Chapter 11
Clara wrote the email in nine minutes and sat on it for six days.
It said: Ms. Ferrand — I would like an hour of your time. I am not going to shout at you and I am not recording anything. If the answer is no I won't ask twice. Clara Whitmore.
Margot answered in forty minutes.
It said: Yes. Tell me where.
Imani was against it, comprehensively, for four days.
"What do you think is in there?"
"I don't know. That's the point."
"That is not the point, that's the excuse." Imani was folding sheets, badly, the way she did when she wanted her hands busy. "You think you're going to sit down across from that woman and find out something that makes the last six months make sense."
"Maybe."
"There's nothing in there, Clara."
"You don't know that."
"I know that in thirty years I have never once seen a woman come out of that conversation better than she went in.
" Snap of a sheet. "You know what's in there?
A person. A regular person who did a bad thing and has been feeling bad about it and would very much like you to make her feel less bad, and you — you, of all the people I have ever met — are going to sit there and end up taking care of her. "
That landed, because it was likely.
"And what if she's horrible?" Imani said. "Have you thought about that? What if she sits down and she's smug, or she cries, or she says something about Willa. What are you going to do?"
"Nothing."
"Yeah. That's what worries me."
Clara folded a pillowcase.
"I'm going," she said.
"I know you are."
"Then why —"
"Because I wanted it on the record that I said don't." Imani took the pillowcase off her and refolded it.
"That's my whole job. You know that, right?
I'm not here to be right. I'm here so that when you do the thing anyway, somebody in your life said the other thing out loud first, and you know you heard it and went anyway.
That's different from nobody telling you. "
They met at a café off State Street on the first Tuesday in March, at three in the afternoon, because Clara had picked the deadest hour of the deadest day she could find.
She got there first. She had thought about that too — whether to arrive first or second, and what each one meant — and had eventually decided that she had spent nine years arranging the optics of rooms and was not going to do it for this.
Margot came in at four minutes past.
She was smaller than Clara remembered from a ballroom, and she had a coat over her arm, and she stopped inside the door and found Clara and did not do anything with her face at all, which Clara had not expected. She had expected an expression. Everyone had an expression.
She sat down.
"Thank you for coming," Clara said.
"I nearly didn't." Margot put the coat on the chair beside her. "I've written you about nine letters since October."
"You could have sent one."
"I know what a letter from me is worth," Margot said.
The waitress came. They both ordered coffee, and neither of them drank any of it, and it sat between them on the table for the whole hour going cold.
"I want to say what I came to say first," Clara said, "because otherwise I'll manage the conversation, and I do that, and I'd rather not do it to you."
"All right."
"I don't think you're a bad person. I'm not here to find out if you are." Clara had her hands around a cup she was not going to drink from. "I'm here because for six months I have had a version of you in my head, and she is a made-up woman, and I'd like to stop carrying her around."
Margot took that in.
"Ask me anything," she said. "I'll tell you the truth even where it's ugly. Especially where it's ugly. That's the only thing I've got to give you."
"When did it start?"
"June."
Clara had thought she was braced. "June."
"The nineteenth. There's no reason you'd want the date but I know it, so you can have it." Margot's hands were flat on the table. "We met in April at a thing in the valley. He didn't do anything for two months. I want you to know that. It wasn't — he wasn't circling."
"And the schedule."
"What schedule?"
Clara looked at her.
And the whole hour turned over on itself in about two seconds, because Margot Ferrand's face did the thing that faces only do when they genuinely do not know a thing, and Clara had spent nine years across tables from people who were pretending, and this was not that.
"There's a document," Clara said slowly.
"Dated the second week of September. It has an announcement in it, and a restructuring, and a schedule for introducing you to my daughter.
Dinner at the house on the fourth of October.
Lunch, just the two of you, on the eleventh.
You staying at the house the weekend of the eighteenth. "
Margot did not say anything.
"He gave it to me at our anniversary gala," Clara said, "and asked me to check whether the sequence worked."
The café made its noises around them.
