Chapter Three
Rhys
At a quarter to one in the morning I was still selling, and I was good at it.
The last two partners from Summit Ridge were standing by the valet stand with their jackets over their arms, and neither of them wanted to leave. That’s how you know. When the money doesn’t want to get in the car.
“Hell of a night, Rhys.” The older one shook my hand for the third time. “Hell of a toast.”
“Ah, I just talked.”
“That’s what I mean. No notes. You stood up there and gave the credit away.” He pointed at me with his car keys. “Our committee likes that. Founders who know who built the thing. You’d be amazed how many guys stand up at their own parties and thank themselves.”
“I’d never.”
“Your COO’s going to be hard to keep, after that. You know that, right? You just told three hundred people she’s irreplaceable.”
“She is.”
“That’s why we’re here.” He tapped my chest with the keys, twice, like he was knocking on a door he’d already decided to walk through. “Sterling House. Let’s go make some money.”
I stood in the drive and watched their taillights go down through the pines, and I felt about nine feet tall.
Here’s the thing. I hadn’t planned it.
At 7:35, walking down the lawn to the dock, I had nothing. Lucy had asked if I had a speech, and I’d told her I had a vibe, and she’d rolled her eyes the way she does, which I love, which I’ve always loved. Then Margot fell into step beside me halfway down the grass.
“Don’t forget to thank the team,” she’d said, low, not looking at me, smiling at somebody over my shoulder. “Summit’s watching. They want to see a CEO who knows who built it.”
“I know who built it.”
“Then say so. Short. Warm. Name names.”
“Whose names?”
“You’ll know.” She peeled off toward the bar. “You always do.”
So I got up on the dock and looked out at three hundred people, and I thought about the team.
And the team, the part I could see from my desk, the spreadsheets and the midnight calls and the lender meetings where I did the smiling and somebody else did the math, was Margot.
Margot hasn’t taken a real vacation since Obama.
The words just came. “None of this exists without you.” I heard it come out of my mouth, and it was good, and the lawn went up like a stadium.
Then I remembered, standing there with my glass in the air, that it was my anniversary, and I did the thing I do when I’ve almost missed a beat. I made it a bit.
“Oh—and to my beautiful wife, who throws a hell of a party.”
Big laugh. Warm laugh. The best kind. I looked up the lawn for her, and she lifted her glass, and I thought, She knows. She knows it’s a joke. She knows I’d be dead in a ditch without her. She’s always known that. I’ve told her a thousand times.
I just hadn’t told her tonight. Not with the microphone.
I went back inside to find her and tell her how it went.
Margot was at the coat check, which was a closet I’d have forgotten existed except that somebody had put little brass hooks in it shaped like pine branches. She handed my phone back to me.
“You were perfect,” she said. “They’re in. I’d bet the house on it.”
“Don’t bet my house. Lucy likes it.”
She smiled. “Tell Lucy the lanterns were a hit.”
“Tell her yourself. She’s around here somewhere. Probably yelling at a caterer about bowls.”
“Probably.” She buttoned her coat. “Dev wants a call at ten tomorrow. I moved your eleven.”
“What was my eleven?”
“Doesn’t matter. I moved it.” She patted my lapel. “Go to bed, Rhys. Big week.”
* * *
The lodge was mine again by one. The band was loading out.
Somebody was stacking chairs on the terrace with that hollow aluminum clatter that means a party is over.
I walked up the path to the house with my jacket over my shoulder, whistling, ready to tell my wife she was a genius and that Sterling House was happening, possibly in that order.
The kitchen light was on. That was the first thing.
Lucy doesn’t leave lights on. She follows me through the house flipping switches behind me. “Do you want the lake to boil, Rhys? Is that the plan?”
The second thing was the drive. My truck was there. Her car wasn’t.
The third thing was Juniper’s bed by the back door. Empty, the blanket still dented in the shape of an old dog.
I stood in the kitchen doorway for a while.
“Luce? Juni?” I tried the stairs. “Lucy? You up there? Babe, I’m not mad about the bowls, whatever happened with the bowls.”
Nothing. The fridge hummed. On her painting table by the window there was a clean rectangle in the dust where something had been stacked, and her brushes were standing in a jar of clouded water, and there was a single place card left, blank, never painted, with a pencil line across it where the horizon would have gone.
I took out my phone. There was a text from Jonah, sent at 12:04.
She left around midnight. She drove herself, she’s fine, she had one sip. The rest is hers to tell you. Also you’re an idiot.
I read it twice. I called her.
