15. “The Story”
“THE STORY”
The news broke on Sunday night.
I had come back to the compound from the barn at two in the afternoon.
Atlas had driven me. We had eaten a small lunch with Mrs. Harris and my sisters and my father.
Atlas had left at four forty-seven. I had gone upstairs to my childhood bedroom and lain on the bed in jeans and one of his shirts and read the Sumi Tan manuscript for two hours without really reading it.
At nine forty-seven, Mrs. Harris knocked on the door.
She did not wait for me to answer.
She pushed the door open and crossed to the bed and set my phone face-down on the bedspread next to me, and she said, very evenly: “Your father is in the library. He needs you down there now. Do not look at the phone first. Come downstairs first. Your sisters are already on their way.”
She did not look at me.
She left.
I sat up.
I picked up the phone.
I turned it over.
The screen was full of notifications. Twelve missed calls from numbers I did not recognize. Three from Sloane. One from Aspen. One from my Genevieve at the imprint. One from Tristan. Four from a New York 212 number I did not yet know to associate with the New York Times.
The top notification was a news alert.
*Senator Whitlock’s daughter spotted at home of close personal attorney. Sources speculate engagement imminent.*
I read it once.
I read it again.
I went downstairs.
My father was in the library with Sara Lin on speakerphone.
Sara was in Hartford. She had been at her sister’s house for a Sunday dinner. She had left dinner at the moment the alert had pushed.
“Eden,” she said when I came in. “Stay where you are. Don’t say anything to anyone. Don’t pick up calls. We’re going to put a statement out tomorrow morning. The senator and I are working on it now.”
“Is he angry,” I said. I was looking at my father.
He looked up.
His face was the face I had been bracing for since Tuesday morning at 8:47 a.m. when I had walked into Atlas’s office in a black dress and made my first irreversible decision of the year.
It was not angry.
It was not, at all, what I had expected.
It was tired.
It was the specific tired of a man who had been preparing for this conversation for a week and had finally gotten to have it and now wanted to be done with it so he could go to bed.
“I’m not angry, baby.”
“Daddy.”
“I am not angry. I am sorry. I am sorry it ran the way it ran. I would have liked you to have your own announcement be your own announcement, on the day you were ready, in the words you picked. Not a leaked story about a sighting. The thing that was supposed to be yours has been made, in part, somebody else’s.
I am sorry about that. The rest of it I have been ready for since June. ”
“Since June.”
“Since the Memorial Day weekend at the compound. When you and Atlas spent two hours in the kitchen at midnight talking about a book by someone whose name I cannot remember. And he laughed at something you said in a way I have not heard him laugh in fifteen years. I knew then. I have been preparing the announcement in my head ever since.”
I sat down on the leather couch.
I did not cry.
I had used up my crying.
Sara’s voice came through the speakerphone.
“Eden. We need you to call Atlas. We need him to know we are managing this from up here. We need him to be at the firm by seven a.m. tomorrow to handle the inbound press calls there. We need you to take the train down in the morning. Show up at the imprint. Be a normal Monday. Don’t talk to anybody.
Don’t make eye contact. The story is going to run for forty-eight hours and then it is going to be over. ”
“All right.”
“Eden.”
“Yes.”
“You handled the Ardent meeting better than any communications professional I have ever worked with. I don’t say that lightly. Do that again. Do that for forty-eight hours. And we are out of the woods.”
She hung up.
The library was very quiet.
My father stood. He came over to the couch. He sat down beside me.
He did not put his arm around me.
He simply sat at the same elevation and at the same angle and looked into the same fire I was looking into.
“Daddy.”
“Yes.”
“Mama would have liked the story being a leak.”
He laughed.
It came out wet.
“She would have. She would have hated the inconvenience and she would have loved that the story made you sound bigger than you actually were, because the story is going to call you the senator’s daughter and Atlas the family attorney, and your mother would have said that you were nobody’s daughter and Atlas was nobody’s attorney.
She would have wanted the headline to be your two names with no qualifiers.
She would have lived to see that headline if she had stayed. ”
I leaned against him.
He let me.
We sat for a long time.
Then I went upstairs.
I called Atlas from my childhood bedroom at 10:33 p.m.
He picked up on the first ring.
