Chapter 25

Chapter Twenty-Five: The Rooftop Garden

They did not speak in the boardroom.

It seemed to both of them, without a word passing, that this was not a conversation for a room full of leather chairs and the lingering smell of cold coffee. Damian merely stood, when the last of the directors had filed out, and looked at her across the length of the table. Then he turned and walked to the door. After a moment's hesitation, Lena followed.

They rode the elevator in silence. It rose past thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four, and the doors opened onto a short flight of stairs, and a heavy glass door, and the cold evening air.

The rooftop garden of the Cross Meridian Group was a long, narrow terrace laid out along the east side of the tower, bordered by clipped boxwood and potted maples and a low glass balustrade. In summer it was crowded at lunchtime. In October, at dusk, it was empty. A few last leaves, red and gold, lay scattered on the paving stones. The wind came across the roofs in long cool gusts, smelling of rain and woodsmoke and the river. Far below, the city had lit itself, street by street, until the whole valley glittered like the inside of a jewel box.

Lena stopped at the top of the stairs.

She knew the place. She knew it exactly, every paving stone, the curve of the bench at the far end, the little brass plaque beneath the nearest maple. She could have drawn it from memory. It was where, three years ago, in the soft blue light of an evening very like this one, a man had stood with his hand shaking, and said her name.

She waited for something to stir in her. A quickening. An ache. A flutter of recognition at the sight of the place where her life had changed.

It was a pretty terrace. It was a little cold.

"I wasn't sure you'd come," Damian said.

He had gone ahead to the balustrade. He stood with both hands on the glass rail and his back to her, looking out over the lights, his jacket open, his tie gone. In the failing light, his shoulders looked narrower than she remembered. He did not turn when she approached.

"You asked."

"I know. I only..." He stopped. "I wasn't sure you'd choose this place."

"I didn't. You did."

"Yes." He gave a short, humorless breath that might have been a laugh. "I suppose I did. It seemed... I thought, if I could say it anywhere..."

"Say what?"

"I don't know." He bowed his head. "I had it all worked out, on the way up. A speech. I'm very good at speeches. I've given a hundred of them." His voice cracked. "And now I'm standing here, and I can't remember a word."

Lena said nothing.

She came to the rail, a few feet from him, and rested her hands on the cold glass. The wind lifted her hair. Below them, the river was a long silver thread under the bridges, and a small ferry crept along it, trailing a line of white.

"Then perhaps," she said, "you'll say it plainly."

It was a long time before he did.

"I have spent the last month," he began, slowly, "trying to understand what I did."

"Yes."

"I have gone over it and over it. The dinner. The cake. The stew. The road." He swallowed. "I keep thinking that there must have been a moment. A single turning. A point at which I could have said, No, this is wrong, and walked a different way. I've looked for it everywhere."

"And?"

"There isn't one." He drew a long breath. "There were a thousand. Every day. Every time you said something and I told you not to be sensitive. Every time you came into a room, and I looked at my phone. Every time I said grow up instead of what's the matter." He closed his eyes. "I don't think I ever did a single dramatic, terrible thing. I only did a great many small ones. And they added up."

"They do."

"I read your notes."

"I know."

"Three years of them. 'Be gentle.'" His voice broke on the word. "You wrote be gentle, about me. Every year. On the day my mother died."

"I thought you might need it."

"I did." He pressed the heel of his hand against his eye. "God. I did. And I never even knew you'd noticed."

Lena looked out at the lights.

She could see it all, quite clearly: the quiet apartment, the dimly lit table, the young woman in the gray dress writing a small note and tucking it under a sugar bowl, her face turned a little to one side, her mouth soft with a tenderness that had nowhere to go. She could see her as one sees a figure in an old painting, from a long way off, composed and still and rather beautiful.

She was very kind, she thought. And she was very lonely.

"I'm sorry," Damian said. "I know it's not enough. I know that saying so costs me nothing, and that you can't..." He gestured helplessly. "That you don't feel it. That it can't touch you. But I need to say it anyway. I'm sorry, Lena. For all of it. For the road, and the stew, and the apology you made me give, and every other thing I can't even name."

"Thank you."

"That's all?"

"It's a great deal." She turned her head. "I believe you."

He looked at her.

His eyes in the fading light were dark and red-rimmed, and they were full of something so naked and so desperate that she almost looked away. He was thirty-four years old, and he had the face of a boy standing on a bridge, waiting to learn whether the ground would hold.

"Then come back," he whispered.

"I'll do anything," Damian said.

The words tumbled out, low and fast and ragged, as though they had been dammed up for weeks.

