Chapter Twenty-Four
Rhys
The first headline landed before I’d finished my coffee.
STERLING FOUNDER TORPEDOES OWN DEAL IN DESIGN FEUD.
A hospitality-finance newsletter, the kind everybody in my business pretends not to read and reads first thing in the morning.
By noon it had a cousin: SWORN STATEMENT: BILLIONAIRE HOTELIER SAYS ESTRANGED WIFE “DREW EVERY ROOM.” By three, somebody had put my declaration next to a still of me at the anniversary party, glass raised toward Margot, and the caption just said Receipts.
Summit’s pause stopped being a pause. Dev’s letter used the word indefinitely twice.
Their analysts ran the numbers again without clean design rights and marked the whole company down by a figure with more zeros than I ever had in the trailer, and I read it standing at my office window in Incline and felt, God help me, nothing much.
I’d spent ten years caring about that number.
It turned out I’d been saving the caring for something else.
The board met without me Thursday. Our general counsel sent the minutes with one line on top: Please call me before you speak to anyone.
Margot cc’d me on every email and didn’t say a word to me in the hall.
On Friday a reporter stood at Glenbrook’s front gate in a puffer jacket, asking valets whether it was true that Mrs. Sterling had designed the lobby.
One of them, a kid from Carson City who parks cars on weekends, told her, “Lady, she designed the valet stand.” I heard about it from Jonah.
I gave that kid a raise and didn’t tell anyone why.
Dev called Saturday night.
“You understand what you did,” he said.
“I told the truth.”
“You did. And it might cost you everything you built.” I heard him breathe out. “Both of those things can be true, Rhys. I just want to be sure you know it.”
“I know it.”
“Okay,” he said, and that was all, and for the first time in the whole ugly autumn I liked him.
* * *
I couldn’t sleep in the owner’s house. I hadn’t really slept there since June.
Everything in it was hers. The watercolor of the dock in the stairwell.
The window seat in the bedroom, cut exactly to the width of a folded quilt.
The way the morning sun hit the kitchen island at seven like she’d ordered it that way, which, I finally understood, she had.
At two-forty Monday morning I gave up, put on my boots, and drove to Truckee.
Her light was on.
I sat in the truck across the street with the engine ticking and looked up at the north window of the loft, one yellow square in a dark block of town. Rules on the tailgate. No money. No fixing. Ask first.
I texted: I’m outside. Your light’s on. I’ll go if you want me to.
The dots came and went twice. Then the door at the bottom of the stairs opened, and she stood in it in an old Berkeley sweatshirt and wool socks, and she didn’t say come in. She just left the door open and went back up.
The studio smelled like pencil shavings and radiator heat.
Juniper thumped her tail twice from her blanket and didn’t get up.
Lucy had the Moleskines out, all of them, laid in order across the drafting table and two sawhorses and half the floor.
Cilla had wanted them tabbed by date. There were little yellow flags sticking out of every one, like a field of tiny surrender.
“Can’t sleep either?” I said.
“I’ve been doing this since midnight.” She sat back down on her stool. “It’s easier than lying there.”
“Cilla’s orders?”
“Cilla wants every page dated and flagged before anybody on the other side gets near them. Thirty-one notebooks. Ten years.” She picked up a pencil, turned it over, put it down. “It’s like reading a diary somebody else kept about my life. Every time I turn a page I remember where I was sitting.”
“I saw the paper yesterday,” I said. “The one with the photo.”
“So did everyone at the grocery store.” She didn’t look at me. “The woman at the deli counter gave me extra olives. I think it was sympathy. It might have been pity. It’s hard to tell with olives.”
I stood by the sawhorses with my hands in my coat. I wasn’t going to touch anything. And then I looked down, and one of the notebooks on the nearest sawhorse was lying open, and I saw what was on the page.
A small room. The one off our bedroom in the owner’s house, the one with the low window that looks at the water.
She’d drawn it in soft pencil, and there was a crib against the far wall, and above the crib, hanging from the beam, a mobile of little paper birds.
Five of them, each one different. In the corner she’d written the date. March 2020.
I turned the page without thinking. The next drawing was a hotel bathroom for the second lodge. Dated May.
