28. “Helena”
“HELENA”
Ihad been over the words on the flight.
I had been over them at LaGuardia. I had been over them in the cab. I had been over them in the elevator at her building. I had been over them on the third-floor landing outside her door.
The words were not better for the rehearsing.
They were not going to be better.
I went in.
I had not been to the loft enough times yet to know all the small landings on the stairs. I knew the smell of the building — old wood, old paint, the small metal smell of the radiators in the hallway. I had not yet stopped noticing the smell.
I went up the three flights two at a time.
She was at the door in the cardigan.
The cardigan was the long cream cardigan she had been wearing the morning Chip had texted me to come to the library.
She had her sleeves pushed up to her elbows.
She had the small pink mark on her cheek she got when she had been pressing her palm against her face while she was thinking.
The kitchen lights were on but the rest of the loft was half dark.
She closed the door behind me.
She turned to face me.
“It’s me,” I said. “It’s me, Eden. The asset is me.”
“What.”
“Sit down.”
“Atlas.”
“Sit down. I want you to sit down because I am about to tell you a story and I want you to hear it sitting down.”
She sat down.
She sat at the end of the long pine table where I had sat across from her on Sunday night with the legal pad between us. She put both her hands flat on the wood. She looked at me.
I sat down across from her.
“You know I was married before.”
“Yes.”
“You know her name.”
“Helena. You divorced her ten years ago.”
“Yes. We divorced because we were not right for each other. I do not need to tell you any of that. You know most of it. You have known it since you were a child. The part you do not know is what happened after.”
“All right.”
“After the divorce, Helena moved to Boston. She started over. She took back her maiden name. She remarried six years ago. The man she married is Edward Whittaker. He was the managing partner at the firm I left ten years ago to start Cain Sterling Hayes. That firm — the firm I left — is the firm that handled the foundation tax work for one of Senator Vivienne Ardent’s primary PACs for the last eight years. ”
She did not say anything.
She was holding very still.
“Helena did not know any of this when she married Edward. She married Edward because they had met at an art-history fundraiser in Boston in 2017 and they had liked each other. The PAC connection at the firm was not on her radar. She is not a political person. She has never been a political person. The connection sat there for four years and nobody thought about it and nothing came of it.”
“Atlas.”
“Hold on. I am getting there. Hold on.”
I drank from my water glass. I set it down.
“In the spring of 2022, Edward made a senior-partner promotion of a man Helena does not like. She does not like him for personal reasons that have to do with how he treated one of his own associates years ago. She made her opinion known to Edward over dinner at their house. She made her opinion known again at a firm event a month later. The man she did not like took offense. The man she did not like was the head of the foundation-tax practice. The man she did not like was the senior firm partner who handled Senator Ardent’s PAC. ”
I watched her face.
She was beginning to follow.
“The man she did not like apparently approached one of Senator Ardent’s senior staff at a fundraiser.
He let the staffer know that there was a managing-partner’s-wife who happened to also be the ex-wife of one Atlas Cain, divorce attorney to Senator Charles Whitlock’s family.
He let the staffer know that this wife was angry at the firm and that he had her ear.
He let the staffer know that he had been collecting small intelligence on the Whitlock family through Helena, who knew me, who spoke to me twice a year, who occasionally asked me about Caleb’s school events at which Chip was sometimes present, who sometimes mentioned to Edward over dinner what she had heard, which Edward sometimes mentioned to other partners over drinks, which the partner who did not like Helena sometimes wrote down. ”
“Atlas.”
“Hold on. I am almost there. Helena did not know. Helena did not know that her dinner conversations with her husband were being repackaged and sent to a senator’s opposition operation.
She did not know that Edward’s partner was using her as a source.
She did not know that what she was telling Edward about my life was being routed through Edward’s partner to Senator Ardent’s chief of staff to Sara Lin’s brother’s leverage operation.
She did not know that the small pieces she was giving Edward at her own dinner table were the small pieces that Senator Ardent’s office had been using to triangulate where Eden lived and what time she got coffee in the morning and what time the senator’s car arrived at the compound on Sunday afternoons. ”
I stopped.
I took another drink of water.
Eden was very still.
She was looking at the table. She was looking at her hands. She was looking past her hands at the page of her own legal pad still on the table between us with Sara Lin’s name circled at the bottom of the staff column.
“Helena,” she said. “Your ex-wife.”
“Yes.”
“Has been the channel.”
“Yes.”
“For three years.”
“For at least two. Possibly three. The records I pulled out of Sara’s drive at the airport identify eleven specific requests in the last eighteen months that originated, according to Sara’s tracking, with a contact she identified by Helena’s first name.
They were routed through Ardent’s chief of staff.
The actual source is the partner at my old firm.
The partner used Helena because Helena was a clean channel.
Helena did not know. Helena does not know.
As of this hour, sitting in my old firm’s offices in Boston, Helena does not know. ”
“Atlas.”
“Yes.”
“Atlas.”
“Yes.”
“Are you the asset.”
“Yes. I am the asset. Not in the sense that I knew any of this. Not in the sense that I gave any of it. In the sense that the entire two-year operation was built on a connection that runs through me. The connection is not Sara. The connection is not Marcus Ellery. The connection is the woman I was married to for nine years and the man she married after me and the firm I left ten years ago. I am the asset. The asset is me.”
She did not speak for a long time.
I let her not speak.
I did not reach across the table. I did not move toward her. I did not say I was sorry. I had decided in the cab that I would not lead with sorry. Sorry was a word for things you had done. I had not done this. I had also not prevented it. The not-preventing was a thing I owned.