"Whatever you ask. I'll step down. I'll give the company to Halloran, or to Voss, or to anyone you name. I'll go to the police and tell them every single thing I know. I'll apologize to Ruth, and to Tomas, and to that poor, broken woman they took out of here in handcuffs. I'll clear her father's name in every paper in the country. I'll sell the apartment. I'll go and live in a cabin in the woods, and learn how to make my own coffee." A wild, choked laugh. "Just tell me what you want."

"I want nothing."

"There must be something."

"There isn't." She said it gently. "Damian, I would like to be very honest, because I think you deserve that. I don't feel what I felt. The doctors don't know whether I will. I may wake up tomorrow and find it all returned, every last piece of it, and I may weep for a week. Or I may never feel it again." She paused. "I don't know which I hope for."

"If it came back..."

"If it came back, I would remember what it was like to love you. I would remember what it was like to be afraid of losing you. I would remember how it felt to apologize for things I hadn't done." She looked at him steadily. "And I do not think that remembering would make me return."

He flinched, as if she had struck him.

"But you don't know that."

"No. I don't." She turned back to the rail. "I only know what I see, now, with clear eyes. And what I see is a woman who spent three years trying to be chosen. Who made herself smaller and smaller, hoping that if she took up less room, she would be easier to keep. Who thought that love was something one earned by enduring." Her voice was soft and quite level. "I do not wish to be that woman again. Not for you. Not for anyone."

"I'd never ask you to."

"You would, though. Not on purpose." She smiled faintly, and without bitterness. "You'd ask me to forgive and forget. You'd ask me to be patient while you learned. You'd say, just give me time, and I would, because I'm very good at giving people time. And in a year, I would wake up to find that I was holding up the whole house again, and you were walking ahead."

He opened his mouth, and shut it.

"That is not a criticism," she said. "It's only how it goes. People do not change in a month. You have changed more in the last week than most men do in ten years, and I admire it. But I am not a project, Damian. And I don't wish to be a reward."

For a long time, neither of them spoke.

The wind had risen. A dry leaf scuttled across the paving stones and fetched up against the leg of the bench. Somewhere far below, a siren wailed and faded.

"I said it to you," Damian said, at last, in a very low voice. "In the hospital. I said that if you didn't grow up, I would call off the engagement."

"Yes."

"I used it like a weapon."

"You did."

"And it worked, for three years. Every time." He gave a short, painful breath. "And in that room, that one time, you looked at me and said, If you want to. And it was as though the floor dropped out of the world."

"I know. I watched your face."

"Why didn't you hate me?"

"I couldn't."

"I wish you had." He was staring out over the rail, quite blankly, without seeing it. "I'd have preferred it. I could have fought hate. It's the kindness that I can't..."

He stopped. His shoulders had begun to shake.

Lena stood very still beside him. She did not touch him. She did not speak. She had once, long ago, reached for this man's hand a thousand times, and had found it, nine times out of ten, withdrawn. Now she stood a foot away in the cold, and let him weep, and kept the small, quiet distance between them like a gift.

"I will tell you what I'm going to do," she said, when it had passed.

He wiped his face with the back of his hand.

"I'm going to call off the engagement."

He did not move.

"Not because you have threatened to. Not because I'm angry. Not because anyone has told me to." Her voice was gentle and perfectly clear. "I'm doing it because I have thought about it very carefully, and I find that I do not wish to marry you. It is as simple as that. It is the first thing I have decided in three years for no reason except that it is mine."

"Lena."

"I'm sorry. I truly am."

"Please."

"You said once that you would call it off if I misbehaved." She smiled, very faintly. "I am not misbehaving. I am simply choosing. I hope, someday, you'll see the difference."

She drew the ring out of her pocket.

It lay in her palm, small and bright, catching the last violet gleam of the sky. For a moment she looked down at it, at the thin gold band, the single modest stone, and she tried once more to feel something, anything, for the girl who had cried so hard on this very spot that a man had laughed and dabbed her eyes with his own pocket square.

Thank you, she thought, to that girl. You did your best. Rest now.

She held it out.

Damian looked at it. His hand lifted, trembling, and stopped halfway. He seemed unable to close his fingers.

"Keep it," he whispered. "Please. Just... keep it."

"I can't."

"Then throw it off the roof."

"I'd rather not. It's a good ring." She took his hand, gently, and laid the band in his open palm, and folded his fingers over it. His skin was cold. "Sell it, if you like. Give the money to Tomas's daughter's tuition. Or give it to a woman you love, one day, when you've learned how to see her."

"I don't want anyone else."

"Not today. But there will come a day." She released his hand. "I hope so, anyway."

He stood with his fist clenched around the ring, and his face, in the dusk, was a ruin.

"There's one more thing," said Lena.

