“Probably that,” Jay muses. “But to his credit, he sounds like he listened to Kitten.”
We can’t see the whole city from the top of four stories, but we can see a lot. The streetlights divide the blocks into neat squares I know well from my map.
Do I have clarity? I see better how to do my job and turn Foster’s home into a gift to the city. I see that Catherine was right to be skeptical of my protests about Jay, even if she was wrong about the reasons I’m drawn to him. It’s not his looks or his status. It’s not even his charm.
It’s how quick his mind is, how curious he is about everything, how he uses history to understand the world the way I do, how seriously he takes his work while not taking himself seriously, maybe to his detriment. Even more than that, it’s his heart. The soft place in it for this city and his grandfather, the way he dropped everything to go help his dad, the way he both treasures and freely shares his memories of his grandmother and his time in the house, treasures it enough to accept a board seat and open it to anyone.
I’ve known this man beside me for a month. Only a month. But the thing is, he’s been beside me many times during that month. Problem-solving, listening, teasing,sleuthing, even quietly working. Clarity? It’s clear I’m falling for him.
I’m not sure he feels the same way. At least, not at the same intensity. I doubt he’s thought about what happens when he has to turn in his book in a couple of weeks and go back to Boston and real life.
What if his feelings are more than attraction? More than liking me as a person? What if he’s feeling like I am and we’re moving toward something deeper? Right now, it’s uncomplicated. If this is mutual, it becomes very complicated.
At least it does for me. I read through the board’s obligations very carefully when I heard Catherine had joined. Trustees owe a “duty of loyalty” to the museum. I’d wanted to understand what that meant in terms of her also sitting on the board of the Sutton. Mainly, it means the trustees must always govern in the museum’s best interests. That’s Jay’s responsibility.
It’s not spelled out anywhere, but if anything developed between me and Jay, we’d need to disclose that to the board. It would be part of his duty of loyalty to the museum so the board could consider that when any of his votes might affect me, and as director, that would be almost everything.
Maybe this will be a moot point if we don’t get involved until I go back to the Sutton. Or maybe we can wait long enough for Catherine to change her opinion of me before we explore a relationship.
Maybe I’m reading way more into the situation, like I did with Hayes.
I sigh, and Jay turns toward me.
“That was heavy. You okay?”
“I’m good. Breathing out some of the stress from the week.”
“Has it been bad?”
I smile, touched by his concern. “Just busy, but it’s good things. Converging, like you said. Coming together.”
“With a lot of effort from you.”
“It’s been more people-intensive than the first two weeks, that’s for sure. It’s not a bad thing, just a different dynamic for me, being top of the—” I break off, realizing what I almost said.
“Top of the what?”
My mouth twitches. “I was going to say ‘ladder’ until I thought better of it.”
His laugh is warm. “I don’t think I’ve been a boss before. Do you like it?”
“I do,” I say. “I prefer to collaborate, so I’m happy to be bringing on full-time staff. But yeah. The job is stretching me, but it doesn’t feel too big.”
“You told me about why you love history, but I don’t think you told me how you chose museum work specifically. And Boston in particular, since you didn’t grow up here. Did you always plan to stay after college or were you thinking even bigger?”
I shake my head. “Boston was the goal. I would have been happy in New York or Philadelphia too.”
“Industrial centers.”
“Makes sense for my specialty, doesn’t it?” Boston had made sense in many ways. When had I realized or decided I’d most likely end up there? When I remember, I smile. “You know what’s funny is that in a way, old school letters are how I ended up in Boston.”
“Handwritten letters? Like Dear Heart’s?”
“Yeah. In fourth and fifth grade, we had pen pals at other schools. Fourth grade was Florida history, so we traded letters with a class in Tallahassee because it’s the state capital. Fifth grade was Colonial history, so my teacher set up a pen pal project with a fifth-grade class in Boston. I grew up in asuburb of Orlando, a master planned city, and at the time, it was one of the newest cities in the country. We were supposed to write to our pen pal to compare and contrast the differences in our cities. I couldn’t wrap my head around Boston. I was amazed that their class lived in a place we read about in history books when our city didn’t even show up on Google Maps yet.”
“Those letters made you want to move to Boston?” he asks. His voice sounds odd. Thin, kind of, and I look over to see if he’s okay. He’s studying me, but he seems fine.
“I guess they did.” I laugh, shaking my head. “Boston became this whole thing in my mind, like it was arealcity, and mine looked like a resort. Important things happened there, and important people lived there, and I loved the oldness of it, because in fifth grade, Boston seemed very, very old. By the time I was applying to college, I mostly picked New England schools. And the rest, as they say, is history.”
