Chapter 18

Chapter Eighteen: Cece

Ruth read the drawing standing up, with her coat still on.

She had come in at eight-twenty-five, ten minutes early, because the shift in her sleep had told her something was wrong. Lena was waiting at the end of the aisle with the envelope held flat against her chest. She did not say anything. She only held out the page, the way a doctor extends a chart, and watched Ruth's face change.

It did not collapse at once. That was the strange part. For a long moment, Ruth only stared at the crooked green house and the round yellow sun, and her expression was one of mild confusion, as though she were trying to place a word in a language she had once spoken fluently. Then her eyes dropped to the lettering across the bottom. RUTH and CECE. FOREVER. And the color went out of her cheeks as water drains from a basin.

"Oh," she said.

It was barely a sound. She put one hand out to the edge of the desk.

"Ruth. Sit down."

"I made her a lunch box," Ruth said, in a thin faraway voice. "Do you know that? Her father couldn't afford a decent one. He used to bring her in on Saturdays when the nanny was ill, and she'd sit under my desk with her crayons, drawing, and I'd slip her a cookie when no one was looking. A tin of shortbread, in the bottom drawer." Her fingers trembled on the page. "She drew this on the last Saturday. She said it was a picture of when she was going to come and live with me."

She sat. Lena slid the envelope into her hands.

"Read the back."

Ruth turned the page. Her lips moved silently. When she reached the end, she closed her eyes.

You always said you would look after us.

I remember everything.

"I did say it," Ruth whispered. "I said it to a six-year-old who asked whether her papa was going to be all right. I said, Don't you worry, Cece. We'll look after you." She laughed, a cracked, awful little breath. "I meant it. God help me, I meant it with my whole heart. And then I went home, and thought about it."

"Ruth."

"She's known from the start. She's known who I am since the first day she walked in. All those weeks, she's passed me in the corridor and smiled and called me Mrs. Delaney, and asked how my husband was, and I didn't..." Her voice cracked. "I never saw her. I never saw him in her. How could I have missed it?"

"You were not looking for it."

"I should have been."

"She changed her name, her history, her face." Lena crouched, so that their eyes were level. Her voice was soft and steady. "She spent twenty years becoming someone who could not be recognized. It isn't a failure to have been fooled."

"It's a failure to have failed her." Ruth's eyes were wet and blazing. "I want to talk to her."

"Ruth..."

"I'm going to talk to her. Today. Before Friday. Before she does whatever she is planning." Her chin lifted. "I owe her that. I owe her a great deal more than that, but I'll begin there."

Lena regarded her for a long moment. She could have argued. She could have laid out, calmly, the many reasons why a confrontation now would be unwise, the risk that Celeste would grow wary, the danger of tipping her hand four days before the signing. But she looked at the older woman's face, at the grief and the resolve and the old unhealed wound, and she found that she did not have the heart to do it.

"Then I'll come with you," she said.

They found Celeste on the stairs.

It was a quarter to one. The thirty-first floor had gone quiet for lunch, and most of the executives were out. Ruth had gone up alone first, at Lena's quiet urging, and Lena had followed at a discreet distance and stationed herself in the shadow of the stairwell door, one floor below, where the sound would carry. She did not want to be seen. She wanted only to be near.

She heard the footsteps first, quick and light, descending. Then a second set, slower, heavier, an older woman's tread. Then a pause on the landing above her. Then the soft click of a door shutting, and silence.

"Cece," said Ruth.

There was a very long stillness.

When the voice answered, it was not the voice of the gentle, breathless, apologetic assistant. It was low and flat and quiet, with a faint tremor in it that Lena had not heard before, like a wire pulled tight.

"Nobody has called me that in twenty years."

"I know."

"You took your time."

"Yes," said Ruth. "I did. I'm so sorry."

Lena stood against the cool concrete wall, with her hand pressed flat to the rail. She could picture them as clearly as if she had been standing between them. The tall, slim, lovely woman, with her back to the window and her arms folded. The small silver-haired figure facing her, hands clasped, shoulders braced. A narrow stairwell, a gray square of sky.

"You remember me," Celeste said.

"I remember everything. The shortbread. The crayons. You used to hide under the desk when the cleaners came, because you said the vacuum was a dragon."

"It was a dragon."

"It was a very large one." Ruth's voice cracked slightly. "Cece, I have thought about you every day for twenty-six years."

"Have you?"

"I swear it."