"No," Margot said.
"I have it."
"I'm not saying you don't have it." Her voice had gone strange. "I'm saying no. I never — Clara, I have never met that girl. I didn't know her name until October. I found it out from the internet like everybody else."
"He was planning —"
"He asked me in August whether I'd ever want children," Margot said.
"That's it. That's the entire conversation that ever happened about his family.
In a car. And I said I didn't know, and he said fine, and we talked about something else, and I remember thinking, that was a strange thing to ask me in a car. "
Clara sat very still.
"I didn't know there was a schedule," Margot said. "Nobody asked me about a schedule. Nobody asked me about October the fourth."
Here is what Clara understood, sitting in a café off State Street with a cold coffee in front of her.
She had spent six months believing she had been replaced.
That was the shape of it. That was the thing she had carried out of a service corridor and up the coast and into a room above an inn — that a man had chosen a different woman for the place beside him, and had been so certain of it that he had drafted the transition.
It was not true.
He had not chosen Margot Ferrand for anything.
He had never asked her whether she wanted to move to Montecito or meet a sixteen-year-old or be given a place in his future.
He had drawn up a plan involving her, in twelve-point type, in the company's own template, with dates against every line — and he had not thought to consult the woman it was about.
He had done to Margot exactly what he had done to Clara.
He had decided what somebody's life was going to be, and then handed the schedule to the person best qualified to execute it.
"Oh," Clara said, out loud.
"What?"
"Nothing. I —" She put her hand over her mouth for a second. "I'm sorry. Something just arrived."
"Can I ask you something now?" Margot said.
"Yes."
"Did you love him?"
Clara opened her mouth to say of course, and did not say it, and the pause went on long enough that Margot's eyebrows moved.
"I've been trying to work that out since September," Clara said.
"That's not an answer."
"No. It isn't." Clara turned the cup a quarter turn.
"I built him a company and raised his daughter and remembered every birthday of every person he's ever needed something from.
And I've spent six months discovering that I could put all of it down in about twelve weeks and be fine, and I can't work out whether that means it was never love, or whether it means I'm just extremely good at carrying things. "
Margot looked at her for a while.
"He told me you two had an arrangement," she said. "In May. Before anything. He said it as a — not as an excuse. As a fact. He said, my marriage is a structure, it's understood, it's been that way from the start."
"He said that to me too," Clara said. "In a room upstairs at the Verdura. Nine years ago."
"Word for word?"
"Close enough that I'd have known his handwriting."
And Margot Ferrand put both hands over her face for a moment, which was the only time in the hour that either of them came near it.
"God," she said, from behind her hands. "It's a speech."
"Yes."
"He's got a speech." She came out from behind her hands and her eyes were wet and she was, unmistakably, angry — and it was not at Clara, and it was very obviously not the first time she had been angry about it.
"I thought he was being honest with me. That was the whole thing.
That was the entire reason I let it start — because every other man I have ever met lies about his marriage, and this one sat me down in a restaurant and told me exactly what the situation was, and I thought, well, at least he's honest."
"He is honest," Clara said. "That's what nobody understands about him. He has never once lied to me in nine years."
"Then what is it?"
Clara thought about it.
"He tells you the truth," she said, "and then he doesn't ask you a single question afterward. And you spend years thinking that the truth was a kind of intimacy. It isn't. It's a notice. It's a man putting up a sign so that nobody can say later that there wasn't a sign."
It ended, and Clara was not prepared for how it ended.
Margot put her coat on. Then she stood there with her hand on the back of the chair.
"I'm going to say something and then I'm going to leave," she said, "and you don't have to respond to it and I'd honestly rather you didn't."
"Okay."
"I'm sorry." She said it very plainly. "Not for the thing everybody wants me to be sorry for.
I didn't know you. You were a name and a job title and a structure, and I did what a lot of people do, which is decide that a woman I'd never met was fine.
" She adjusted her coat. "I met you once.
At the party. I asked if you worked for the hotel. "
"I remember."