Chapter Five
Townes
The text from Winona came while he was in a meeting.
We need to talk tonight. Please be home by seven.
He stared at it for a moment, read it twice.
Please be home by seven was not a sentence Winona had ever sent him.
It had the specific gravity of something decided.
He typed back I'll be there and spent the rest of the meeting at approximately forty percent capacity, the other sixty running probability assessments on what that sentence meant.
He was home at six-fifty.
She was in the kitchen when he came in—standing, not sitting, which he noted—and her expression was the one he called the closed door.
She had this face she deployed when she had decided to control the conversation, to hold her own emotion precisely while conducting an inquiry.
He had seen it when she dealt with contractors who tried to overcharge her. He had never had it directed at him.
"Close the door."
He closed the back door behind him. He set his bag down. He looked at her and said, "Tell me."
She put the photographs on the kitchen island between them.
He looked at them. His face went very still.
"Those are—" he started.
"I know what they are." Her voice was quiet. The quiet was worse than volume would have been. "I found them in your office. Someone sent them to you. Or gave them to you. And you didn't tell me."
He picked up the top photograph. His jaw was tight. He set it down. "I've never seen these before."
"They were in your office, Townes. In your file cabinet."
"Someone put them there." He looked at her directly. "I am telling you that I have never seen these photographs before, and I don't know how they got into my cabinet."
She looked at him for a long moment. "That's what you're leading with."
"Because it's true."
"Then tell me about Madrigal Merrill." Her voice didn't change register but something in it sharpened. "Tell me who she is and how much time you've spent with her and why I don't know any of it."
He should have told her three weeks ago.
He knew it as clearly as he had ever known anything—he should have told her the minute Madrigal began signaling in ways that were not professional.
He had not, and the reasons he had not—conflict avoidance, the cold paralysis of their distance, his own private management habit—were real and were not sufficient and he was not going to offer them as a defense.
"She's a client," he offered. "A new one, through Brycen. She has been—" He chose the word carefully. "—inappropriate. I've been managing it. I didn't tell you because I didn't want to cause alarm over something I thought I had under control."
Winona's expression did something complicated. "Under control."
"I know how that sounds."
"Do you?" She stepped back from the island. "Townes, I found photographs of you with a woman I've never heard you mention. Someone put them in your file cabinet with a note saying I deserve to know what's happening. And the explanation you're giving me is that you had it under control."
"I was wrong not to tell you." The words came without the usual friction because they were simply true. "I was wrong. That is not a defense of what I did, it's an acknowledgment that I—"
"Don't do the thing where you itemize the apology into pieces," she retorted. Her voice cracked, just slightly, and then she put it back together. "Just—answer me. Are you involved with her?"
"No." No hesitation. No equivocation. Just the word, dropped like something solid.
"No. I am not. I have not touched her, I have not wanted to touch her, and every time she has pushed the boundary I have ended the meeting or redirected to colleagues.
I can prove all of that. I will prove all of it to you if you let me. "
She looked at him. He held the look, did not break it, because the one thing he had always been able to give her was his eyes—that was where she read him and where she had always found him true.
"Who put those photographs there?" she asked.
"I don't know. But I intend to find out."