Page 52 of The Lost Heiress
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Ransom said.
“Yeah,” Ana said. She looked down at her hands, picked at a loose thread on the armrest of the sofa. “You know that saying that you can never go home again?” she asked. “I never understood it until my cousin died. Home isn’t a physical place. It’s a point in time when you felt loved and protected and safe. It’s a person who made you feel that way. And when that’s gone, it changes everything, you know?”
“I do,” he said, his voice quiet.
Ana believed him, that he really did know the feeling. It was rare for Ana to get to talk to someone around her own age who had experienced grief and loss and understood it as acutely as she did. There was a certain comfort in sharing that burden, in not having to explain it or sit there while someone felt sorry for you and groped for the right words that wouldn’t come because they didn’t exist. There were no right words. There was no right thing to do that could take away the sting, erase the pain. Oftentimes, she ended up having to comfort and reassure the person who was there to comfort her.
“My brother, Theo, and I, when we were younger, we used to have this game we’d play,” Ransom said. “Our great-aunt Peggy, she’d get everyone the same thing for Christmas every year—a tin of these handmade marzipan candies from this monastery in Switzerland. The candies were all made to look like her little pug, Sir Winston, whom she was obsessed with but nobody else could stand, because he’d either drool all over you or bite you or—sometimes, if you were particularly unlucky—both. It was an awful and bizarre gift—what kid likes marzipan? And shaped like a dog that nobody liked? So Theo and I, to get rid of them, we’d hide them in each other’s things, you know,just to mess with each other. The more random and well hidden, the better. Sometimes you wouldn’t find them for months, and then you’d go to put on your ski jacket and find one tucked into your pocket, half melted, or you’d go to pull your driver out of your golf bag and find one there. We called it getting Pugged. When Theo passed, I put one in his suit jacket pocket to be buried with. It was the sort of thing he’d have had a laugh at. One last Pug.
“Several weeks ago, I pulled out my old chess set, the one my father had gotten me ages ago. And when I opened the box, I saw it there—a marzipan pug, sitting there with all the other pieces. And I just ... I—” Ransom trailed off, was quiet a moment. “He must have hidden it ages ago, of course,” Ransom went on. “But it was just so like Theo, to still be playing. To make one more move when you thought the game was over.”
Ana smiled gently. “He sounds like quite the character,” she said. “You must miss him terribly.”
Ransom shifted on the sofa. “He was a lot of things.”
“You know, you’re not exactly how I imagined you’d be,” Ana said after a while.
“And how’s that?”
“Well, based on your politics, I always kind of assumed you were ... I don’t know, a little cold. Morally bankrupt, maybe. But, it turns out, you do have feelings.”
Ransom cocked an eyebrow at her.
“Just some of the policies you support,” Ana went on quickly. “Cutting funding for welfare programs, like food stamps, for one.”
“Sometimes you have to do the wrong thing for the right reason,” Ransom said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just that no one in government has the luxury to vote solely in line with their own conscience,” Ransom said. “By supporting that federal budget cut, I got the votes I needed to push through legislation for mydisability rights bill. Sometimes you have to scratch someone else’s back so they’ll scratch yours.”
“That sounds like a spin to me,” Ana said.
“I’m not spinning anything,” Ransom said. “Things are more complicated than justrightandwrong. Democracy is a giant wheel, and I’m just a small cog in it. I can’t make it turn by myself. There have to be enough of us, all going in the same direction. And sometimes that means you have to make sacrifices, compromises.”
“I think if you’re truly confident that you’re doing the right thing, you should do it without compromise,” Ana said.
“Someone who believes they’re always right and single-mindedly pushes forward their own agenda without compromise—that’s an autocrat, a dictator,” Ransom said. “That’s not a democracy.”
“Maybe,” Ana said. “But how do you know when you’ve compromised too much?”
His eyes flashed at her. “That, Miss Rojas, is the million-dollar question.”
They sat there for a moment, looking at one another in the dark, the glow of the television softly illuminating their faces. Somehow, while they’d been talking, they had shifted closer together on the sofa. Ana’s knee was just inches from Ransom’s thigh.
“You can call me Ana, you know,” she said. “Miss Rojas feels so formal.”
He held her gaze. There was an intensity in his stare that sent a shiver down Ana’s spine.
“Ana,” he said.
An electricity pulsed between them when he said her name. Ana sat very still. Ransom leaned forward, and before Ana knew what she was doing, she closed her eyes and waited to feel his lips against hers.
After a few moments when nothing had happened, she opened her eyes again. Ransom was no longer sitting next to her. He had gotten up, was already standing on the other side of the couch.
“I should get to bed,” he said, his hands in his pockets. “We have an early morning tomorrow. Good night, Miss Rojas.”
Ana felt an ache of disappointment between her ribs, and then a jolt of shame.
