CHAPTER SEVEN

Simon — The Weight of a Name

He did not sleep for three days.

This was not unusual for him during crises — he had run on four hours and black coffee through the Hartwell filing, through two hostile negotiations, through the year his father had his first heart scare and Simon had essentially run the company alone for six weeks while pretending publicly that nothing was wrong. He knew how to function inside deprivation. He knew how to make his body a tool and use it past the point other people stopped.

What he did not know how to do was sit in Frederick's chair.

He did it anyway. On the second day, when the house had quieted and the condolence calls had slowed and Elder Brown had returned to his own residence with the particular exhaustion of a man who has outlived one of his children and does not know what to do with that fact, Simon went to the west wing study and sat in Frederick's chair and looked at Frederick's desk.

There was still a coffee ring on the surface. No one had cleaned it. He didn't know if that was oversight or if Gloria had understood, somehow, that it should be left.

He sat there for an hour. He did not cry. He had not cried since he was eleven years old, at his mother's funeral, when he had understood for the first time that some things did not come back, and he had decided somewhere in that understanding that tears were for the moment of comprehension and he had already had his. Everything after was just living with it.

He thought about Frederick. The specific, complicated, exhausting truth of him. The way he had laughed. The way he had borrowed things without asking and returned them without mentioning it. The way he had showed up, always, when something was actually wrong — not with words, not with the right thing to say, but with his physical presence, his body in the room, the reminder that you were not alone in it.

Simon had not always wanted Frederick's presence. He had sometimes found it unbearable.

He would have given most of what he owned to have it back.

On the third morning he came out of the study and found Mara in the corridor.

She was there with her cart — she was always there with her cart, the quiet machinery of the house continuing regardless — and she looked at him when he appeared, and she did not say I'm sorry for your loss the way everyone else had said it, the phrase worn smooth from overuse, and she did not look away the way some of the other staff did, uncomfortable with proximity to grief.

She just looked at him. Directly. The way she always looked at things — with that complete, unhurried attention that he had noticed from the first week and had not stopped noticing since.

"Have you eaten?" she said.

It was such a simple question. Such an ordinary, human question. He almost didn't know how to answer it.

"No," he said.

She nodded once, like a decision had been made, and left the cart in the corridor and went to the kitchen. He stood where he was for a moment, uncertain what he was doing, and then followed her.

She made eggs. The same way he made them, he noticed — he had no idea how she knew that, whether she had observed it or asked or simply guessed correctly. She made toast. She put coffee in front of him without asking how he took it and it was exactly right and he was too tired to find that strange anymore.

He ate. She sat across from him and drank tea and did not try to fill the silence, which was the most generous thing anyone had done for him in three days.

Halfway through the meal he said, without planning to, "He used to steal my pens."

She looked at him.

"Frederick. Every time he came into my study he'd pick up whatever pen was on my desk and take it. I don't think he even noticed he was doing it. I had a drawer full of pens because I kept buying new ones and then finding them on his desk a week later." He paused. He looked at his coffee. "I found four of mine in his study yesterday."

Mara said nothing. But something in her face — something careful and controlled — shifted slightly, the way a door shifts in a change of air pressure without opening.

"I'm sorry," she said. It was different from the way everyone else had said it. It sounded like she meant something specific by it.

He looked at her. She was looking at her tea.

They sat in the kitchen for another twenty minutes. He did not talk anymore. Neither did she. But the silence had changed quality — it was no longer the silence of a man alone with something too large to carry. It was the silence of two people in the same room, which is a different thing entirely.

That evening he found her in the sitting room with a book. He sat in the chair across from her and opened his own and they read on opposite sides of the room for two hours without speaking, and at some point he became aware that this was the most settled he had felt since Thursday, and the awareness of it made him look up at her.

She was already looking at him.

He looked back down at his book. She looked back down at hers. But something had been confirmed between them that neither of them named.

Three days later he called her into his study at eleven at night. She came in her day clothes — she hadn't been to bed yet, he realized, which meant she kept hours close to his — and sat in the chair across from his desk and waited.

He had not planned what he was going to say. He had sat at his desk for an hour after the last of the condolence calls and felt, with sudden and uncomfortable clarity, that the thing he had been filing away and not examining had grown too large to continue filing.

"I want to tell you something," he said. "And I want you to understand I'm not asking anything of you in return. This isn't a renegotiation of the contract."

She looked at him steadily.

"Since Frederick died," he said, "the only time I have felt like a person rather than a—" He stopped. Started again. "You have been the only thing in this house that has felt real to me. I don't know what to do with that. I'm not sure I'm doing anything with it. But I wanted you to know it."

The room was very quiet.

Mara looked at him for a long moment with an expression he could not read — the most unreadable he had ever seen her, and she was always somewhat unreadable. Something was moving behind her eyes that she was working very hard to keep still.

"Simon," she said. And stopped.

Her phone buzzed on the table beside her.

She looked at it. He saw her see it. He saw something happen in her face that he would spend a long time afterward trying to name — a kind of closing, fast and total, like a room going dark.

She stood up.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I have to—" She stopped again. She looked at him one more time, and whatever she had been about to say, she swallowed it whole. "Goodnight."

She walked out of the study.

He sat at his desk and looked at the door she had closed behind her and felt the strange, specific chill of a man who has said a true thing to someone and watched them leave before they could answer.

Downstairs, through the floor, he heard nothing.

He did not know that at that exact moment, in the corridor below, Mara Cole was standing with her back against the wall and Hayes' message open on her phone screen.

Daniel. Tomorrow night. No more delays.

She read it twice. She put the phone in her pocket. She pressed the back of her head against the cold wall and closed her eyes and stayed there for a long time in the dark, in the house of the man who had just told her she was the only real thing in his world.

Then she pushed off the wall.

And went to prepare.