Chapter 3 #2
He picked up the call. He said the right things to a man named Patterson about a position on a Singaporean carrier they were both circling.
He sounded, to himself and to Patterson, like a man who was paying attention.
Some functioning part of his brain did the work and the rest of his brain stood off to the side and watched his hand on the contract not be perfectly steady.
When the call ended he sat for another minute in the silence of his office.
He told himself, for the third time that morning, this is Melody.
He waited for the thought to land the way it usually landed, with the warm settling certainty of something true.
It did not land. It hovered an inch off the surface of his mind like a leaf on water that has not decided yet whether to sink.
His phone buzzed on the desk. A text. From her.
lunch? i can come to you. i miss your face.
A photograph followed it a second later: her, in the elevator of her foundation's building, making a face at her own reflection in the polished steel, her mouth twisted up in the goofy private expression she only ever showed him.
She was wearing the green coat he had given her last Christmas.
Her hair was up. She looked like herself.
She looked like the woman who had laughed on a beach in Greece in his white shirt.
He looked at the photograph for a long time.
Then he typed back: can't today, sweetheart. drowning over the London deal. tomorrow?
He watched the three dots come up. They lingered. They went away. They came back.
tomorrow. love you.
love you too.
He set the phone face down on the desk.
In the bottom drawer, the photograph from Greece sat in its small frame in the dark.
He did not open the drawer.
Rivera's report came back in the late afternoon.
It came back exactly the way Alexander had told himself, all morning, that it would not.
There was a David. There was only one David in any of the public-facing material attached to Melody's foundation, and the only place his name appeared was on the masthead of a hospitality consultancy that had done a small piece of catering work for an event in May.
The photograph attached to his bio on the consultancy's website was the photograph of a man in his middle thirties who had the kind of face that women used the word charming about.
There was no contract on file with Melody's foundation in the current quarter, there was no record of a David anywhere in the discretionary line.
But there was a hotel reservation in his consultancy's corporate name at a small discreet hotel in the East Forties for tonight, beginning at eight, and the room had been booked, according to the front desk's notes, for two.
Alexander sat back in his chair and looked at the river.
He thought, very clearly, if I open the drawer right now I am going to lose the thread of this, and I am going to have to spend the rest of my life wondering if I let it go because I was a fool or because I was a coward, and he did not open the drawer.
He picked up the desk phone again. Not Rivera this time. The car.
"I'll be downstairs at seven thirty. East Forties. I'll give you the address in the car."
He found himself standing in a hotel hallway; he knew the suite number because Rivera had given it to him in the report. He stood outside the door for the longest five seconds of his life and listened.
Through the heavy soundproofing of an East Forties hotel he could hear almost nothing: the small distant murmur of a man's voice, the smaller distant sound of his wife's laugh.
The sound of his wife's laugh through a closed hotel door was the worst sound he had ever heard in his adult life, because it was the laugh she only ever did in private. The unguarded one.
He raised his hand and knocked once. Sharp. Precise.
The door opened.
Melody was on the other side of it. She was wearing a soft black wool dress he did not recognize, her hair was loose around her shoulders.
She had a glass of something in one hand and her shoes were off, lined up neatly by the inside of the door the way she always lined her shoes up in their own apartment when she meant to be in a place for a while.
Her face when she saw him went through surprise, then a small startled flicker of something almost like pleasure.
Over her shoulder Alexander could see the rest of the suite.
It was a corner suite. It had a king bed against one wall, made up and turned down, the small chocolate on the pillow placed by housekeeping.
There was a low couch by the window, and on the couch was a man Alexander had never seen in person but recognized at once from the photograph on the consultancy's website: middle thirties, dark hair.
He was in his shirtsleeves. His jacket was draped over the arm of the couch.
There was an open bottle of wine on the low table in front of him and two glasses, one of them half-empty, and a leather folio on the cushion next to him with a few loose pages spilling out of it.
The man was sitting forward with his elbows on his knees, his hands loosely clasped between them.
He looked up. He saw Alexander. Some small careful thing in his face shut down the way the faces of certain kinds of men shut down in the presence of certain kinds of husbands.
"Alexander," Melody said. Her voice did not sound quite like her voice. "What are you doing here?”