She looked up at me.
Her eyes were dry.
“Why are you telling me this tonight.”
“Because I am telling your father in the morning. I will not have anything between you and me that I do not know how to look at. I will not let your father hear it from anyone but me. I am telling you tonight because I will not have you find out tomorrow morning at the same time he does. We started this together. We finish this together. Are you hearing me.”
“I am hearing you.”
“Are you angry.”
“No. Not at you. I am working through it. I will tell you what I feel about it when I know.”
“That is fair.”
“Atlas.”
“Yes.”
“You came home and told me first.”
“Yes.”
“You did not call me from DC. You did not text. You did not wait until tomorrow.”
“No.”
“You came home.”
“Yes.”
She stood up.
She came around the table.
She sat on my lap. She put her arms around my neck. She put her forehead against mine. She did not kiss me.
She just stayed there.
She smelled like rosewater and the small specific warmth of a person who had been wearing the same cardigan for eight hours. Her hair against my jaw. Her hands at the back of my neck.
I held her.
I held her the way I had held her in the suite at the Pierre.
I held her the way I had held her at four in the morning at the loft after the boathouse.
I held her the way I had been holding her for six weeks now — with both hands, fully, without holding back any of the parts of myself I had been holding back from people for twenty years.
We stayed there for a long time.
The radiator clicked. The kitchen light hummed. Outside the river kept moving. Somewhere down on Hudson Street a delivery truck dropped its tailgate and a man called something to another man.
After a while she lifted her head.
“What is the plan.”
“Tomorrow morning. Seven. We drive to the compound. Together. We sit in the library with your father. I tell him exactly what I have just told you. I show him the eleven entries. I show him Sara’s documentation.
I show him the chain through my old firm.
I propose that we keep Helena out of it until we have made sure there is no criminal exposure for her.
I propose that we deliver the entire operation — Marcus Ellery, Sara’s leverage, the firm channel, the Ardent personal involvement — to the FBI as a single package, with my name attached, with a separate package documenting that I was unwitting.
I am willing to take the hit for being unwitting if it ends the matter. ”
“He is not going to let you take the hit.”
“That is between him and me.”
“He is not.”
“I know.”
“Atlas.”
“Yes.”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
We sat on the chair for another long minute.
She got off my lap. She went to the kitchen. She made tea. She brought me a cup. She sat down across from me again.
“Eat,” she said.
“I am not hungry.”
“Eat anyway.”
She made a small sandwich. She put it in front of me.
She watched me until I picked it up. I picked it up.
I ate it. The sandwich was the small specific kindness of a woman who had just been told something she did not yet know what to do with and who had decided, while she was still figuring out what she felt, to feed me.
I ate the whole sandwich.
I drank the whole tea.
I was hungrier than I had thought.
We went to bed at eleven.
I did not sleep.
She did not either, although she pretended to.
I lay on my back and I watched the ceiling and I thought about Helena.
I thought about a dinner table in Boston where my ex-wife had been used as a courier for two years without her knowledge.
I thought about the partner at my old firm who I would have to call in the morning and who I was going to enjoy ending.
I thought about Edward Whittaker, who was Helena’s husband, who was an honest man as far as I knew, who was going to find out in the next twenty-four hours that his closest partner had been using his wife to feed information to a senator’s opposition operation.
I thought about what that was going to do to that marriage.
I thought about Caleb.
I thought: he is going to read about this.
I thought: I will tell him before he reads about it.
Eden’s breathing slowed beside me at one a.m.
She was asleep.
I let her sleep.
I lay there with the city outside the window and the loft quiet and Eden’s hand on my chest, and I went over the morning’s plan in my head one more time. Then I went over it again. Then I went over it a third time the way Foster had taught me to go over a closing argument the night before a trial.
The plan was good.
The plan was clean.
The plan was the plan I would have written for any other client.
It was not for any other client.
It was for the man who had stood at the back of a chapel on a Saturday morning in October 2018 and held my elbow when I came up the aisle to the casket and had not said a single word for the next twelve hours.
It was for the man who had handed me a glass of bourbon at one in the morning at his own kitchen table, after Eve, and had said: you keep showing up. That is all I am asking. You keep showing up.
I had kept showing up.
I was going to keep showing up tomorrow morning at seven.
I was going to look him in the face in his own library and I was going to tell him.
The buzzer rang at four oh seven a.m.
I sat up.
Eden sat up beside me. She had been more awake than asleep.
“Who,” she said.
“I do not know.”
“It is four a.m.”
“I know.”
I got up. I pulled on a pair of pants. I went to the intercom. I pressed it.
“Yes.”
The voice came back without preamble. The voice I had known longer than I had known any other voice except my own father’s.
“Atlas. Let me in.”
It was Chip.
He had been driving since midnight.
Eden was already at the door of the bedroom in her robe.
“Dad,” she said.
“He knows,” I said.
“He knows.”
I buzzed him in.
I went to the door and I waited.
I could hear his footsteps coming up the stairs.
He had taken the stairs the way he always took the stairs when he had been driving for hours — two at a time, with the slow steady deliberateness of a man who had spent most of his life in the Marines and had not yet stopped using the body those years had built him.
I opened the door.
He stood in the doorway in the gray sweater he had been wearing on Saturday in the library, and the same coat he had worn at the gala, and his hair was flattened in places from the headrest of the wagon, and his eyes were very awake.
He did not say hello.
He looked at me.
He looked at Eden in her robe behind me.
“Let me in,” he said.