“I saw it,” he said. “Mrs. Harris saw it. My father is in the library with Sara on the phone.”
“I’m coming back up.”
“Don’t. Stay there. We need you in the city tomorrow morning. My father is going to manage the storm from the compound. He told me you should be in the city to handle the legal calls. Atlas — “
“Yes.”
“It’s going to be all right.”
“I know.”
“Hold your face.”
“I will.”
We talked for forty minutes after that.
We talked about the small specific shape of the next forty-eight hours.
We talked about who would call whom and when.
We talked about the very small list of people we trusted to manage the press.
We talked about Caleb, and what Atlas was going to tell him at breakfast, and how Helena was going to find out and what she was going to do about it.
We did not talk about Atlas’s drive home.
We did not talk about whether either of us was sleeping tonight.
We did not talk about Eve.
We did not need to.
When we hung up at 11:14 my hand was still warm where I had been holding the phone.
Aspen called at 11:21.
She was, when I picked up, in her car in the driveway of her own house in Hartford. She had heard about the leak from a friend. She had immediately called Sloane. Sloane had told her to call me.
“Eden.”
“Aspen.”
“Are you okay.”
“I think so.”
“Daddy.”
“He’s calmer than I expected.”
“He has been preparing himself for this for a long time, Eden. Since at least May. Probably since before May. Mama would have laughed at how badly he handled the Memorial Day weekend. He thought he was being subtle.”
“He was not being subtle.”
“He was not.”
“Aspen.”
“What.”
“Are you angry with me.”
“For what.”
“For not telling you sooner. For making you find out from a leak. For doing this in this order.”
“Eden. Listen to me. You are in love with the man who has been making my father laugh for twenty-five years and who has been the only adult who has ever listened to me tell him about my paint colors without smirking. You are choosing the kindest man I know. You are doing it on a timeline that is not the timeline I would have picked, but Eden, the timeline is yours. Not mine. Not Daddy’s.
Not Aunt Mary’s. Yours. So no. I am not angry.
I am thrilled. I am, in fact, going to drink an entire bottle of champagne by myself in my driveway at this exact moment and then go inside and tell Hawk about it. ”
“Hawk is at your house.”
“Hawk is renovating my kitchen. Hawk has been at my house since Thursday. Hawk has not spoken to me except to ask where the breaker box is.”
“Aspen.”
“Don’t, El.”
“I love you.”
“I know. I love you back. Now go answer Sloane’s call. She’s been trying to get through for forty minutes and you know how she gets.”
She hung up.
Sloane called at 11:54.
“You’re alive,” she said.
“I’m alive.”
“You’ve been on the phone.”
“With Aspen. And before her with Atlas. And before him with Daddy. I am, technically, currently on the phone, Sloane.”
“Don’t get cute with me.”
“Okay.”
“Eden.”
“Yes.”
“I knew.”
“I know you knew. You told me you knew last week.”
“No. I knew before then. I told you I had known for a year. I lied. I have known for two.”
“Two.”
“I have known for two years that you were in love with Atlas Cain. I figured it out the night before Tristan proposed to you. You came home from a dinner at the compound and you were quiet for an entire hour. And I asked you what was wrong and you said you had been watching Atlas argue about a book all night and you didn’t think anyone was going to ever talk to you about anything that interesting.
And I thought: oh. Oh, no. Oh, this is going to be a thing. ”
“Sloane.”
“I know. I should have said something.”
“Why didn’t you.”
“Because you were about to get engaged to Tristan and you were happy and I did not want to be the person who took apart your happiness with a sentence. I thought you would figure it out yourself eventually. I thought you would either figure out that you were in love with Atlas, or you would forget, and either was your decision. So I waited.”
“You waited two years.”
“I waited two years.”
“Sloane.”
“What.”
“Why did you tell me you knew for one when you actually knew for two.”
“Because two felt like too much, El. Because saying I had known for two years felt like saying I had watched you marry the wrong man on purpose. I had not watched you marry the wrong man on purpose. I had been waiting for you to decide for yourself. And you did. You did, and you walked into his office on a Tuesday morning, and you came out of his office on a Tuesday morning and you came home and I knew. I knew the second I saw your face.”
“Why didn’t you tell me.”