Nothing in between.
“I didn’t know you drew this,” I said.
She looked up. She saw which page. Her face didn’t move at all, and that was worse than if it had.
“You didn’t look,” she said.
“Luce—”
“You didn’t look at any of it that spring. You were in Denver four days after. Four.”
“You told me to go.”
“I told you to go because you were already gone.” Her voice was very level. “You were pacing the kitchen at midnight on the phone with the bank. You said refinancing eleven times. I counted. I was lying on the couch with a heating pad and I counted.”
“The lenders were pulling out. It was March 2020, the whole world was—”
“I know what the world was doing, Rhys. I was in it.”
I heard myself get louder. I didn’t stop it.
“And what were you doing? Because I came home from Denver and you’d redrawn the entire second lodge in six weeks.
Every room. You didn’t sleep. I’d come in at one in the morning and you’d be at the dining table under one lamp, and you wouldn’t even look up.
I stood in doorways, Lucy. I stood in a lot of doorways. I thought you wanted to be left alone.”
“I wanted you to sit down.”
It came out of her so fast it sounded like it had been waiting behind her teeth for six years.
“I wanted you to sit down on the floor next to me,” she said, “and not fix anything, and not call anyone, and just be sad with me for one single night. And you couldn’t.
So I did the only thing I could think of.
I went where you were.” She pointed at the notebooks, all of them, the whole field of yellow flags.
“Your work. It was the only room you were ever in. If I drew hard enough, you’d be standing next to me at least. You’d say that’s beautiful, Luce, and for about a minute, I’d have you. ”
“You told me you drew because you couldn’t stand the quiet.”
“That was the polite version.” She didn’t blink. “This is the other one.”
The radiator knocked. Juniper’s ears went flat.
“And the second time,” Lucy said, and her voice finally cracked, “you booked Kauai.”
I closed my eyes.
“A week in Kauai,” she said. “Like it was something a beach could fix. You had your assistant email me the itinerary.”
“We didn’t go.”
“No. We didn’t go. You let the airline keep the money, and you went to Aspen for the ski conference, and I drew the library for the third lodge with a window seat in it that nobody ever sat in.”
I opened my eyes. She was crying now, not loudly. Just steadily, with her chin up, like somebody standing in weather.
“I threw myself into work,” I said. My throat felt like I’d swallowed a stone.
“That’s what I know how to do. When things went bad at home, I got a job.
When the money ran out, I got two. I didn’t know how to be in a room where you were hurting and I couldn’t sell anybody anything to make it stop.
So I went to Denver. I went to Aspen. I went anywhere there was a problem I knew how to solve. ”
“And I threw myself into your work.” She wiped her face with the sleeve of the sweatshirt. “Isn’t that funny? We were in the same building for six years and we never once ended up in the same room.”
It wasn’t funny. Neither of us laughed.
I sat down.
Not on the stool, not on a chair. On the floor, on the old boards, between the sawhorses, the way she’d wanted me to six years ago.
It was about six years too late and I knew it, and I did it anyway, because I didn’t know what else was left.
My knees cracked. Juniper got up, stiff and slow, and came over and lay down against my leg, and I put my hand in her fur.
Lucy looked down at me from the stool for a long time.
“We never said their names,” she said. “We never even picked names. Did you know that?”
“I picked one,” I said. “The first time. I never told you. I thought it would make it worse.”
Something went across her face, fast and raw, and she pressed the back of her hand against her mouth.
The sky outside the north window was still black. Three-ten by the clock over the door. Somewhere down the street a snowplow scraped past, early, testing its blade on bare road.
I looked at the notebook on the sawhorse, still open to the paper birds. Five of them. I hadn’t looked at them properly the first time. One was a heron. One was clearly a bluebird. One was an owl with its eyes too big for its face, and she’d drawn it that way on purpose.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I said. “I know how to make a plan. I don’t know how to do this. But I want to, Luce. Whatever it is. Tell me where to start.”
She was quiet for so long I thought she wasn’t going to answer.
Then she reached over and closed the notebook, very gently, over the birds.
“Not tonight,” she said.