
Reid did not move his.
For a moment, the glass sat between them, held by both, and the wine trembled, just slightly, in a way that had nothing to do with the movement of the room.
"Poppy," Reid said, in a voice that was quieter than the one he had been using.
"I know," she said, and she did not know what she knew, except that her hand was where it was, and his hand was where it was, and neither of them was moving it.
"We should," he said, and stopped.
"I know," she said again.
The glass did not move. The wine did not move. The string quartet arrived at a phrase that required a sustained note, and the cellist held it, and the note hung in the palm court like a held breath.
Reid withdrew his hand. The glass remained with Poppy. She looked down at it. The wine had gone still again. Her own fingers, through the glass, looked strange and pale, as though they belonged to someone else.
"You will need to be able to do that," Reid said, after a moment, and his voice had resumed its careful, measured quality.
"Do what?"
"Touch me. In public. A hand on the arm. A lean at the shoulder. Cordelia will be watching. Vivien will be watching. They will be looking for the ways in which we do not touch, and the ways in which we touch wrong."
"Oh," Poppy said, and set the glass down.
"We should practice."
"Practice."
"Yes."
"Right now."
"There is no time like the present."
Poppy looked at the glass. She looked at the wine. She looked at the linen, and at the small silver dish of wrapped chocolates the waiter had left at the edge of the table, and at the way the light from the glass ceiling caught the cellist's bow as it rose and fell.
"All right," she said.
Reid sat back. He folded his hands on the table, then unfolded them, then folded them again, in a way that Poppy recognized, with a small shock, as the way her own hands moved when she was trying to pretend she was not nervous.
"Give me your arm," he said.
"You want me to touch your arm."
"I want you to practice touching my arm."
"The arm of a man you have been dating for, what are we saying, three months?"
"The arm of a man you have been dating for three months and are now touching, casually, in a restaurant, while discussing wine."
"Right," Poppy said again, and reached across the table.
Her hand hovered. The back of Reid's forearm was visible where the cuff of his shirt had shifted slightly, and she could see, in the warm interior light, the faint pattern of the veins beneath, and a small scar near the wrist that looked like an old story she would not be told.
"Just touch it," Reid said.
"I am about to."
"Then about."
She touched it.
Her fingers landed on the inside of his wrist, by accident, where the skin was thinner and warmer than she had expected. She felt the small jump of his pulse, or thought she did. She felt, more certainly, the texture of his shirt cuff, which was finer than any cuff she had ever touched, and the texture of the skin just beyond it, which was finer still.
"That is not an arm," Reid said, in a voice that had gone slightly strange.
"You said arm."
"I meant the arm."
"I will move to the arm."
She moved her hand, an inch, to the inside of his forearm, where the sleeve of his shirt had rolled back in its small, deliberate way. She rested her fingers there. The fabric was soft. Beneath the fabric, the muscle was present, and warm, and very still.
"How does that feel?" Reid asked.
"Like an arm," Poppy said, with a dignity she did not feel.
"I mean to you."
"It feels like an arm."
"Poppy."
"It feels," she said, and stopped, because what she wanted to say was that it felt like a sentence she had not known she was in the middle of, and that the period had not yet arrived, and that she was not sure she wanted it to. "It feels like something I will need to get used to."
"We have a week."
"A week."
"A week to make it feel like something you have been doing for three months."
"Right," Poppy said.
She did not move her hand.
Reid did not move his arm.