All Chapters of The Woman He Forgot to Cherish : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Chapter Twenty-One: Two O'ClockThe morning of the signing was the clearest Lena had seen in weeks.She stood at the window of the guest room at six, with a cup of tea going cool in her hands, and watched the sun come up behind the towers. The rain had stopped sometime after midnight. The sky was a pale, washed, brilliant blue, and every pane of glass in the financial district caught the light and threw it back in long gold bars. A flock of starlings turned over the river. Somewhere below, a delivery truck backed up with a cheerful, repetitive beep.A good day, she thought. A day for the truth.She had not slept. She had lain on the narrow bed with her eyes open, running through the afternoon in her mind, once, twice, a dozen times, the way she used to run through a presentation. Not in fear. Fear had gone, with everything else, on a mountain road in the rain. It was only that she liked to know where each piece would fall.Behind her door, on the other side of the wall, a floorboard c

Chapter Twenty-Three: The Least Interesting ThingFor a long moment, nobody spoke.It was strange, Lena thought, how quiet a room could become when a mask came off. She had expected shouting. She had expected tears, or denial, or some last, wild, theatrical struggle. Instead there was only a vast, held stillness, as of a congregation waiting for a priest to continue, and in the midst of it a slim, pale woman in a cream suit sat with her hands folded on the table and looked, for the first time since Lena had known her, perfectly at ease."Well," said Celeste. "I suppose that is that."Her voice had changed. It was no longer soft or breathless or faintly apologetic. It was low and clear and even, with a faint, dry edge, the voice Lena had heard on a recorder in the rain. It carried down the length of the table without effort."I would like to stand," she said. "If the board has no objection.""Miss Marlowe," began Ingrid Voss."Aldine.""Miss Aldine. I must advise you that anything you

Chapter Twenty-Five: The Rooftop GardenThey 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 co

Chapter Twenty-Seven: What Damian LearnedHe had been standing in the car park for forty minutes.Damian did not know this precisely. He had stopped looking at his watch at about the twenty-minute mark, when he realized that he had checked it eleven times and absorbed none of the information. He knew only that the snow had been falling when he arrived and was falling still, that his shoes had long since soaked through, and that somewhere in the long gray building on the hill, a woman he had wronged was sitting at a table, speaking to the one person in the world he most wanted to see.Four Saturdays, he thought. This is the fourth.He had come the first time in December, in a rented car, with a speech prepared. He had parked at the far end of the lot, rehearsed it twice in the mirror, and sat for an hour and ten minutes with his hands on the wheel. Then he had driven home. The second Saturday he had gotten as far as the visitors' center door. The third, he had spoken to the guard at th

Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Glasshouse in JuneIt did not rain on the day of the wedding.Ruth said afterward that it was the only miracle she had ever witnessed in her life, and that she had been prepared to complain to somebody if it had gone the other way. The morning dawned clear and gold and warm, the first perfect morning of June, with a sky the color of a robin's egg and a breeze that carried the scent of cut grass across the whole length of Hollis Park. The roses along the garden wall had come out overnight. The lawns steamed gently in the sun. And the great Victorian glasshouse, with its hundred thousand panes of glass, stood at the end of the long white path like a ship made of light.Inside it, in a small potting room behind the orchid hall, a woman in a deep blue dress was being fussed over by three people at once."Hold still," said Ruth."I am holding still.""You're fidgeting.""I'm breathing. It's a necessary function.""Breathe more quietly." Ruth tweaked a pin out of Le