“And you accepted?”
“She was so relieved I was going to be able to come that I couldn’t turn it down. And honestly, what do I care what Matt spends his money on? I’m sure he’s dropped way more on things that make Izzy way less happy.”
“So, you ready?” he asks, surer than ever that he doesn’t want to go to this party.
“Yeah, let’s get this over with.”
Matt Channing isn’t someone he’d ever choose to spend time with. That’s what Xavier has figured out in the ten minutes he’s spent in this guy’s proximity. All he seems to do is joke about how much his wife nags him, and while Xavier’s not an expert on marriage, it seems kind of shitty considering the woman is pregnant with his kid.
“So, Xavier, what do you do?”
“I work in repatriation.”
“Repatriation?”
Bianca responds before he can. “He helps countries and their museums get back stolen artifacts.”
“Stolen? So you’re a . . . sort of artifact cop?”
Xavier’s eyes nearly bug out of his head. “Uh, no, stolen as in, taken during occupations or during a period of colonization, usually under the guise of legitimacy.”
“So it was legal?”
“It was legal because the people making the laws decided to make it so. There are countless times throughout history when what was legal wasn’t what was right. In fact, you can even make that argument now.”
“How so?”
Xavier tries not to roll his eyes. Is the guy being deliberately obtuse? “Well, take immigration, for example. How many people talk about how their ancestors came to the States ‘legally’, but legally back then was just getting on a boat and showing up, the same way so many asylum seekers do now?”
“That’s different.”
“How so?”
“Well, back then, if it was illegal they just wouldn’t have come.”
Isobel puts a hand under the table, probably giving Matt’s thigh a gentle squeeze, but it goes ignored.
“So you’re saying people literally starving to death or fleeing fascism, just . . . would have lain down and died instead of breaking an unjust law?”
That has Matt furrowing his brow in confusion. “Who gets to decide what’s unjust?”
“We all know. We all know where the line is. Governments and people choose to ignore it because they want power or money, or they’ve decided that their wants supersede the will of the people they’re subjugating.”
“Well, this conversation is a little heavy for a party like this,” Isobel interrupts and Bianca takes that as her cue.
“I think I see some of the Gammas over there, we’re gonna go say hi,” Bianca says, extricating him and leading him toward a group of women near the bar.
“You were in a sorority?”
“No. They’re nice girls, but that wasn’t really my thing, it was Izzy’s. We had very different friends after freshman year. She always jokes that I’m her ‘voice of reason’ friend, the one she goes to if she needs someone to tell her the truth.”
“And have you?”
“Told her that marrying Matt would be a mistake and that she’s gorgeous and talented and smart and amazing and that she could do so much better than someone who thinks Elon Musk is a genius? Yeah, we had that conversation senior year before I left for New York. They broke up for a little while once we graduated, but a couple of months later, they were back together, engaged and setting the date.”
“If you’d been in LA, do you think you could have talked her out of it?”
“She knew how I felt. It’s not my job to direct her life.”
