Chapter 4 #3
He didn't slow. Neither did I. I didn't turn.
When I reached the end of the corridor, I realized I'd exhaled.
My pulse, steady all day, now fluttered in my wrists.
For the first time since childhood, I felt the discipline required not to look back, not to check if he'd done the same.
I kept walking, hands shaking. At the corridor's mouth I made the small adjustment that turned the route to the car: not the public way, but the back-of-house, where the cameras didn't reach.
You are an adult, I told myself. He said your last name. That is all that happened.
The corridor opened onto a side door that gave onto the back of the hospitality block, the same service spine I'd walked the morning of the costume party.
I took it because the public corridor had cameras and the side door didn't, and because the trade for that small piece of privacy was one I was willing to make.
At this hour the service spine was empty.
The fluorescent strips hummed. One bin recess had been refilled with the day's compressed cardboard.
The corridor smelled of bleach and brake dust: the back-of-house signature of a building that had been working since six in the morning and was not yet done.
Andre was at the second bin recess.
Oh.
Oh.
He wasn't waiting in the posture of a man who was waiting.
Phone in one hand, screen dark, the other hand at his side.
He'd been looking at the wall opposite. He looked up when he heard me, and the look this time wasn't the one from the corridor outside.
The corridor outside had been the public version.
This was the version that didn't have to be filed afterward.
I stopped two meters from him. I didn't put down the folder.
“You took the wrong corridor.”
“I took this one.”
A small silence. The fluorescent hummed.
“You walked out of the press center with your helmet.”
“I walked into a corridor. I knew which one you would take.”
I considered this. The dock came back to me: the unlit cigarette, the precise economy of a man who never moved his hands without having decided in advance what they would do. The same economy now. The phone was in the same hand he'd held the cigarette in.
“My car is waiting.”
“Yes.”
He didn't move. The chronograph on his right wrist caught the strip-light. He'd pushed the sleeve of the polo back to wash his hands, or to check the time, or for some other reason I couldn't see from here.
I gave myself one second, then said the thing I hadn't meant to say.
“You wear the watch on your right wrist.”
He looked down at it once, the way a person looks down at a thing whose presence on the body has long since stopped being a question. Then he looked back at me.
“It was my father's.”
I waited. He let the silence sit for two seconds, the same two seconds he'd let sit on the dock before You want to walk?, and then continued, as if the next sentence were the second half of the first.
“He gave it to me when I came back from karting in Spain. I was sixteen.”
“And he wore it on the right.”
“He wore it the way I wear it. He had a thing with his left wrist when he was a boy. The right was the hand he trusted.”
The information sat in the corridor between us. He hadn't delivered it as confession. He'd delivered it the way the bartender at the casino had described the water: as the answer to a question I hadn't formally asked. He'd decided to be the one who answered first.
The decision was the offering.
“Thank you.”
He nodded once, the same single nod he'd given the press officer that morning. No embarrassment in it. No claim being made on the disclosure. He'd given me a fact, and he'd given it to me alone in a corridor with no cameras, and the giving was the whole thing.
Down the service spine, a door opened. A junior in a logoed polo went past at speed with two folded laundry bags over one shoulder. He didn't look at us, with the deliberate care of a person trained, at some early stage, in the protocol of not looking.
When the door at the end clicked shut, Andre said, “Your car will go without you if you do not move.”
“It will wait.”
“Yes.”
Neither of us moved.
Then he tilted his head a quarter of a degree, the same tilt he'd given me on the dock when I'd said I had an early morning, and stepped back to the wall, deliberately, to clear the path.
“Goodnight, Celeste.”
The use of my name wasn't violence this time. It was a continuation.
“Goodnight, Andre.”
I walked past him. I didn't look at the watch again.
I didn't check the line of his shoulders against the wall, because I knew, without needing to verify it, that he wouldn't have changed his posture for me.
I went out the service door to the back lot and the car, and the driver opened the door for me without looking up from his phone.
In the back seat I closed my eyes and thought, for the first time in eight years, of my grandfather's watch in the safe at the penthouse. I hadn't worn it in nine months.
I was going to wear it on Saturday.