Chapter 8

Chapter Eight: Ten Days

There is a particular kind of loneliness in knowing something no one else will let you say.

Lena discovered it in the first twenty-four hours after she decided to find proof. It was not dramatic. It did not announce itself with tears or sleeplessness, though she had plenty of both. It was subtler than that, a quiet, steady pressure, like standing at the bottom of a swimming pool while people on the surface laughed and waved and could not hear her calling.

She started with the building.

The apartment tower had a doorman named Mr. Teague, a gray, courteous man in his sixties with a tidy mustache and a brass nameplate, who had worked the night desk for eight years and knew every resident by their step. Lena had always liked him. Their conversations had never gone beyond the weather, but there was something in his manner, a dry, watchful decency, that made her think he noticed more than he said.

On Tuesday evening, she stopped at the desk on her way in.

"Evening, Miss Hartwell," he said. "Cold one."

"It is." She hesitated, adjusting the strap of her bag. "Mr. Teague, this is going to sound strange. Does anyone ever drop things off for Miss Marlowe? Packages, envelopes?"

His eyes, which were mild and brown and had probably seen everything, rested on her for a moment.

"I'm afraid I can't discuss other residents' deliveries, miss."

"Of course. I understand."

"Building policy."

"Yes, I know."

She turned toward the elevator. She was nearly there when his voice came again, low and perfectly even.

"If a person were to be curious, and I'm only saying if, the lobby cameras hold seventy-two hours and then overwrite. Management reviews them only on formal request. A formal request would have to come from the unit's leaseholder."

Lena turned back.

"Mr. Cross," Teague added, examining his ledger.

"I see."

"I'm sure he'd never have reason to."

"No," Lena said. "I'm sure he wouldn't."

She rode the elevator up with her heart beating hard. It wasn't much. But it was the first time in weeks that anyone had told her anything that sounded like a door.

The second thing she tried was her own phone.

At night, on the sofa, she scrolled through the photographs she had taken of the guest room ceiling and cropped them, zoomed them, tried to make them say something they did not. A stain. A bed. A window open an inch. She enlarged the window until its edges pixelated. It looked like a window.

She wrote a list in her notes app, in small cramped sentences.

1. Window open. Ceiling dry above. Water poured from top. 2. Blank emergency contact line. No sister. 3. Overheard call. "Don't move until I tell you." 4. Vance folder. "Before he signs." 5. Retreat. Sunday, 2 p.m.

She read it back and her throat tightened. Each item, viewed alone, was nothing. Each could be explained in a sentence. Taken together, they made a shape, a clear, cold shape, like a silhouette through frosted glass, but a shape was not evidence. A shape was a feeling. She knew precisely how a man like Damian would describe it. You're assembling a story out of coincidences.

She locked the phone and pressed it against her sternum and stared at the ceiling.

The remark came on Thursday, in the break room, from a person she scarcely knew.

She had gone in to refill her water bottle. Two women from procurement stood by the window with their coffee, and when she walked in, their conversation faltered for half a beat and then resumed, louder, with that unmistakable air of performance.

"I just think it's so sweet," one of them said, "the way Celeste handles everything. She never complains."

"Never. And honestly, the way some people act around her, it's embarrassing."

"Oh, it's so obvious. It's the whole pick-me thing. Like she can't stand it if the CEO has a single other woman in his orbit."

"It's an insecurity thing."

"Sad, really."

Lena kept her back to them. The water bottle filled very slowly. Her hand on the dispenser was steady, which she found vaguely interesting, as though it belonged to someone else.

"Hi, Lena!" said the first woman, brightly, as she turned. Her smile was thin as wire. "Didn't see you there."

"Hello."

"Excited for the retreat?"

"Very."

"It's going to be so lovely," the other woman said. "Celeste put together the whole thing. She's amazing."

"She is," Lena said.

She screwed the cap onto the bottle and walked out. She made it all the way to the stairwell, where no one could see, before she sat down on the cold concrete step and put her forehead against her knees. She did not cry. She breathed. She counted to sixty. At sixty, she lifted her head, wiped her face with the heel of her hand, and went back to her desk.

Pick-me. She turned the words over. They had a kind of ugly brilliance, she thought. You could never defend yourself against them. Any protest only proved the charge.

The strangest thing happened that same night.

Lena came home to find Damian in the living room alone.

It was nearly eleven. The apartment was dark except for a single lamp. Celeste had gone to bed, or was in the master bedroom with the door shut. The dehumidifiers had finally been taken away that afternoon, and the silence they left behind was enormous and slightly shocking. Damian sat on the sofa, her sofa, with his jacket off and his tie loosened and a glass of amber liquid cradled in both hands. He looked up when she entered, and for a moment his face was open in a way she had not seen in months.

"Hello," he said.

"You're up late."

"I couldn't sleep." He gestured vaguely at the cushion beside him. "Sit."

She sat. They were a foot apart, and the foot felt like a mile. She could smell the whiskey on him and, beneath it, the faint cedar of his cologne, and her whole body ached with an appalled, helpless tenderness.

"I've been thinking about my mother," he said.

Her breath caught.

"It's strange. I hadn't, not for years. And then that stew." He turned the glass in his hands. "I could taste it, Lena. I could actually remember the kitchen. The yellow curtains. She used to hum when she stirred." His voice dropped. "I'd forgotten that."

"I'm glad you remembered."

"Are you?"

The question was so quiet that she almost missed it. She looked at him. He was staring into the glass, and his profile in the lamplight seemed younger than it had in years.

"Of course I am."

"You don't like Celeste."

"It isn't that I don't like her."

"Then what is it?"

Tell him. The thought burned through her, bright and urgent. Tell him everything. Now, while he's soft. Tell him about the folder and the lock and the voice in the mirror.

