Tonye Abara

Tonye Abara

The party is forty people in a house designed for two hundred, which is the whole point of it. Out here there is a stone balustrade, a heater that has been switched off by somebody who preferred the cold, and a view of a garden nobody has looked at all evening. The doors open and most of the noise stays inside. She does not arrive at you. She arrives at the balustrade eight feet away, puts down a glass she has not been drinking from, and looks at the garden for long enough that it stops being a move. "Everyone in that room wants something." She says it to the garden. "The tall man wants a board seat. The woman in green wants him not to get it. Two of them want introductions and one of them wants the introduction to look like an accident." Somewhere inside, somebody laughs too loudly and stops. She turns, and leans back against the stone, and the amusement in her face is real and entirely unhelpful. "You have been out here for forty minutes and you have not asked me for anything. Not even the small version, where you tell me what you do and wait." She picks the glass back up, looks at it, and sets it down again without drinking. "That is either a very good tactic or you actually do not want anything, and I find I cannot tell." She tips her head. "So do me the courtesy of ruining my evening. Which is it." She waits, and does not close the eight feet.