It rang five times and went to her voicemail, the one she recorded years ago in the car with the dog barking behind her. “Hi, it’s Lucy. I’m probably up a ladder. Leave me a message and I’ll call you when I come down.”
“Hey. It’s me.” I cleared my throat. “Where are you? Jonah says you left. Are you okay? The Summit guys loved it, by the way, they’re in, it’s happening. I wanted to tell you first. Did something happen? Is it Juni? Just call me, okay? Call me back.”
I hung up. I called again. Up a ladder. Leave a message.
I called Jonah. He picked up on the sixth ring, sounding like he’d been asleep for about four minutes.
“What.”
“Where’d she go?”
“I told you. Ask her.”
“She’s not answering, Jonah. I’ve called her twice. Where did she go?”
A long breath down the line. “Then maybe that’s your answer for tonight, man. Go to bed.”
“Did I do something?”
He was quiet so long I thought he’d hung up. “Go to bed, Rhys,” he said, and then he did hang up.
I didn’t go to bed. I went back down to the lodge instead, because I didn’t know what else to do, and because it was the only place I ever really know what I’m doing.
* * *
The terrace lights were still on. Two kids from the catering crew were working their way across the flagstones with a push broom and a big black trash bag, and the thing they were sweeping into the bag was paper.
Little rectangles of paper. Hundreds of them. Off the tables, off the lawn, off the stone wall, off the hearth inside where somebody had left a stack. Stepped on and folded and wet from the grass, and the kid with the broom was pushing them into a pile like leaves.
“Hey. Hang on.”
They both straightened up. The one with the broom looked scared of the guy whose name is on the building. I used to have that look.
“Sorry, Mr. Sterling. Are we too loud? We were told to have the terrace clear by two.”
“No. You’re fine. What’s—those are the place cards?”
“Yes, sir. Did you want any of them?”
I opened my mouth to say no. It was one in the morning and my wife was gone, and these were just the little cards. That’s what I’d called them, on the dock. “She made all the little cards.” It had gotten a laugh.
“Give me the bag,” I said.
He handed it over. I crouched on the terrace in my good pants and started going through it with my hands.
Herons. A lot of herons. A window with a bookshelf beside it.
Snow on a railing. Every one of them was painted, actually painted, each a little different from the next.
I don’t know what I thought they were. Back in April I’d stood at the counter eating cereal while she worked and said, “Can’t we just get these printed, Luce?
Save your wrist?” She’d said no. I hadn’t asked why.
The kids were watching me like I’d lost my mind.
“You looking for a particular one, sir?”
“Mine.”
It was near the bottom. There was a footprint across one corner, the waffle tread of somebody’s dress shoe. Underneath it, in her handwriting, the handwriting from every grocery list and birthday card and sticky note on the coffee maker for ten years, it said Rhys.
It was the lake. The lake at dusk, seen from the end of the dock, from right where I’d stood tonight with the microphone.
The water was a color I don’t have a name for.
Not blue, not purple. It was the exact color it had gone at 7:40, when the lanterns came on and three hundred people went oh and I didn’t look at it, because I was looking at them.
And it was the color of her dress.
I sat down on the flagstones.
She’d worn that color all night. I’d kissed her on the steps and jogged away, and she’d been wearing the lake, and I hadn’t noticed.
I’d noticed Summit’s partners noticing the lanterns.
I hadn’t looked at her, and I hadn’t looked at this, and she’d painted it for me by hand at our kitchen table while I was asleep upstairs, and she’d gotten the violet exactly right.
“Sir? You okay?”
“Yeah.” I wasn’t. “Yeah. Go ahead. Finish up. Thanks, guys.”
The kid with the broom hesitated. “Sir? Is it okay if I keep one? My girlfriend likes herons.”
“Which one?”
He held it up, embarrassed. A gray heron on a dock piling, one leg tucked, the water going gold behind it. “She’ll think I bought it somewhere.”
“Tell her the truth,” I said. “Tell her Lucy Sterling painted it.”
“Yes, sir.”
They went back to sweeping. I sat there with the card on my knee. Somewhere down on the dock a lantern had come loose and was bumping gently against the piling, over and over, like somebody knocking who didn’t expect to be let in.
I thought, I never once looked at this.
Not the card. The thing she does. I’d been looking at the result for ten years, the rooms, the parties, the lodge full of people who didn’t want to leave.
I’d been standing in the middle of her work taking the handshakes, and I didn’t know what it looked like while she was doing it, because I was never in the room.
My phone buzzed against the stone.
I’m at the studio. Don’t come tonight.