8. Lucy
LUCY
The suitcase wouldn't close over Grace's fourth stuffed rabbit, and Lucy was on her knees on bedroom floor at six in the morning, negotiating with a seven-year-old who had staked her entire diplomatic position on smuggling contraband animals past airport security.
"One rabbit," Lucy said. "The gray one. He's the ambassador. The other three stay home and guard the house."
"They'll be lonely."
"They have each other. That's the whole point of an embassy.
" Lucy zipped the case around the single, victorious rabbit before Grace could counter-propose, and stood, brushing off her knees.
"Coat. Shoes. We leave in ten minutes or your aunt starts pacing, and once she starts pacing, nobody in this house gets breakfast."
It had been three weeks since the caseworker's visit—a brisk, watchful woman named Alvarez who'd spent ninety minutes in the house asking Grace what her favorite color was and watching, closely, to see whether Carrington already knew.
Carrington had known. Teal, she'd said, without hesitation, and Lucy had stood in the doorway with her heart doing something complicated and watched five weeks of triangle toast and bedroom doors left properly shut pay for themselves in real time.
The follow-up letter had used the word stable.
Lucy had read it twice before she let herself believe it.
She hadn't expected the letter to change anything about how Carrington ran her calendar.
She'd been wrong about that, too. Two days after the letter arrived, Carrington had called her into the study and informed her, in the tone she used for board resolutions, that she'd be traveling to Cormorant Point to close the Ashgrove acquisition in person, and that Grace and Lucy would accompany her, and that this was not, Ms. Harper, open for negotiation.
"You could leave her here with me for four days," Lucy had said, testing it. "It's not a crisis."
"I left her mother for thirty years believing that was an acceptable arrangement." Carrington hadn't looked up from the contract she was annotating. "I've reconsidered my position on acceptable arrangements. Pack for four days. Nadia has the flight details."
So now there was a private jet waiting at a regional airfield an hour outside Phoenix Ridge, and Grace was buckled into a seat twice her size with the gray rabbit tucked under one arm, and Carrington sat across the narrow aisle in a suit the color of wet slate, reading a document with a pen already moving through it before the wheels had left the tarmac.
Anjalinka—younger than Lucy had pictured from Carrington's phone calls, sharp-eyed, visibly delighted to have been promoted from Tokyo delegate to in-person acquisitions counsel—sat one row back with her own laptop open, occasionally leaning forward to murmur something about zoning easements that made Carrington's pen stop and then start again, faster.
Lucy had flown exactly twice in her life before this, both times economy, both times with her knees against the seatback in front of her. This was quieter. The quiet made her suspicious of it, the way she'd learned to be suspicious of anything that came without a visible cost attached.
Grace fell asleep somewhere over the mountains, her head listing sideways against Lucy's arm, and Carrington glanced up from her document at the exact moment it happened, something crossing her face too fast to name before she looked back down at the contract as though she hadn't seen anything at all.
Cormorant Point turned out to be a lodge built into the shoulder of a headland, cedar-shingled and low-slung, with a wall of glass in the main room that framed the cove below like a painting somebody had commissioned specifically to intimidate potential buyers into paying more than the land was worth.
Ashgrove Holdings had run it as a private retreat for forty years before deciding, for reasons Lucy gathered involved a very expensive divorce among the Ashgrove siblings, that they'd rather have the money.
The rooms Nadia had arranged sat along the same hallway—Grace's between the other two, a connecting door on either side so that neither adult had to walk through a public corridor to reach her in the night.
Lucy noted the arrangement without comment.
She suspected Carrington had specified it herself, down to the exact configuration, the same way she specified breakfast menus, and found something almost touching in the idea of a woman drafting the architecture of her own care for a child in the margins of an acquisition memo.
The first night passed the way travel always did with a seven-year-old: overtired, overstimulated, a meltdown over the unfamiliar smell of the pillowcases that resolved itself, eventually, into sleep only after Lucy had read four chapters of the fox book in a voice pitched low enough not to carry through the wall.
