4. Nolan
NOLAN
Iwake up reaching for her before I've opened my eyes, and the bed is cold on her side.
The pillow still smells like whatever she puts in her hair — something with coconut in it, and something underneath that's just her — but the sheet where her hip should be is room temperature, and the lamp she didn't bother to turn off is still burning on low against the wall.
I lie there for a beat trying to construct an innocent version of this.
Maybe she's in the bathroom. Maybe she's on the balcony watching the sun come up because she couldn't sleep either.
The dress isn't on the floor. The clutch isn't on the entry table. The heels she kicked off by the bed last night are gone. So is she.
It is six minutes after seven on a Sunday morning, and I, Nolan Ashford, am sitting at the side of a forty-thousand-dollar mattress staring at a closed bathroom door behind which there is no woman, and I am genuinely annoyed about it for reasons I refuse to examine before coffee.
I pull on the trousers from last night and pad out into the suite.
The wineglasses we drank from are still on the iron table on the balcony, hers with a faint print of nude lipstick along the rim.
The kitchen is untouched, because of course it is.
There is no note. There is no number scrawled on the back of the room service menu. There is no nothing.
She didn't even take the cashmere throw, and I think, absurdly, that I'd have respected her more if she had.
I put coffee in the machine and stand at the counter with both hands flat on the marble, listening to it brew, and I let myself say the sentence out loud, just once, because saying it out loud is the only way I've ever gotten a thing out of my own head.
"She left."
The machine hisses agreement. The bay outside is starting to turn the color of a bruise healing.
By eight-fifteen I'm showered and on my second cup, and I've already made three phone calls I would not have made for anyone else in this city.
The first is to the head of security at the Marquesa, an ex-cop named Ruiz who's owed me a favor since the spring.
He pulls last night's elevator logs without asking why, and the camera at the forty-second floor catches a woman in an emerald dress walking past it at four-seventeen in the morning with her heels in her hand and her face composed like she's leaving a deposition.
She doesn't look up at the camera. She knew exactly where it was.
The second call is to the gala coordinator, who emails me the guest list inside ten minutes. Arielle M. Sutton, Halloran-Reyes Architects, Chicago office, plus zero, dietary: none. No phone number. No follow-up email. The RSVP went through her firm's account, which I already knew.
The third call is to the desk downstairs.
"Did a Miss Sutton check out this morning?"
"One moment, Mr. Ashford." The clerk's keyboard clicks. "I don't have a Sutton in our system, sir. Did she stay with us?"
"Try Arielle. First name."
More clicking. "We did have an Arielle Morrison check in Friday and check out at five-oh-two this morning. Paid in cash on departure. Would you like the room number?"
"No," I say. "Thank you."
Morrison. Middle name, probably. I do not need the room number because the woman in question is six hours gone and is, by my best calculation, currently in the air somewhere over the Carolinas, drinking bad coffee out of a paper cup and very much not thinking about me.
I stand at the kitchen counter and stare out at the bay, and I am furious in a way I have not been furious in years.
Not at her. That's the part that makes me angriest. Not at her at all.
She did exactly what she told me she was going to do at the railing last night, in plain English, with her hand on her glass.
I am not staying for breakfast. I am on a flight in the morning.
She gave me the entire script. She even signed it.
I am furious at myself. I am furious that I am standing at a counter at eight-thirty in the morning running an investigation on a woman who told me to my face that she would not be findable.
I am furious that the suite feels smaller than it did yesterday.
I am furious that when I poured the second cup of coffee I poured it into two mugs out of habit and had to pour one of them back into the pot.
I have not done that since my mother died.
The board meeting is at ten. I shower again, because the first one didn't take, and I put on a suit and I am in the Ashford tower on Brickell at nine-fifty-two, exactly on time, exactly composed, exactly the version of myself that everyone in that conference room expects to walk through the door.
Phillip is already there, drinking something green out of a glass that looks like it costs money to hate. "You look like you slept in your tuxedo, Nolan."
"I slept in my bed. Briefly. Are we starting?"
“We’re starting. Greenwood’s on the line. He wants ten minutes on the land issue before we move into Q3.”
"Give him fifteen. He's writing the check."
I sit at the head of the table and I open the bound proposal in front of me, the one our acquisitions team prepared on the waterfront corridor — the project that brought me to that rooftop in the first place, the project I have spent six months and a small fortune in legal fees trying to position myself on top of.
I have read this document four times. I could recite the table of contents from memory.
I turn to the architectural appendix on a reflex I don't think about, and there she is.
Lead architect, southern parcel: Arielle M. Sutton, AIA, Senior Architect, Halloran-Reyes.
Underneath her name is a rendering I have been looking at on and off for two weeks.
A long, low building with a salvaged brick facade tucked under a glass cantilever, the bakery footprint intact at the corner.
I know this drawing. I know the way the line weights are heavier on the original brick and lighter on the new construction, like she's deferring to the older building on principle.
I have been admiring this drawing in the abstract, the way one admires a good piece of work whose author is interchangeable.
The author is not interchangeable.
The author drank San Pellegrino with lime out of a champagne flute last night, told me my coffee was a war crime, and left my bed at four in the morning without leaving so much as a hair tie.
Phillip is talking about the south parcel. I am not listening to Phillip.
"Nolan."
"Sorry. Repeat that."
"Greenwood's asking about the timeline on the variance. The community board has us pegged for September."
“Tell him we’re not waiting for September.
” I close the appendix and keep my hand flat on the cover so it stays shut.
“I want a revised acquisition target on Halloran-Reyes’ role in that site by end of week.
We’re not bidding it out. We’re not opening it up.
We bring them inside for this project specifically, and we structure it so the lead architect attached to that work comes with the package. ”
The table looks at me. Phillip sets his green drink down.
"Nolan. We had a plan for that parcel. The plan was to phase the architect out after the variance hearing."
"The plan changed."
"When did the plan change?"
"This morning. Anything else?"
Phillip studies me across the table, and I watch him do the math behind his eyes — the math of a man who has been my second chair for nine years and has never seen me make a decision in a board meeting without showing his work first. He doesn't say anything. He picks his green drink back up.
"I'll have the revised target by Thursday," he says, finally. "Do you want to tell me why?"
"No."
"All right."
"Greenwood?" I say, pivoting toward the speakerphone. "Let's talk about the bridge financing."
The meeting goes on for another hour and forty minutes.
I run it the way I always run it. I close it on time.
I shake the hands I need to shake. I walk out into the corridor with the bound proposal under my arm, and I do not open it again until I am alone in the back of the car, and when I do, I open it straight to her page.
I look at her rendering. I look at her name.
I look at the small line under her credentials that reads Chicago office and I think about the woman in the emerald dress walking past a forty-second-floor camera with her heels in her hand at four-seventeen in the morning, and I make her a promise inside my own chest that she has not asked for and would refuse if she heard it.
“I’ll find her. Not tomorrow. Not in a rush. I’ll find her on a project, in a conference room, in daylight, with her name on a contract that has mine on the other side. And when that happens, we finish the conversation she walked out of.”
I close the appendix. I tell the driver to take me back to the Marquesa.
The cashmere throw is still folded over the arm of the sofa where she didn't bother to take it. I leave it where it is.