"And yet you never found me." It came out softly, almost conversationally. "How difficult could it have been? A little girl. A name. A city. There were records. There were churches, and orphanages, and relatives. I was in three homes before I turned ten, Ruth. Three. Do you want to hear what I learned in the second?"

"If you wish to tell me."

"That nobody is coming." She said it quite gently. "That the people who say they'll look after you are lying, or they're afraid, or they're simply forgetful. And that you have to look after yourself."

"I wanted to."

"But you didn't."

"No," said Ruth. "I didn't."

The silence that followed was terrible. Lena could hear the faint hum of the fluorescent lights above her, and the hollow whisper of a ventilation shaft, and, far down below, the distant thud of the lobby doors. Her pulse was steady. She noticed that distantly, with detached interest, and noticed, too, that she was holding her breath.

"I was twenty-six years old," Ruth said at last. Her voice was low and steady, and the steadiness cost her, Lena could hear it. "I was terrified. I'd been told that if I spoke up, I'd lose my job, my home, my mother's care. I told myself I would do it the next day, and the next. I was ashamed, and ashamed, and ashamed. And by the time I had the courage, your father was gone."

"Don't say gone."

"Cece..."

"Say dead." The voice was very quiet. "Say that he died in a cell with a cracked rib and a lung infection, and that nobody came. Say that his wife followed him within the year because she could not afford the medicine. Say it. I want to hear someone say it."

"He died," Ruth said. "In prison. For something he did not do. And I let it happen."

A long, shuddering breath. A pause, and then a soft, unexpected sound, a small cracked exhale, almost like a laugh.

"Thank you," said Celeste.

"I'm sorry. I'm so very sorry."

"I know you are. It's in your face. You look terrible, by the way. Old." A pause. "I used to think that if I ever saw you again, I'd want to hurt you. I imagined it for years. I planned what I would say."

"And now?"

"And now I find I'd rather you watched."

Lena's fingers tightened on the rail.

"I'm not going to hurt you, Ruth," Celeste went on, in the same soft, even tone. "I want you to understand that. I am not that sort of person, whatever you may have heard. I only wanted you to know that I remembered. That I've always known exactly who was in the building, and who was not in the courtroom. And that on Friday, when it's all over, when Cross Meridian is a cold hole in the ground and Damian Cross is standing on the pavement with nothing in his hands, you'll be there to see it. You'll see what silence costs."

"Cece, please. Your father was innocent. I can prove it."

"I know he was innocent. I've always known." A faint, brittle laugh. "I don't need proof. I have proof. I have my father's face in my head every morning when I wake. What I needed was for somebody to say it out loud, in a room full of people. And nobody ever has."

"I will."

"Will you?"

"Yes."

"Then do it on Friday." The voice was suddenly very gentle, almost tender. "Come to the signing. Sit at the back. And if you still wish to speak, when it's done, I promise I'll listen."

Footsteps. The soft scrape of a door. A voice, brighter now, brisk and sweet and utterly transformed: "Oh! Good afternoon, Mr. Pruitt! Wasn't the buffet lovely?" A cheerful, answering murmur. A burst of polite laughter.

And then nothing but the hum of the lights, and above Lena's head, the sound of an older woman sinking down onto a concrete step and beginning, quietly, to cry.

Lena found Ruth in the stairwell twenty minutes later.

She was sitting on the third step from the landing with her handbag in her lap and her coat buttoned to the chin. She had stopped weeping. She had that scoured, hollowed look of someone who has been emptied out and not yet refilled, and when she saw Lena's shoes appear on the stairs, she did not look up.

"You heard," she said.

"Yes."

"Then you know she's going to destroy him."

"I know she is trying to."

"She isn't doing it for money." Ruth's voice was very tired. "She meant what she said. She wants him standing on a pavement with nothing, the way her father stood in a dock. It isn't greed, Lena. It's grief. And it has been growing in her for twenty years, like a tooth under the skin."

"It doesn't change what she has done."

"No. But it changes what I owe her." Ruth lifted her head at last. Her eyes were red-rimmed, and quite clear. "I'm coming on Friday. I'm going to say it, out loud, in front of the board. I'm going to tell them what Edmund Cross did. And I don't care what it costs me."

"You'll lose your job."

"I lost something far worse a long time ago."

Lena sat down beside her on the cold step. For a while, neither of them spoke. The ventilation shaft sighed. Somewhere below, a door banged and was still.

"She's right about one thing," Ruth said after a time, and her voice cracked a little. "Nobody ever came."

