7. Chapter 7
Sawyer
***
I am back at my desk by eleven.
This is, by any objective measure, an efficient use of a Friday morning.
I drove to Finch and Fern, I addressed the committee timeline, and I returned to the estate with the remainder of the day intact.
There is nothing inefficient about any of this.
I sit down in my chair and open my laptop and pull up the Harrington portfolio and read the first line of the executive summary and then read it again and then close the laptop.
I sit for a moment in the quiet of my study.
The quiet is the same as it always is. The room is the same. The view from the east window is the same stretch of lawn and old oak and morning sky that it has been every day since I arrived in Willow Creek, and none of it has changed in any measurable way in the last three hours.
I am aware, nonetheless, that something has.
Grace appears at the study door at half past eleven with a fresh coffee and my afternoon schedule printed on the single sheet of paper she uses when she wants me to be able to hold the whole day in one hand.
She sets the coffee beside my closed laptop without comment.
She looks at the closed laptop. She looks at me.
"Singapore confirmed for two," she says.
"Good," I say.
She doesn't leave.
Grace has worked for me for four years and in that time she has learned, among other things, that I do not make small talk, that I take my coffee black without sugar, that I will not reschedule a call for anything short of an actual emergency, and that when I close my laptop before noon something has happened that is outside the ordinary run of things.
She is standing in my study doorway at eleven-thirty on a Friday morning with the expression of a woman who has filed this information carefully and is waiting to see if I volunteer anything.
I do not volunteer anything.
"The Tuesday recap," she says. "Three items still outstanding from last week."
"I'll action them this afternoon."
"You said that yesterday."
"Then I'll action them today."
She nods, in the way she nods when she is agreeing to something she doesn't entirely believe, and she leaves, and I sit alone in my study with my coffee and my closed laptop and the silence of a room that is waiting for me to be honest with myself.
I pick up my coffee. I set it down.
The truth, which I am capable of facing when I decide to, is this: I kissed her.
I crossed the counter in her shop without being invited, which she noted, and then I kissed her, which I had not planned and had not calculated and had not, if I am being precise about it, done anything to prevent once I understood it was going to happen.
She held the lapel of my jacket in her fingers and did not step back.
I was the one who stepped back. I was also the one who apologized, which in retrospect was either the right thing to do or a spectacular miscalculation, and she looked at me with the direct, unguarded honesty that I am beginning to understand is simply how she operates and said:
I could have stopped you. I didn't.
I have been in boardrooms with people who have spent decades learning to say things that precise and most of them never quite manage it.
I open my laptop.
Not the Harrington portfolio. The Linden Rise acquisition file, which Grace has organized into three sub-folders: title deed, survey reports, and pending actions.
I open the pending actions folder and look at the transfer document that has been sitting there since Wednesday, drafted and complete and requiring nothing further from me except the instruction to send it.
I look at it for a long time.
The Linden Rise building is a clean acquisition.
The numbers are straightforward, the title is clear, and the original reasoning was sound enough the building was going to auction, someone was going to buy it, and I preferred to be the someone in a position to determine what happened to it next.
This is how I have operated for fifteen years.
You see a variable. You control it. You move on.
The variable, in this case, has dark hair and a zinc worktable and eleven years of experience conditioning ranunculus and a way of looking at you across a counter that makes controlling anything feel like a very small ambition.
I sit with the pending actions folder open on my screen and think about a woman who has opened that shop before sunrise more mornings than she can count.
A woman who built something on Main Street with her own hands and would rather lose it than let someone else decide what it's worth.
Who looked at me afterward with the steady honesty of someone who learned long ago that pretending costs more than it's worth.
The cursor hovers over the send button.
I don't send it.
I close the folder and open the Harrington portfolio instead and read the executive summary from the beginning, slowly and with the focused attention of a man who is choosing, deliberately, to put one thing down before he picks up another.
I get through four pages before Grace appears again at the door.
"Carl Calloway called," she says, with the careful neutrality she uses when delivering information she suspects I will find interesting.
"He says Bette wanted to remind you that the next committee meeting is Thursday evening, and that the decorating sub-committee is expected to present preliminary garland designs. "
I look at her.
"He also said," Grace continues, with the same careful neutrality, "that Bette has reserved the two seats nearest the window for sub-committee members. Specifically." She pauses. "She was apparently very specific about the specifically."
I look back at the Harrington portfolio.
"Tell Carl thank you," I say.
Grace's expression does not change. It doesn't need to.
She has a full vocabulary of unchanged expressions, each one conveying a different thing, and the one she is wearing now conveys, without a single word, that she finds Willow Creek considerably more eventful than she expected when she agreed to relocate here temporarily.
She leaves.
I look at the Harrington portfolio for another moment.
Then I look at the closed Linden Rise folder.
Then I look at the east window and the lawn and the old oak that has been standing at the edge of the property for longer than anyone in Willow Creek can remember, long enough to have stopped caring about the weather.
I think about a single white ranunculus stem on a zinc counter.
I think about the lapel of my jacket.
I think about I could have stopped you.
I have built a great deal in my life on the principle that every problem has a solution and every solution has a cost and the only question worth asking is whether you can afford to pay it.
It is a principle that has served me reliably for twenty years and I have never had serious cause to revise it.
I am beginning to suspect, sitting at my desk on a Friday afternoon in Willow Creek with the Linden Rise folder closed on my screen, that Maya Finch is not a problem.
And that is a much more complicated thing to know what to do with.
***
I action the three outstanding Tuesday items before the Singapore call.
I do not reopen the Linden Rise folder.
I think about Thursday evening with the careful attention of a man who is not planning ahead, and who is therefore planning ahead, and who knows it, and who has decided, for reasons he is not yet prepared to examine in full, that this is acceptable.