Chapter 17
She drove to Ojai on the Tuesday, because it was owed in person.
Hugo met her at the Alcorn and walked her through the property first, which was either a kindness or a piece of advocacy and was probably both.
It was a very good hotel. It was a better hotel than three of hers.
He had twenty-eight rooms and a kitchen garden and a laundry in the back that Clara had wanted to see for a year, and he took her into it and stood there looking pleased with himself while she worked out the sequencing in about ninety seconds.
"You're running two shifts off one machine."
"I am."
"That's why the number works."
"That's why the number works," Hugo said. "Nobody's ever got it that fast."
They sat outside afterward with coffee neither of them drank, which Clara noticed, because it was the second time in a year she had sat across a table from somebody over coffee that went cold.
"Say it," Hugo said. "You've been carrying it since the parking lot."
"I'm not signing."
He nodded slowly.
"Right," he said.
"I want to say the rest of it, because you'd say the rest of it to me."
"Go on, then."
"It's the best offer I will ever get." Clara had her hands flat on the table.
"I want to be exact about that, because I've spent four days being exact.
Your paper is better than anything I could have negotiated for myself.
My name first, operating control, a clean exit at three years.
There is no version of my life in which somebody offers me that again, and I am thirty-eight, and I have run the numbers on both and yours is the better business. "
"You don't have to —"
"I do, actually." She looked at him. "You are a better man than my husband, Hugo. I want that said out loud once, by me, to your face, because you've been extremely decent for a year and you've never once made me say anything."
Hugo Bertrand looked out at his kitchen garden.
"That's a hell of a thing to hear on a Tuesday," he said.
"I know."
"Is he — " He stopped himself, and then went ahead anyway, which she respected. "No. Ask the question properly, Hugo. Are you going back to him?"
"I don't know yet."
He turned his head.
"That's the truth," Clara said. "I'm not being delicate with you. I genuinely have not decided, and I am not saying no to you because of him, and I need you to believe that, because it's the only part of this that matters to me."
"Then why?"
And here was the thing she had worked out on a terrace at half past ten on Saturday night, and had checked for four days, and which had turned out to be the whole answer.
"Because I'd be running your company," Clara said.
"That's — yes. That's the offer."
"I know. And I would be extremely good at it, and it would be the fourth time." She counted them off, flatly. "The Ellwood. The Whitmore Group. Imani's inn, which I fixed in four hours on a legal pad without being asked. And then yours."
"Clara —"
"I have spent eighteen years making other people's buildings work, and I have been paid variously, and once I was paid in a marriage.
" She kept her voice level. "And the reason I have not signed your paper since February is not that I was waiting for him.
I've had four days to check that and it isn't true.
It's that every time I picked it up, some part of me said: this is the same shape.
A very good man with buildings, offering me the thing I'm best at, and my name on the letterhead this time — and it is still somebody else's company that I make work. "
Hugo sat with that for a while.
"So you're going to build your own," he said.
"I don't know."
"You are, though."
"Hugo, I genuinely don't —"
"Clara." He almost laughed. "I've been in this business twenty years.
I know what it sounds like when somebody's already decided and hasn't caught up with themselves.
" He picked up the cold coffee, looked at it, put it down.
"You're not turning me down for a man. You're turning me down because you finally worked out that you're allowed to want something. "
Clara did not say anything, because her throat had closed.
"Right," Hugo said, and slapped the table once, and stood up. "Well. That's the single most expensive conversation I've ever had and I feel oddly excellent about it."
"You're a very strange person."
"I'm a hotelier. We're all strange, it's the hours." He put his hands in his pockets. "Three years. The Ellwood. I'm serious, I want it, and I'll pay properly."
"Two," Clara said. "And you'll pay properly."
"Done."
And that was the end of it, and he walked her to her car, and at the door he said, "For the record, I'd have made you happy," and Clara said, "I know," and he said, "Yeah, well," and went back inside without waiting, and did not watch her drive out.
She told Imani that night, on the phone, standing in the apartment above the hardware store.
There was a long silence.
"So you turned down the good man."
"I turned down the good man."