"Then we shall come," said Lena, quietly. "On Friday. All of us."

Ruth turned her head. A very small smile touched her mouth, and she laid a hand over Lena's, and gave it a short, hard squeeze.

Damian was waiting when she got home.

It was a quarter to seven. The apartment was dim, lit only by the yellow circle of a single lamp, and he sat on the sofa with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled to the elbow, his hands hanging between his knees. A glass stood untouched on the coffee table. When Lena came in, he did not rise.

"Close the door," he said.

She did.

"Sit."

"I'd prefer to stand."

"As you like." His voice was low and strained. "Celeste tells me you went out on Thursday afternoon. To Hollis Park. She says she saw you, from a taxi, going into the conservatory."

So, Lena thought. That is how.

It was interesting, in a cool, abstract way. She had not seen a taxi. She had not seen anything. And yet it did not matter, she supposed, because a woman who wished to follow someone could do it from any angle, and a story only needed to be plausible, not true.

"Yes," she said.

"She says you met a man."

"Yes."

"Who?"

"A man who knows your company very well."

Damian rose. He did it slowly, with a stiff, controlled movement, the way a man stands when he has decided not to shout. His eyes were dark and burning and very tired.

"Are you seeing someone?"

The question dropped into the room like a coin. Lena looked at him, with calm, courteous attention, and she saw what she had not seen in all the years she had known him: the faint quick tremor of a muscle in his cheek, the whiteness around his mouth, the raw unguarded hurt behind the anger.

Oh, she thought. He is jealous.

It was a startling discovery, and a faintly sad one. She searched herself for satisfaction and did not find it. She found only a kind of gentle, distant sympathy, as one might feel for a stranger on a train.

"No," she said. "I'm not seeing anyone."

"Then who was he?"

"His name is Adrian Vance."

The silence that followed was absolute.

She watched it land. She watched Damian's face go white, then red, then white again, his lips parting, his hands curling slowly into fists. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse and wild and hardly recognizable.

"Vance."

"Yes."

"You went to meet Adrian Vance? Alone? In a public park?"

"I was curious."

"He is my enemy. He has been my family's enemy for eleven years. He is the man who ruined my father." His voice cracked. "Do you have any idea what you've done?"

"I'm beginning to," said Lena, mildly.

"You are my fiancée."

"Am I?"

He stared at her. Something moved behind his face, a flash of naked terror, quickly buried. He took a step toward her and stopped.

"What did he want?"

"To talk about the brand report."

"And what did you tell him?"

"That I would consider it." She paused. "Damian, may I ask you something?"

"What?"

"Why was Celeste in a taxi outside the conservatory?"

He blinked.

"I'm sorry?"

"It's a very quiet park. It's nowhere near the office, or the apartment, or any route she would ordinarily take. I would have thought it a surprising coincidence." Lena tilted her head, as though pondering a mildly interesting puzzle. "She says she saw me from a taxi. I was only curious how she came to be passing."

For a very long moment, Damian said nothing.

She watched the question work its way into him. She watched his eyes flicker, once, to the dark window, to the hall, to the faint line of light beneath the master bedroom door. A small crease appeared between his brows. It was the first time, in all the weeks she had known the new Celeste, that she had seen him hesitate.

"She said she was visiting a client," he muttered.

"I'm sure she was."

"It's... I'm sure there's an explanation."

"I'm sure there is."

"Lena." He rubbed his face with both hands. "I don't understand what's happening to me. I don't understand you. I don't understand any of this."

"No," said Lena, gently. "I don't suppose you do."

She left him standing in the middle of the room, in the lamplight, with his hands at his sides.

It was past midnight when she found the note.

She had been lying awake on the narrow bed, listening to the faint murmur of voices from the master bedroom, a low, sharp, angry exchange that she had not tried to follow. She heard a door open. A footstep. Then silence, and a soft, deliberate sound outside her own door, like a sheet of paper being slid across the floorboards.

She waited a full minute. Then she rose, and crossed the carpet in her bare feet, and crouched.

It was a single sheet of cream-colored paper, folded once. She unfolded it. The writing was neat, upright, graceful, a hand she knew.

I saw you in the glasshouse.

I saw who sat beside you.

Be careful, Lena. You are not the only one who can keep a record.

Below it, in a tidy line, was a time, and a date.

Friday. Two o'clock.

And beneath that, underlined once, in a neat firm stroke:

Come alone.

End of Chapter Eighteen