10. “Penthouse” #2
She was quiet for a long time.
Her breathing went steady.
The radiator clicked.
I could hear, from the avenue forty floors below, the very faint braid of city noise: a horn, a siren far away, the deep long sound of a delivery truck on Park.
She lifted her head off my chest.
“I want to see the books on your nightstand.”
“They’re right there.”
She stretched across me.
The duvet slid down to the small of her back. Her hair fell over my face. She picked up the stack on the nightstand and she set it on her own chest.
There were three books.
The first was Cormac McCarthy. *The Road.* I had been reading it in pieces for the last eight months because every time I opened it I read about ten pages and could not read any further.
The second was a slim volume of poems by Mary Oliver.
The third was the Marilynne Robinson she had pulled off the shelf in the library twenty minutes ago, which I had brought down the hall after her without her knowing because I had been carrying it around the apartment with me ever since the morning she had walked into my office.
She held the McCarthy first.
“You’re reading this.”
“In pieces.”
“It’s about a man and his son.”
“Yes.”
“You read it because of Caleb.”
“Yes.”
She set it down.
She picked up the Mary Oliver. She did not say anything about it. She put it down.
She picked up the Robinson.
“I thought you said this was in the library.”
“I keep two copies. The one I marked up for twenty-four years is in the library. This one is the one your mother gave me. I keep that one in my bedroom because I do not let anyone else hold it.”
She looked at me for a long beat.
“Atlas.”
“Eden.”
“You kept the copy my mother gave you next to your bed for twenty-four years.”
“Yes.”
“For twenty-four years.”
“Yes.”
She put her face down against my chest and she made a small sound.
It was not a sob. It was a small hum, the kind a person makes when they have just put a piece of a puzzle into the place where it had always belonged. Her breath came out warm against my skin.
She turned her face up.
“Tell me what she wrote in it.”
I reached past her. I opened the front cover. The inscription was in Eve’s handwriting.
*Atlas — Read this slowly. The book is about waiting, and you do not yet know what you are waiting for. You will. Be patient. The thing that is coming is worth all the years it takes to arrive. — Eve.*
It was dated September 14, 2002.
Eden read it.
She read it twice.
She read it a third time.
She closed the book.
She put it back on the nightstand.
“She’s on your nightstand,” Eden said.
“She’s on my nightstand. Because every night I read one of her passages and I think about what it means to wait for something real instead of something easy.”
Eden got back into bed.
She lay against me with the book still in her hand.
“Read me something,” she said.
I took the book from her.
I opened it at random.
I read: “There is another life. There is a life after this one. That’s what they believe. And I don’t know why they can’t just be happy about that and let the rest of us alone.”
“That’s depressing,” Eden said.
“Wait for the end of the passage.”
I read: “He was standing there in the early morning and Rebekah was beside him, very close to him, and he knew that she could die in the next instant and something would be left of that moment in the design of things. Something that was precious to him beyond any expression or utterance of his own.”
She was quiet for a very long time.
“Your mother was asking you to understand that the moment matters,” Eden said. “Not the future. Not the wedding. This moment. Here. With me in your bed. That matters more than anything.”
“That’s what I understood the seventh time I read it,” I said.
She fell asleep like that.
With her head on my chest and her hand on my heart and the Robinson on the nightstand beside us.
At 3:14 p.m., my phone buzzed in my jacket.
I didn’t check it.
I just lay there with Eden sleeping against me and I understood, with absolute certainty, that I had finally become the man I was supposed to be.
Not the lawyer.
Not the friend.
Not the man trying to be careful and contained.
The man who could hold something precious without breaking it.
The man who could wait for four years and then let himself have what he wanted.
The man who was going to marry Eden Whitlock in front of everyone who mattered.
At 8:43 p.m., she woke up.
She stretched like a cat and she looked at my face and she kissed me without saying anything at all.
“I should go,” she said eventually.
“Not yet.”
“My father will worry.”
“Your father knows exactly where you are and what you’re doing. He told me yesterday that he was giving us one afternoon before he put us on the shelf for the leak. He said he understood that we needed to know each other before he asked us to be careful in front of the boys.”
“My father is the most understanding man alive,” she said. “And also the most manipulative.”
“He’s both simultaneously.”
She got out of bed and got dressed slowly.
I watched her.
I wanted to memorize this too. The way she buttoned her dress. The way she stepped back into her shoes. The way she came over to me and kissed me one more time before she left.
She paused at the bedroom door.
“Atlas.”
“Yes.”
“What if my father finds out.”
I was quiet for a long time.
I had asked myself the question every day for four years.
I had asked it, very specifically, every Sunday at his table.
I had asked it the night Eve had given me that book in 2017 and I had said, in the dark of the guest room at their old house, *if I do this, he will lose his only friend.*
I knew the answer because I had been writing the answer in my head for two decades.
“He already suspects,” I said.
She did not move.
She stood in the doorframe with one hand on the frame and her face turned toward the window I could not see from where I was lying.
“Atlas.”
“Eden.”
“How long has he suspected.”
“Long enough that he asked me a question on the porch in May that I did not answer. Long enough that he stopped seating me next to you at Sunday dinner two years ago. Long enough that when he called me on Tuesday morning after you came to the office, he asked me twice whether I was the right attorney for you, and the second time he asked it, the question meant something different than the first.”
“Then he’s known. The whole time. He’s known.”
“He has suspected. He has not known. There is a difference. He is going to know once Foster is finished with the leak. And he is going to forgive you because you are his daughter and he loves you and he has been preparing himself for this conversation for two years.”
“Will he forgive you.”
“That is harder.”
She crossed back to the bed.
She sat on the edge of it with her dress on and her shoes still in her hand.
She put her hand against my face.
“He is going to forgive you,” she said. “Because my mother told him to.”
“Eden.”
“Yes.”
“Your mother told both of us to.”
“I know.”
She kissed me one more time.
She slipped her shoes on.
She walked to the door.
She left at 9:14 p.m.
I stood at the window and watched her get into the car forty stories below.
Then I went to my study and I opened my laptop and I sat down to write a draft of an email I would not send for weeks.
Not a proposal. Not yet. Foster needed his time. Chip needed his time. The senator’s office needed to be cleaned of whoever was inside it before any of the public part of this could be allowed to happen.
But the draft mattered. The draft was the small private commitment I made to myself in the dark of my study at the window forty floors above Park Avenue.
The draft began: *Foster — I am ready to begin commissioning the ring. I will need three weeks and complete discretion.*
I saved the draft.
I did not send it.
Not yet.