Chapter 6 #2
It was still there, four minutes and six seconds, sitting in a message from a number that was not his but was obviously his.
She had forwarded it to Susan unplayed on a Sunday night in October and never opened it, and it had followed her from phone screen to phone screen ever since like a stone in a shoe.
Laura sat on the rolling stool in an empty clinic with her thumb over it.
Four minutes and six seconds. That was a long time for a man who did not like the sound of his own voice off a field.
She could hear it without hearing it — the flat careful way he talked when he had thought about something too long, the two false starts, the part where he would say I'm not asking you for anything and then, a minute later, ask her for something.
Or not. That was the trouble now. Four months ago she had known exactly what was on it.
She thought about the phrase in the lawyer's letter. Regardless of what she does.
If she played it, one of two things happened.
Either it was the man she had built in her head, and she would have him back for another month — solid, wrong, leavable.
Or it wasn't, and she would be sitting on a stool in her own clinic at four in the afternoon with her whole footing gone and an evening patient due at five.
She put the phone face down on the table.
"Not today," she said, out loud, to a room with nobody in it.
Gary Stern came on Friday.
He did not call ahead. Laura came out of the clinic at ten past six to lock up and he was leaning on the hood of a black car at the curb, in linen in February, tanned the way people are tanned when it is not the season for it.
"There she is."
"Gary."
"You look good." He said it warmly, and he meant it warmly, and it landed exactly like what it was — an assessment. "You look better than you did at the thing in Aspen, and I told Jake that at the time. I said, that woman doesn't want to be in Aspen."
"You bought Ron Nolan's building."
"I made a phone call. Jake bought a building." He held up both hands. "I know. I know. Listen — can I have four minutes? Four. Then I get in the car."
She should have said no. She thought about Susan's voice on the phone. Not one unrecorded conversation. But this was not Jake, and there was a piece of her that wanted, badly, to see what would come out of Gary Stern's mouth.
"Four minutes."
"Great." He pushed off the hood. "First — I'm sorry. Genuinely. What happened to you was ugly and you did not deserve one second of it."
"Okay."
"Second." He took a breath. "I've been at this thirty years.
I've sat where you're sitting, in a way — not the same, I'm not going to insult you — but I've watched a lot of these, and I know something you don't know yet, which is how they end.
" He spread his hands. "They end in eighteen months.
Two years. Everybody's spent, everybody's broke, the lawyers have taken a bite you would not believe, and the two people involved hate each other in a way they didn't at the start, and that's the good outcome. "
"And you have a suggestion."
"I have a suggestion." He smiled, and it was a good smile, and she could see exactly how it had worked for thirty years.
"Let me get this done in six weeks. Quietly.
A number that makes your accountant sit down.
You never see a courtroom, you never see a deposition, nobody asks you on a stand about your marriage, and it's over before the summer and you get the rest of your life back. "
"And in exchange?"
"Standard paper. Mutual non-disparagement, confidentiality on the terms." He shrugged with his whole upper body. "It's boilerplate, Laura."
"You want me to sign an NDA."
"I want both of you to sign a mutual confidentiality provision, which protects you as much as him—"
"Gary." She set her bag down on the sidewalk. "He's already given me the house and the trust with no conditions on them. His lawyers told mine, in writing, to stop fighting me on anything. If he wanted my silence he'd have attached it to any one of those. He didn't."
The smile stayed exactly where it was. That was the tell. The smile did not move at all.
"So the question I have," Laura said, "is why the man who isn't asking me for anything has an agent standing outside my clinic at six in the evening asking me for the one thing his client didn't."
Four seconds went by.
"He's not thinking clearly," Gary said. "That's my job. Somebody in that building has to think about what this looks like in three years—"
"What does what look like."
"—and about the other people whose living depends on—"
"What does what look like, Gary?"
And there it was, for about a quarter of a second: a flicker of pure irritation, the look of a man who has been managing rooms for thirty years and has just been made to answer a question by a physical therapist on a sidewalk in a town he could not find on a map.
It was gone as fast as it came.
"Your four minutes are up," Laura said.
He laughed, easy again. "You always did have a way about you.
" He got in the car. Then the window came down.
"Think about it. And Laura — for what it's worth, I've known that man since he was nineteen years old, and whatever you decide, don't decide it based on who he's been for the last four months. That's not him."
"I don't know," Laura said. "It might be."
She stood on the sidewalk until the taillights turned at the bank.
Then she walked back to her truck slowly, thinking, and she did not think about Jake at all.
She thought about a man in linen driving ninety minutes east in February to sit on a car outside a storefront in Sawyer's Bend, on his own, without his client, to ask a woman to sign a piece of paper her husband had specifically declined to ask her for.
She got in the truck and sat with her hands on the wheel.
Six hundred dollars a month into an account, she thought. Every month, for as long as it takes.
And: why is Gary Stern in a hurry?