Chapter 8
Patrick
I’m twelve minutes late to lunch, and Alister is already on his second drink.
He looks up when I walk in, checks his watch, and says nothing. This is how we’ve been friends for fifteen years: he observes everything and selectively weaponizes it.
“Traffic,” I say.
“Of course.”
I sit, take the menu, and put it down. I know what I’m ordering. The restaurant is quiet enough, the tables spaced well, the kind of place where conversations stay at the table. I come here when I need to actually talk.
“You’re not late because of traffic,” Alister says.
“My assistant moved a meeting to the wrong date. I found out this morning when the client called to reschedule a reschedule.”
He picks up his glass. “The new one.”
“The only one.”
“And?”
I order water and the salmon, and give Alister the look that is meant to communicate I’m not going to spend a lunch discussing my assistant. The look has not worked once in fifteen years of friendship. I keep using it anyway.
“She’s incompetent,” I say. “Precisely, not generally. She is specifically, technically incompetent at the actual job. She books the wrong conference rooms. She sends calendar invites with the wrong times attached. Two weeks ago, she transferred a call to my line in the middle of a board presentation because she decided I needed to know immediately that a vendor had confirmed a shipment.” I pause.
“Chairs. Twelve units. She interrupted a board presentation for twelve chairs.”
Alister is smiling. Not the response I came here for.
“Fire her.”
“I can’t. She scored the highest numbers HR has recorded in four years. Every single section. Standard battery, logic, situational judgment, the full competency profile. I was expecting the results to give me something to work with. A documented basis.”
“To fire her.”
“To make an informed decision.”
He sets his glass down and looks at me with the expression he’s been using since we were twenty-two, equal parts impressed and exhausted. “So, she’s brilliant.”
“On paper.”
“But a disaster at the job.”
“Catastrophically.” I drink my water. “She is also always there. First in, stays late without being asked. She found a dying plant in one of the conference rooms and moved it to her desk and is now personally invested in its survival. She asks if I’ve eaten. She brings me a cookie every Tuesday.”
“A cookie.”
“Chocolate chip. From the place on Fifty-third.”
Alister leans back. He goes quiet, which is worse than when he talks.
“I don’t eat them,” I add.
“Tell her you don’t want them.”
“I take them.” The words are out before I can arrange them differently. “She goes out of her way. I’m not going to make her feel—” I stop.
Alister smiles. The slow kind, specifically designed to make me aware of exactly what I’ve just said.
“You like her,” he says.
“She’s an employee who’s difficult to manage.”
“You said she’s always there. Stays late. Asks how you are. You take cookies you don’t like so you don’t hurt her feelings.” He tilts his head. “That’s not how you talk about someone you want to fire.”
“I need an assistant. They all go through a learning curve.”
“Right.”
“That’s the whole thing.”
“Right,” he says, same tone, same cadence, which means he doesn’t believe a word of it.
The food arrives. I give it my full attention. Alister cuts his steak with the patience of someone who’s made his point and is comfortable letting it sit.
The problem is he’s not wrong. And I know he’s not wrong, which is precisely why the distance is necessary.
The distance is load-bearing. Every morning I come in, go directly to my office, close my door, and keep the perimeter intact, because without the perimeter I become someone who tracks exactly where she is in the room at all times.
Someone who can hear her voice from behind a closed door and read the mood in it without trying.
Someone who noticed three days ago that she’d worn her hair down and spent a portion of an otherwise productive afternoon not thinking about that.
She has the kind of face that registers in the part of the brain that doesn’t ask permission.
Black hair against her skin, blue eyes that carry an expression I don’t have a word for, some specific quality of openness that doesn’t read as naive on her, it just reads as her.
And her mouth. Full, and red even without lipstick, and when she’s concentrating on something she thinks no one is watching she does this particular thing where the corner of it—
“What does she look like?”
I surface. Alister is watching me with the focused attention of a man who already suspects the answer.
“Why.”
“Because you’ve been staring at your salmon for ninety seconds and you were clearly not here.” He cuts another piece of steak. “So. What does she look like?”
“Dark hair. Blue eyes.”
He nods. Waiting.
“She’s—” I look at him. He’s leaning forward very slightly, the exact angle he uses when he’s about to ask for a phone number. Something tightens in my chest, immediate and completely unreasonable. “She’s not your type.”
“You don’t know my type.”
“I’ve watched you date for fifteen years. I know your type.”
“Enlighten me.”
“Not her.” I hold his gaze. “Leave it.”
He raises both hands. The picture of innocence. He has the decency not to push it, which is the main reason we’re still having lunch fifteen years later.
I go back to my food. The interior argument I’ve been losing for two weeks picks up exactly where it left off.
The truth is this: I can feel her through walls.
I don’t know what to do with that information, so I’ve been filing it under things I don’t examine, along with the dreams of her I started having since week one, along with the fact that I held her on that couch while she was falling apart, and some part of me didn’t want to let go.
Along with the fact that every morning, when she asks if I slept well, the answer is no, and I would not have told her that, even before the answer became about her.
Sarah has been gone three years. Three years and I still wake up some mornings and the first thing I do is reach for the empty side of the bed, muscle memory that no amount of time has fully corrected.
I have no right. And I meant it. I still mean it.
My phone goes off on the table. My mother.
I answer before the second ring because not answering means a second call, then a third, then a voicemail in the register that means she’ll bring it up at the first opportunity.
“Maman.”