She drew a breath. She opened her mouth.

And she saw, in the dark of the hallway, the faintest sliver of light beneath the master bedroom door. Someone was awake. Someone, perhaps, was listening.

"I think," she said carefully, "that I'm tired. And I've been hard to be around. I'm sorry."

Something in his face closed. Not unkindly, just gently, like a book being shut.

"That's what I thought." He finished the whiskey and stood. "It's been a hard few weeks for everyone. Get some sleep."

"Damian—"

"Goodnight, Lena."

He walked down the hall. At the end of it he paused, and for a moment she thought he might turn around. Then the master bedroom door opened a few inches, and he stepped through, and it closed.

She sat on the sofa in the dark and heard the murmur of two voices behind the wall, low and intimate, the voices of two people settling into a long evening.

She had chosen not to speak. She told herself it had been wise. Wisdom, she was beginning to realize, felt exactly like cowardice from the inside.

On Friday morning, a week before the retreat, Damian knocked on the arm of the sofa.

She woke slowly, blinking, to find him standing over her, already dressed, holding a cup of coffee he did not offer. His expression was careful and composed.

"We need to talk about the weekend," he said.

"The retreat?"

"Yes." He cleared his throat. "I've been thinking. It might be best if you sat this one out."

She sat up. The blanket slid from her shoulders.

"What?"

"It's going to be an intense two days. A great deal rides on the signing. I'll be working. Celeste will be working. The staff will be, frankly, watching me at all times. I'd rather there be no..." He selected the word with care. "...friction."

"I'm your fiancée."

"I know what you are."

"It's the annual retreat. Every year, the board expects the family to attend. Mr. Halloran said so himself, he told me last spring—"

"This isn't about Halloran."

"Then what is it about?" Her voice had risen. She pushed it back down. "Is it that you don't want me there? Or that Celeste doesn't?"

"Don't."

"I'm only asking."

"You are doing exactly what I asked you not to do." His jaw hardened. "She hasn't said a word about it. She'd never. It was my decision. You've been under strain. You've been difficult. I thought you might appreciate a weekend off."

Under strain. Difficult. Appreciate a weekend off. Each phrase was a small, clean knife in a velvet sleeve.

"I want to go," Lena said.

"No."

"Please."

"Lena—"

"I've worked in this company for four years. I've never missed a retreat. I'm engaged to you. If I don't come, everyone will ask why." She heard her own voice shaking and made it stop. "What am I supposed to tell them? That you didn't want me?"

For a long moment, he said nothing. The coffee in his hand steamed gently. Outside, the city was beginning to turn from pewter to pale gold, and in the light his face seemed suddenly tired, and old, and unfamiliar.

"I'll think about it," he said at last.

He left. She sat on the sofa, hands in her lap, and realized she had said please to him three times in as many sentences, and that he had not noticed.

It was Mr. Halloran who settled it, in the end.

Lena would never know whether it was luck or something else. She came back from lunch that afternoon to find a handwritten note on her keyboard, on thick cream paper, in a shaky old man's hand.

My dear Miss Hartwell,

I trust you are looking forward to the lake. I am told I shall be sitting beside you at the Saturday dinner, which delights me. At my age, one must take care to sit near the people who talk sense.

With great regard, A. Halloran

She read it twice. She laughed, once, a short surprised breath, and found her eyes had filled.

By four o'clock, Damian had heard, because he heard everything. He summoned her to the thirty-first floor with a curt message. When she arrived, he stood at the window with his back to her, and Celeste was nowhere to be seen. His shoulders were rigid.

"Halloran requested you," he said, without turning.

"I didn't ask him to."

"I'm aware." A long, tight breath. "Fine. You'll come. You'll sit where you're placed, and you'll be pleasant, and you will not, under any circumstances, make a scene."

"I won't."

"Celeste is handling the arrangements. She'll send you the details."

"Thank you."

He turned. His gaze held hers, and there was nothing in it, no warmth, no relief, not even anger. It was the look of a man whose evening had been rearranged by an inconvenient piece of furniture.

"Don't thank me," he said. "Just behave."

The details arrived on Monday morning, in a soft ivory envelope left on her desk. Inside was a printed card, perfectly typeset:

Retreat Transport Assignments.

Below it, a list. Three coaches for the general staff, departing from the main entrance at seven. A separate black car for the executive party, to follow at nine. Lena's finger moved down the page, slowly.

Car One: Mr. Halloran, Ms. Voss, Mr. Brandt, Mr. Peele. Car Two: Directors and spouses. Car Three: Mr. D. Cross, Ms. C. Marlowe, Ms. L. Hartwell. Driver: T. Reyes.

Her own name stared up at her, small and neat.

She read it a third time. The seating had been decided, she thought, by someone who understood both how to look generous and how to keep a rival where she could be seen. Beside Damian's name, a gold paperclip held a smaller printed slip. It was a map.

Lena frowned.

She knew the route to Alder Lake. Everyone did. It was a gentle highway drive, two hours through rolling farmland, with a well-lit lodge at the end. But the line traced on this map was different. It left the highway at the forty-mile mark and turned north, onto a thin, twisting gray ribbon labeled Ridge Road.

She had driven it once, years ago, with her father. It was a narrow, unlit mountain pass, hardly wide enough for two cars, hugging the cliff face over a long fall to the river below. It was beautiful. It was also, her father had said that day, with a laugh she remembered, the road they close first when it rains.

A small handwritten note had been added at the margin, in the same neat script she had seen on a folder, on a thank-you card, and on a retreat itinerary.

Scenic route for the executive party! Short-cut saves 40 minutes. — C.

Lena set the card down very gently on her desk.

Outside the window, the sky was beginning to cloud. The forecast, she remembered, had said rain for Saturday.

End of Chapter Eight