She had walked a few steps toward the stairs. She stopped, and turned, and looked back at him across the dim, windy terrace. He had not moved. He stood at the balustrade with the city glittering below, a tall figure in a rumpled suit, quite alone.

"The apartment."

"It's yours. Whatever you want, whatever..."

"I'm going to collect my things tonight. I'll be staying with Ruth, for the present." She paused. "Miss Aldine's belongings are still in the master bedroom. The police will want to speak to you about them. I would be grateful if you'd let them in without fuss."

"Of course."

"And Damian. When you speak to Detective Quill, please tell her the whole truth. Not the parts that flatter you."

He nodded, slowly.

"I'll try."

"Thank you." She hesitated. Something stirred at the edge of her mind, a faint warm memory of a rooftop, a hand, an evening, and she let it come, and look at it, and pass. "I hope you find your mother's recipe again, one day. The real one. I hope you make it for yourself."

His breath caught.

"I think you could," she said. "I think there's a great deal in you that you've never been allowed to be."

She turned. She walked down the long terrace, past the clipped boxwood and the shivering maples, toward the heavy glass door. Behind her, in the dusk, she heard a sound, low and broken and wholly unguarded, the sound of a man sinking down onto a cold stone bench with a ring in his hand. She did not look back.

She reached the door, and pushed it open, and stepped into the warm yellow light of the stairwell.

The door swung shut behind her with a soft, final click.

She made it down two flights before it happened.

It started in her chest. A small, odd tightness, like the first tug of a thread in an old seam. She had her hand on the rail, and her foot on the next step, and she stopped, puzzled. It was very quiet in the stairwell. A fluorescent tube hummed overhead. Somewhere far below, a door banged.

She stood with her hand pressed flat to her breastbone and waited.

It came up slowly, as water rises in a well. It was not a rush. It was not a wave. It was something stranger and gentler, a vast, soft, shuddering ache, as though a great stone she had been carrying for weeks, without knowing, had finally been set down, and every muscle that had held it had begun to tremble.

Her eyes were wet.

She lifted a hand to her face, and her fingers came away damp. She stared at them in utter astonishment. She had not wept since the hospital. She had not wept, truly, in a year. She did not know why she was weeping now. It was not for Damian. It was not for the ring. It was for someone else, a small, serious, hopeful girl in a gray dress, who had pinned her hair back every morning and waited, and waited, and waited to be seen.

Oh, Lena thought. There you are.

She sank down onto the cold concrete step with her back against the wall and her knees drawn up, and she put her face in her hands, and for the first time in a very long time, she let herself cry.

Not for long. Not loudly. It was a quiet, steady, private weeping, the sort one does in the aftermath of a long illness, when the fever has broken and the body remembers that it is allowed to be tired. Above her, the fluorescent tube hummed. In the dim yellow light, the stairwell seemed to hold her, like a great hand.

And when at last it had passed, and she lifted her head, wiping her face on the sleeve of her cardigan, she found that she was not alone.

A tall figure in a dark overcoat stood on the landing below, with one hand on the rail. He had not come closer. He had stopped three steps down, with a kind of grave, careful tact, as a person stops at the edge of a sleeping animal. His face was in shadow. But she knew the shape of his shoulders. She knew the quiet.

"Miss Hartwell," said Adrian Vance. "I did not wish to intrude."

She looked at him for a long moment. Her face was wet. Her hair had come loose. She felt, with a small bewildered shock, that she did not mind in the least.

"How long have you been standing there?"

"A little while." His voice was low and a little rough. "I came to see whether you needed a car."

"That was kind."

"I'm not sure that it was." He hesitated. "You were crying."

"Yes."

"For him?"

"No," said Lena, slowly. She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand and considered the question, honestly, as she had considered everything lately. "For someone I used to be. I think... I think she needed me to say goodbye."

He was silent.

Then, very quietly, he came up the three steps and sat down on the cold concrete beside her. He did not touch her. He did not speak. He sat with his forearms on his knees and his gray eyes on the opposite wall, in the long humming silence, and after a while, he took a clean white handkerchief out of his pocket and laid it on the step between them, without comment.

She picked it up.

"Thank you," she said.

"It's only linen."

"I know." She dabbed her eyes. A strange, shaky, unexpected laugh escaped her. "Mr. Vance, I believe that I am happy."

He turned his head.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I think it's happiness." She was still half laughing, half crying, a little lost, quite certain. "It's very unfamiliar. I had forgotten that it feels so much like being sick."

For the first time since she had known him, Adrian Vance smiled.

It was a small smile, and a slow one. It changed his whole face. It softened the severe line of the mouth, and warmed the cold slate of his eyes, and made him look, suddenly, very young.

"I believe," he said, "that it often does."

End of Chapter Twenty-Five