“Because then you would have stopped watching your own face. And you needed to keep watching it. The whole point was you finding out for yourself.”
I closed my eyes.
The bedroom was dark except for the small reading lamp. The window was open a crack and I could hear the sound of the Sound very faintly from down the lawn. The compound was very quiet.
“Sloane.”
“Yes.”
“You are the smartest person I have ever known.”
“I know.”
“Don’t be smug.”
“I’m not being smug. I’m being correct. You’re going to marry him. You’re going to be happy. I am going to be a bridesmaid. And then in eight years I am going to take credit for the entire thing in front of my own daughter.”
“You don’t have a daughter.”
“I am going to have a daughter, El. And I am going to tell her this story. And she is going to think your husband is an old man, because by then he will be, and she is going to ask why you married him. And I am going to tell her: because he was the only man your aunt Eden ever wanted, and she had to wait until she was twenty-six to figure out it was allowed.”
I laughed.
It was the first real laugh I had had in three days.
She let me have it.
She let me have it for thirty seconds.
Then she said: “Get some sleep, El. Take the train in tomorrow. Be a person at your desk. Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t read the comments. Call me at lunch. I love you.”
“I love you too.”
She hung up.
I lay back on the bed.
I did not sleep.
I lay there for three hours with my hand on Atlas’s flannel that I was not going to take off and the small reading lamp on and the open window letting in the sound of the Sound, and I tried, with a not very full success, to stop running through every interview I had ever read with a senator’s daughter and asking myself which version of one I was about to become.
The Monday morning train into the city was crowded.
I took the 7:14. The platform at New Canaan was full of commuters in suits and the small grim faces of people going back to a Monday they had not chosen. I sat in the third car. I had a copy of my mother’s New Yorker open across my lap. I did not read it.
A woman three rows in front of me had the Times open to the page that ran the leak.
I could see, from where I sat, the corner of the photograph of me on the steps of the Carlyle.
The photograph Marcus Ellery had taken the morning of the Ardent meeting, which had been buried by the FBI investigation but which had now, somehow, surfaced.
Someone at Ardent’s old office had been holding it for a rainy day. The rainy day had come.
I did not look at the photograph for longer than two seconds.
I looked out the window instead.
The Hudson was the color of pewter.
I got to the imprint at 8:47.
The receptionist’s face did the new thing I had been bracing for.
A small smile. A quick assessment. A mental readjustment.
She did not ask me anything.
She handed me my mail.
I went to my desk.
Genevieve was already at hers.
She looked up.
“Editor mode or person mode,” she said.
“Editor mode.”
“Then let’s edit.”
We worked. We edited a manuscript about grief. The author had lost her mother ten years earlier and she was still processing it. Every chapter was a different stage of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. I understood every word. I lived in those words.
Tristan called at 11:47.
I let it go.
His mother emailed at 12:14.
The subject line was: *A Quiet Word — Again.*
I deleted the email without reading it.
At 1:30 Genevieve handed me a sandwich she had bought me and said: “Eat the sandwich. Don’t look at your phone. The world is going to keep being the world.”
I ate the sandwich.
The world kept being the world.
By Friday, the initial story was already old news. Nobody cared anymore.
The story went away.
The wanting did not.
I sat at my desk that Friday afternoon at 4:47 with the manuscript I had been pretending to read all week, and I let the imprint hum around me.
Genevieve was on the phone with the cover designer.
Three editors down the hall were laughing about something nobody outside the room would understand.
Outside, the small honk and shuffle of a Manhattan Friday already starting to lean toward the weekend.
I put my hand flat on the manuscript.
I thought: he is going to ask me, in some week I cannot yet name, in a place I have not yet seen.
I thought: I am going to say yes.
I thought: in the meantime, I am going to do my work, and I am going to read my manuscripts, and I am going to call my father on Sunday and ask if he is sleeping.
I picked up my pen.
I went back to the page.
The page was good. The author had buried a sentence on page 247 that wanted to be on page 12. I marked the move. I wrote a one-line note in the margin. I closed the manuscript.
I left the office at 5:14.
I walked home through the long October light.
The sidewalks smelled like roasted chestnuts and the river. The cabs were already moving up Sixth in the way the cabs moved on Friday afternoons. I did not, for the first time in two weeks, look at my phone every block.