CHAPTER 7 A Voice from Chicago

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The phone rang as she was taking off her boots, and she knew who it was before she looked.

Eleven missed calls. And now the twelfth. Her father's name on the screen, lit up in the cold light of the boot room.

Julian was not there. He had gone to confer with the lawyers who had arrived by afternoon, and the corridor behind her was empty except for a rack of coats and the smell of wet wool. She stood there with the phone buzzing in her palm like a trapped bird.

Then she answered it.

"Elodie." His voice was calm. It was always calm. "Four days of silence from my daughter. I confess I was beginning to feel neglected."

"Papa." Her own voice came out smaller than she wanted. "I told you in the email. I'm engaged. I'm with his family in Vermont."

"Yes. I read the email. I have also read the Hale family trust, which is not difficult to find if one pays a good lawyer." A faint rustle of paper. "Very interesting. A young man with a clause and a deadline, and a girl with a clause and a deadline. A coincidence of such tidiness that a cynical father might wonder."

Her heart stopped.

"It's not a..."

"I am not accusing you, cara. I am only observing." A pause. "I find that Odalys Hale and I have a mutual friend. She was kind enough to invite me for Christmas Eve dinner. I am bringing Anders. Voss thinks it would be gracious."

The boot room swam. "You can't."

"Of course I can. It is Christmas. A father may visit his daughter's fiancé. And if the love is as real as you say, you will not mind a little supper."

"Please what, cara? Please do not look? I am your father. It is the one thing I have ever done well."

She closed her eyes. She heard her mother's voice in her head, the rough kitchen alto, the smell of vanilla and warm sugar. A company is a family. It was always her father's favorite sentence. Her mother had never once said it.

"No," she whispered. "It isn't terrible."

"Good. We arrive at four tomorrow. Anders sends his regards, by the way. His father has been very helpful with the details." He hung up.

She stood with the phone against her chest and her breath going very fast. Her hands were shaking. She was thirty years old, she ran a company worth a billion dollars, and a four-minute phone call had turned her back into a child hiding in a pantry. She did not want Julian to find her like this. So she pulled her coat on again, wrong, one sleeve inside out, and went out the side door into the snow.

The garden was white and silent. Blue shadows lay across the hedges, and the sky was the clear dark gold of a bell. She walked until the Hall was a smudge behind her, until the sound of her own breath was the only sound, and then she sat on a stone bench under a bare, black-limbed oak and cried, silently, thoroughly, the way a person cries who has not done it in years.

It was perhaps ten minutes before she heard the crunch of footsteps. She did not turn. She knew them. Careful. Even. A man who walked as if the ground might give way.

Something warm settled over her shoulders. A scarf. Wool, charcoal, smelling faintly of cedar and cold air. It was still warm from his neck.

"Your coat is inside out," said Julian, sitting beside her.

She let out a damp, helpless laugh. "Is it?"

"Left sleeve. Also, your lips are blue." He did not touch her. He sat a careful foot away, his hands on his knees, looking at the dark hedges. "I looked for you in the library, the kitchen, and the boot room. Mrs. Pruitt informed me that the side door was open and that I was an idiot."

"Is it? Open?"

"I'm an idiot. The door was open." A very faint pause. "Elodie. Tell me what happened."

"Section Twelve," she said, wiping her face. "I know."

"It isn't about the contract." His voice was low. "It was never about the contract. Tell me because I want to know."

She told him. About the call, and the dinner, and Anders, and her father's soft, terrible voice saying that he only wanted to see her happy. The words came out in a muddle. She said she was tired of being a gift. She said she had built the company with her own hands and still had to ask permission to keep it, and that every time her father smiled at her she wanted to be six years old again and have him look at her as he looked at the business.

When she stopped, Julian said nothing for a long time. A single flake of snow drifted down between them, turning slowly, and landed on the back of his glove.

"I could end it," he said at last. "Right now. Walk into that house and tell them all it was a lie. Take the loss. Let the company split, if it must. You wouldn't have to face him."

She stared at him. "You'd lose everything."

"I would lose a building and a balance sheet." He turned his head. In the blue twilight his eyes were very dark, and very steady. "I have not been this frightened in nine years, and I find I am more frightened of watching you cry in a garden than I am of losing Hale Meridian. I don't understand it. I don't like it. But it's true."

The wind moved in the oak. Somewhere very far away, a church bell was ringing the half hour.

"Don't end it," she said, shakily. "Please. I need to see it through. I need to look at my father across that table and not flinch."

"Then I'll sit beside you," said Julian. "And if you flinch, I'll flinch with you. It'll look like a very devoted engagement."

It was so earnest and so absurd that she laughed again, and this time it did not hurt. He did not smile, exactly, but his shoulders came down. And after a moment, with the slowness of a man who expects to be refused, he lifted one hand and tucked a wet strand of hair behind her ear.

It was a small gesture. It was in no contract. And it undid her more completely than a kiss.

"Julian," she said.

"Not yet," he said, very quietly. "Not in a garden, with you freezing and upset. Not like this." His thumb rested a heartbeat against her cheekbone. "When it happens, Elodie, I want it to be because you chose it. Not because I was kind."

She nodded. She could not speak. And they sat there as the stars came out over the white hills of Vermont, two cold, frightened, honest people, not touching, and so close that the air between them seemed to hum.

Neither of them noticed the figure in an upstairs window, a tall woman in a pale blue sweater with one hand pressed flat against the glass. By the time they rose and went in together, the window was empty.