27. Arielle
ARIELLE
The south parcel meeting on Tuesday morning is the first one I walk into since the benefit, and I don’t know which version of Nolan Ashford I’m walking toward until I’m in my own chair at the conference table and his is, by Carla’s design, two seats to my left instead of directly across from me.
Two seats to my left is the seat of a man who is in the room as a courtesy. Directly across is the seat of a principal. Carla has, very quietly, moved him.
He does not protest. He sets his binder down on the table, and he nods at Vega's deputy, who is sitting in for her on the city's behalf today, and he opens to the procurement page and waits.
The meeting is mine. I run it. I run it the way I ran the press conference with no theatrics and no apologies and no attempt to make the men in the room feel comfortable about my voice.
Terry is on my right. Patel is on my left.
The deputy chief of staff asks the same question about the seventeen-foot setback he asked at the city presentation, and I answer it the same way, and Nolan does not lean forward and he does not interject and he does not, when one of his own coordinators tries to press a point about the cantilever procurement schedule, take the man's side.
He looks at his coordinator. He says, mildly, "That's Halloran-Reyes' call.
We'll defer." The coordinator stops talking inside the sentence.
I don’t look at Nolan when he does it. I write a note in the margin of my deck instead, because I’m not giving him the dignity of an expression, and the note I write is the date and the word deferred, because some part of me wants the moment recorded in handwriting that will never sit on his desk.
By the time the meeting ends at eleven-forty he has spoken three times in ninety minutes, each time in a sentence under fifteen words.
He shakes Carla's hand on the way out. He does not shake mine.
He nods at me from the doorway and turns left toward the elevators and goes, and Terry, who has been sitting beside me for the last six months and has learned my face, leans toward me with his pen still in his hand.
"That was weird, Ari."
"It was not weird, Terry. It was a man behaving."
"It was a man behaving like a man I have never seen in this room."
"That is what behaving looks like, Terry. Go write up the procurement memo."
Bianca is on my couch by seven-thirty with the same bowl of popcorn she has been carrying around since the first week of March, and her boots are off, and she has her phone in her lap, and she is doing the thing she does when she has prepared a sentence on a cab ride and is going to deliver it whether I like it or not.
"He's changed, Ari."
"He's behaving."
"That is what changing looks like. Don't do the cousin thing where you redefine the word to keep yourself safe.
He sat two seats off your shoulder this morning and did not open his mouth except to defer a procurement call to your firm in front of his own coordinator.
He has not called you in eighteen days. He has not driven past your apartment in fifteen, which I know because Malcolm tells me, which Malcolm only does because Claire told him to.
He has been in therapy on Wednesdays since the day after he walked out of your kitchen.
He has not bought a single building, Ari.
I have been watching the Tribune real estate page for two weeks. The man has not bought a broom."
"That is not a personality, Bee. That is a calendar."
"It is a calendar he is keeping. Which is more of a personality than most men have."
"He could be doing all of this on purpose."
“He’s doing it on purpose, Ari — all of it.
He couldn’t operate any other way if you paid him.
The real question isn’t intent; it’s direction.
And from what I’ve seen — six months of watching him reorganize his entire life around the weather patterns of your moods, with a Google alert on your name pinging me since 2017 — the direction has shifted.
He’s not angling for a reunion. He’s trying to become the version of himself you wouldn’t have had to leave.
That distinction is real. And it matters. Eat the popcorn.”
I eat the popcorn.
Claire calls at nine the next morning, which is a Wednesday, and asks me to lunch again, and I tell her I cannot, I have a Patel review at one.
She does not push. She tells me she has something to drop off and that she will leave it with the front desk at Halloran-Reyes with my name on it, and she would prefer that I open it at home and not at the office.
The envelope is at the front desk when I come back from Patel.
It is thick. It is unmarked except for my first name in Claire's small straight handwriting.
I take it home. I do not open it until I am in bed at nine-fifteen with a glass of water on the nightstand and my hand on the curve of my stomach where she has been doing the small, urgent turning thing she has started doing in the last week.
Inside the envelope are six letters. They’re written on cream stationery with the Ashford Foundation watermark at the top.
The handwriting is small, slanted, unmistakably the kind taught in boarding schools.
They’re dated between 1996 and 1998, all addressed to Nolan.
None of them were mailed. The envelopes inside are stamped but not postmarked, and on each one his mother has written his name in that same careful slant and then drawn a neat horizontal line through it, as if crossing out an entry in a ledger.
The shortest one is four lines. Nolan. You were nine and you came into the kitchen on a Saturday morning and you asked me whether I was sad and I told you I was not, and that was the first time I ever lied to you. I am writing this down so that one of us remembers. — M.
The longest one is three pages. I don’t make it to the third on the first try.
I reach the second, where she writes about the swim meets, about standing in the back in a navy coat so his father wouldn’t see her, about walking past him in the hallway and feeling, every time, that small private collapse that comes when your own husband has called your son contaminated.
I set the letter down on the duvet, close my eyes, keep my hand on my stomach, and do the breathing Dr. Ellis taught me in October.
There is a sticky note from Claire on the inside flap of the envelope.
I am not asking you to forgive him. I am asking you to know what he was given.
She wrote these in the last two years of her life.
She never sent them. My father found them in her writing desk after the funeral and gave them to me because she had crossed Nolan's name out and he assumed they were unfinished and worthless.
I have kept them in a drawer for eleven years.
I am giving them to you because I would rather you read them than him, because if he reads them now he will use them as a deed and you will use them as a window. — C.
I read them all. I read them twice. I sit in bed at one in the morning with the lamp on and a hand on my stomach and the six letters in two piles on the duvet beside me, and I think about a nine-year-old boy in a kitchen on a Saturday asking his mother whether she was sad, and I think about a thirty-seven-year-old man standing at my doorframe in February telling me he was trying not to be left in a hallway, and the two of them line up inside my chest in a way I have been refusing to let them line up for two weeks.
I pick up my phone. I open his contact. I type three words and look at them for a count of thirty.
I do not send them.
The notification that comes in at one-eleven a.m. is from a Google alert Bianca apparently set on my name that I never asked her to set, and the headline is PREGNANT OVERTOWN ARCHITECT'S MIDNIGHT TEXT HABITS RAISE QUESTIONS ABOUT ASHFORD HEIR PATERNITY.
The byline is the Sun-Times gossip page.
There is a photograph of the front of my building taken from the deli across the street, and somebody who is not Malcolm is in the frame.
I delete the three words from the text box. I lock the phone. I put the letters back in Claire's envelope, and I slide the envelope into the drawer of my nightstand where I keep the ultrasound printouts, and I do not turn off the lamp until almost three.