“Patrick.” Bright, which means she has information to deliver. “I’m calling because I’m going away with Francesca and Louise for a few days. I wanted you to know.”
“Okay.”
“I’ve already spoken with Maria. She has everything.” A pause. “I just want you to try to be home earlier this week. Erick asks about you.”
The salmon tastes like nothing.
“I know.”
“He’s four, Patrick. He doesn’t understand why Daddy is always at the office.”
“I’ll be home by seven.”
“Good.” She softens. “I’ll be back Monday. Kiss him for me.”
She hangs up. I put the phone down.
Alister eats quietly for a moment. The grace of a man who knows when not to speak.
“Your mother,” he says finally.
“She’s going away for the week.”
“How is she?”
I consider the question. My mother arrived at my apartment four days after the funeral with a schedule, with pediatrician recommendations, with opinions about nursery schools, and she has been coming back ever since.
Not living there. She has her own apartment, her own life, her own friends clearly, given that she’s going away with two of them this week.
But she shows up. Several times a week. She lets herself in with the key I gave her when Erick was born and she stays for dinner and she plays with him on the floor and she watches me across the table with the expression of a woman who is deciding how much to say.
I know what she did in those first months.
I know what it cost her. I know the love inside it.
“Involved,” I say.
Alister nods. He knows the whole history.
He was at the wedding. He was at the funeral.
He was in my kitchen three months after, at midnight, when I called him because Erick had been crying for an hour and I couldn’t make it stop and I couldn’t locate a single thing inside myself that felt like a parent.
He sets his fork down. The social version of him goes somewhere.
“Can I say something.”
“You’re going to anyway.”
“Stop punishing yourself.”
I don’t respond.
“Three years,” he says. “Erick is doing well. The company is doing well. You wake up, you run six miles, you go to the office, you come home, you put him to bed, you lie there in the dark, and you do it all again. It runs. Everything runs perfectly. But that’s not the same thing as being alive, Patrick, and you know it. ”
“I’m fine.”
“You function.” No cruelty in it. Just fact.
“I was at your wedding. I knew you before all of this. The man sitting across from me right now is not the same person, and I’m not saying that like grief is something you get over and you’re behind schedule.
I’m saying you’ve turned it into a way of life. You’re using it.”
My jaw tightens. I look at the table.
“You’re allowed to want something for yourself. I’m not talking about forgetting Sarah. I’m not talking about Erick. I mean something that is just yours. Something that makes you…” He gestures. “Present. In your own life.”
“I have what I need.”
“Sure.” He picks up his drink. “Come out Friday. Just drinks. I’ll introduce you to someone, no pressure, just a person in a room.”
“I need to be with Erick.”
“Maria exists for exactly this reason.”
“Another time.”
He looks at me for a long moment. Something passes through his face, the expression of a man who has been saying the same thing in different configurations for three years and has made the decision to keep saying it regardless. He picks up his fork.
“She sounds like she might be good for you,” he says. Not looking at me. Cutting his steak. “The assistant. Whatever’s got you so carefully not talking about her.”
I don’t answer.
My phone rings.
The office line. Elena’s extension.
I answer. “Yes.”
“Hi. It’s Elena.” She says it like I might not know, and I do know, because I know the exact lift in her voice when she’s about to deliver something she’s already braced for. “I need to tell you something and I need you to let me finish before you say anything.”
The salmon is fully cold now.
“Louis Ferrante is coming to the office this afternoon.” Fast, clean.
“He called this morning while you were in the briefing and I wrote it down and I was going to tell you right when you got out and then Margaret called about the Thursday situation and it just—” A breath.
One second of silence. “I forgot. I’m sorry. He gets here at three.”
Louis Ferrante. Twelve years of business. The man who gave Aldera its first major contract when we were still a name nobody recognized.
“It’s two-thirty,” I say.
“I know.”
I’m quiet long enough to decide that losing my composure on the phone while Alister watches will accomplish nothing.
“I’m on my way,” I say, and hang up.
I signal for the check. Alister watches me stand.
“Emergency?”
“My assistant forgot to tell me about a client meeting.”
“The one you won’t fire.”
I leave enough on the table to cover both of us and button my jacket.
“Patrick.” He says it to my back. “I’m just saying.”
I walk out.
The air outside is cold, the midday city loud and indifferent. David is at the curb with the car running. I get in and we pull out into traffic while I run through what I need: the Ferrante file, the last three orders, the conference room prepared. Thirty minutes. It’s enough time if I move now.
I take the elevator up in silence and step out into the reception area ready to deal with whatever I find.
And then I stop.
Elena is standing beside her desk. Not behind it, not hunched over the computer looking panicked.
Standing, easy, one hand resting on the edge of the wood.
And sitting on the cream couch with a coffee cup balanced on his knee and his jacket folded beside him is Louis Ferrante, eighty-one years old, a man I have seen unmoved through a hundred negotiations and two economic downturns.
He is laughing.
Full, open, genuine. The way he almost never laughs in a room with business attached to it.
Elena says something. I’m too far to catch it.
He laughs again, and lifts a hand in the gesture of someone who is thoroughly, helplessly entertained.
I stand in the doorway and I don’t move.
She’s leaning slightly forward, her dark hair falling over one shoulder, her full attention on him, and whatever she’s doing, however she’s doing it, it is working, and the file in my hand, the hours I spent planning this feel suddenly beside the point.
I don’t know what to do with what I’m looking at.
I’m not sure I’ve known for weeks.