"And the company."
"And the company."
"For him."
"No," Clara said. "That's what I called to say.
Not for him. I haven't decided anything about him.
I turned it down because it was the same shape and I'd have been doing it again, and I'd have been doing it happily, and I'd have looked up in six years and been forty-four and still be the person who makes somebody else's thing work. "
Another silence.
"Say it," Clara said.
"I'm not going to say it."
"Imani, in a year you have said everything."
"I know." A chair scraped, two streets away. "Here's what I've got. I've been telling you not to go back to that man since September and I have not been wrong about a single thing I said. I want that on the record."
"It's on the record."
"He was careless with you in a way I will not forgive, and I'm not going to, and if you go back to him I'll be at the table at Christmas being polite about it for the rest of my life.
" A breath. "And you're a grown woman who nearly got sold with the furniture and has spent a year building herself back from the studs, and if you tell me you know what you want, then I have got exactly nothing left to say except that I'll be there. "
Clara stood in the dark with her eyes shut.
"I love you," she said.
"Yeah, well," Imani said. "Somebody has to."
She drove to Ladera Lane on the Wednesday evening and did not call ahead.
The gate code worked. The eucalyptus had been cut back — she had booked that crew in March, from the driveway, in a fit of reflex, and somebody had kept paying them.
The light over the range was on.
Adrian opened the door before she got to it, which meant he had heard the car, which meant he had been sitting somewhere he could hear the gate.
He did not say anything at all. He stood back and let her in.
They went into the kitchen because that was where everything in that house happened.
"I saw Hugo yesterday."
"Clara, you don't have to —"
"Stop." She put her bag down. "I'm going to talk for a while, and I've rehearsed it, and I'm going to do it badly anyway, and I need you to not be gracious at me because if you're gracious I'll lose it."
Adrian shut his mouth and stood on the other side of the counter.
"I turned him down," she said.
Something went through his face. He got hold of it.
"That's not about you," Clara said. "That's the first thing.
I turned him down on Tuesday afternoon before I had decided anything about you, and if I'd walked out of that meeting and never spoken to you again I'd have made the same decision.
I need that to be true and it is true and you have to take it. "
"Okay."
"Second thing." Her hands were shaking and she let them. "I'm not moving back into this house."
He nodded, slowly.
"Not because of you," she said. "Because I furnished every room in it and none of it is mine, and I sat in that doorway in September and understood that, and I'm not going to undo it by moving my clothes back in.
If we do this we buy something. Together.
Both names, and I pick half of it and you pick half of it, and if you have a feeling about the lamp we have an argument about the lamp. "
Adrian said, "All right."
"Don't just agree with me."
"I'm not just agreeing with you," he said. "I've been in a rented place since October that I hate, because I couldn't work out where I was allowed to live. You've just solved a problem I've had for a year. I'm agreeing with you because you're right."
Clara took a breath.
"Third thing," she said. "The company's mine."
"Yes."
"No — listen, because this is the part that matters and you took the veto out before I asked, and I know that, and it makes this harder, not easier.
" Her grip tightened on the edge of the counter.
"I'm not asking you for structure. I've got structure.
The bank's got the schedule and the independent directors have the consent rights and if we disagree, I win, and that is on paper forever now.
"What I'm asking for is that you never once make me use it."
He went very still.
"That's the term," Clara said. "That's the only one I've got and it isn't legal and there's no way to enforce it.
Nine years, I never once said what I wanted, and you never once asked, and we both built a fence and called it something else.
If we do this you are going to have to ask me things.
Constantly. Boring things. Where do you want to eat and are you tired and what did you want out of that meeting — and I am going to have to answer, out loud, in words, like a person, and I am worse at that than you are. "
"Clara —"
"I'm not finished." Her voice cracked and she went on through it.
"And when I do it badly, which I will, you don't get to be relieved.
You don't get to let me go quiet again because quiet is easier and the company runs better when I'm quiet.
That's the deal. That's the whole deal, and it's harder than anything the bank asked you for. "
The kitchen was completely silent.
"Yes," Adrian said.
"Say the rest of it."