8. Lucy #2
"I was already going to intimidate them." Carrington's voice had gone lower than the sentence required. "You've simply ensured I do it correctly aligned."
"Someone has to maintain standards around here."
Carrington held her gaze a beat past what the joke needed, something unguarded moving behind her eyes before she visibly filed it away, the way she filed away everything that threatened to cost her composure in a hallway with Anjalinka approaching from the far end with a stack of contracts.
"Wish me luck, Ms. Harper."
"You don't need it. You need the fault-line report and a chair that doesn't creak. Luck's for people who haven't already done the reading."
Something that was almost a laugh moved through Carrington's face, rare enough that Lucy would have remembered it even without what had just happened to her hand, and then she was gone, into the meeting room, the door closing behind her with a soft, final click that left Lucy standing alone in the hallway with her fingers still faintly warm.
She stood there a moment longer than the task required, and made herself a promise she'd made once before, in a different house, with a different woman, and had broken so thoroughly it had cost her four years and a mixing bowl she still missed.
Not again. Not this. I will be useful here. I will not be anything else.
She almost believed herself.
She called Mira from the lodge's back porch that evening, phone pressed to her ear, watching Grace two hundred feet down the slope collecting shells with the flashlight app on Nadia's old phone, because full dark had come on fast out here, faster than in the city, and because some habits—checking in, being findable—she'd kept even eleven months unemployed and four years heartbroken.
"So, you're on a private jet now," Mira said, without preamble. "Living your best life while the rest of us take the bus."
"It was one jet. I've flown coach my whole life. I'm allowed one jet."
"How's the Ice Queen? Anjali wants to know if she's actually terrifying in person or if that's a media thing."
"She's—" Lucy watched Grace crouch over something in the sand, gray rabbit tucked under one arm even out here, and chose her next word with more care than the question probably deserved. "She's trying. It's not nothing."
"That's not an answer, Lucy, that's a deflection wearing a very nice coat." A pause, the particular pause Mira used right before she asked the real question underneath the small one. "You sound different. Since the job started. Good different, I think, but different."
"I'm sleeping better. The cottage has a real bed."
"That's not it either." Mira let it sit a second, and Lucy could picture her exactly, wine in one hand, phone in the other, deciding how hard to push.
"You know you can tell us things, right?
Whatever this is. We didn't get the whole story with Elena either, and I've never once made you give it to us.
I'm not starting now. I'm just saying the door's open, if there's ever a version of this you want to say out loud. "
Lucy's throat did something complicated, fast, before she got it back under control.
She doesn't know, she thought, watching Grace hold a shell up to the flashlight, turning it over.
None of them know it was Elena I loved, not just Elena's house.
None of them know what I actually lost when that check landed on the counter.
She had built four years of friendship on the version of the story that made her sound unlucky rather than reckless, careful rather than the woman who'd let herself be loved by someone else's wife and then acted surprised when the wife chose her marriage.
She wasn't going to hand that over now, over a phone, on a stranger's porch, with the woman she was currently failing not to fall for close enough that Lucy could still feel where her fingers had been that morning.
"There's no version," Lucy said. "I promise. I'm fine. I just like the ocean."
"Uh-huh." Mira didn't believe her. Mira rarely did—and rarely pushed past the point of making that clear. "Text us when you're back. And Lucy… be careful with rich women and their nice coats. That's all I'm saying."
"Noted," Lucy said, and hung up before the woman could ask her anything further.
She found Carrington on the deck past ten, after Grace had finally gone down, a bottle of wine open between two glasses that Carrington had clearly poured in anticipation of company she hadn't been certain would arrive.
"The Ashgroves signed," Carrington said, without turning. "Eleven million in remediation, structured over three years, exactly where Anjalinka predicted they'd land. It should have felt like a victory."
"Doesn't it?"
"It feels like a Tuesday." Carrington handed her a glass without being asked, their fingers overlapping around the stem for a half-second longer than the transfer required, and neither of them moved to correct that either.
"I used to live for the feeling of a deal closing.
Now I find I'm mostly relieved I can go check on a seven-year-old instead of celebrating with people I don't particularly like. "
"That's not nothing, Ms. Cole."
"Carrington." The word came out low, deliberate, offered rather than corrected. "You've fixed my collar and poured my coffee and told my niece I'm trying, all in the same twenty-four hours. I think we're past Ms. Cole."
The cove had gone fully dark below them, the tide somewhere out past hearing, and the only light came from a single lamp inside and the moon doing something unhelpful to the line of Carrington's jaw.
Lucy set her glass down on the rail because her hands had started doing something she didn't trust around stemware, and Carrington's eyes tracked the movement, and then came back up to Lucy's face and stayed there.
"We shouldn’t be doing this," Lucy whispered, more to herself than to the woman standing eighteen inches away. "Whatever this is."
"What's it called, when you already know and you're doing it anyway?"
"A mistake, usually."
"Usually," Carrington repeated, and lifted one hand, slow enough that Lucy could have stepped back a dozen times before it arrived, and didn't, and felt the backs of Carrington's fingers come to rest against her cheek, warm despite the cold coming off the water, patient in a way nothing about this woman had ever been patient before.
Lucy's breath went somewhere it didn't usually go. Carrington leaned in, unhurried, deliberate, the way she did everything that mattered—
And from inside the lodge, thin and rising fast, Grace began to scream.