She heard Carrington's door open once, sometime after midnight, and close again without anyone knocking, and understood it for what it was: a woman checking that the house, this borrowed house on a rented headland, was still standing the way she'd left it.
Lucy was awake before dawn on the second morning, the way she often was in unfamiliar beds, and she'd pulled a sweater over her sleep shirt and gone looking for coffee in the lodge's main room rather than lie there listening to the unfamiliar creak of cedar settling in the cold.
Carrington was already at the window, in a robe instead of a suit, which was its own small dislocation—Lucy had never seen her in anything that wasn't armored, tailored, buttoned to the throat.
The robe made her look, for one disorienting second, like an actual person who occasionally slept and occasionally got cold rather than a headline that happened to eat breakfast.
"You're up early," Carrington said, without turning from the glass.
"I could say the same."
"I never went to sleep, strictly speaking.
Ashgrove's counsel sent a revised term sheet at three, and I wanted to have opinions about it before Anjalinka woke up and had her own.
" Carrington nodded at the carafe on the counter, French press, dark enough that Lucy could smell it from the doorway.
"I made too much. Nadia isn't up for another hour. "
Lucy poured two cups without being asked twice, and something in the domesticity of that—pouring coffee in someone else's borrowed kitchen at five forty in the morning, no schedule dictating it, no binder requiring it—settled over her more gently than she wanted it to.
She crossed to the window and stood a careful two feet away, close enough to share the view, far enough to keep it a view and not something else.
Outside, the cove was still the color of iron, the tide pulling back off rocks that wouldn't be visible again until noon. A single gull worked the shoreline, methodical, unbothered by the cold.
"It's beautiful here," Lucy said.
"It's a liability with excellent light. There's a fault line under the eastern parcel that will cost someone eleven million dollars to remediate before anyone builds so much as a gazebo.
" Carrington sipped her coffee, and something in her shoulders came down half an inch, the way they never did in the study, in the boardroom, anywhere Lucy had seen her be observed by people who mattered to her balance sheet.
"I used to think that was the whole point of me.
Seeing the fault line before anyone else did. "
"Isn't it still?"
"I'm no longer certain it's the whole point." Carrington turned then, and the early light did something unfair to her face, softened the sharp architecture of it into something Lucy had no professional reason to be looking at this closely. "Thank you for the coffee, Ms. Harper."
"You made the coffee. I just poured it."
"You're aware that isn't what I meant."
Lucy didn't have an answer for that, and the silence that followed had the particular texture of a held breath, both of them looking out at a gull worrying the same six feet of shoreline, neither one willing to be the first to walk away from a two-foot distance that had started, without either of their permission, to feel smaller.
She was the one who broke it. She always was, lately, and she noted that fact the way she noted everything she didn't like about herself—filed away but not forgiven.
"I should get Grace up before she finds the tide pools without a supervisor," she said, and left before the coffee had cooled enough to drink.
The collar happened three hours later, in the hallway outside the lodge's largest meeting room, forty minutes before the Ashgrove family's lawyers were due to arrive and renegotiate a fault line into eleven million dollars of somebody's problem.
Carrington had dressed for it—dark suit, hair pinned back with the same controlled precision as always—but her collar had gone crooked somewhere between the mirror and the hallway, one point folded under instead of crisp, and she was reading through Anjalinka's final notes with the kind of attention that meant she had no idea her own collar had betrayed her.
"Hold still," Lucy said, before she'd fully decided to say it, and reached up before Carrington could object.
Carrington went still the way a struck bell went still, all the vibration still moving somewhere underneath the stillness.
Lucy fixed the collar with two efficient motions, straightening the fold, smoothing the fabric flat against her collarbone, and was almost finished, almost safely back in the territory of a task performed and completed, when her knuckles brushed the warm skin at the base of Carrington's throat and neither of them moved to correct it.
It lasted perhaps a second. It felt considerably longer.
"There," Lucy said, and stepped back, and heard her own voice come out steadier than anything currently happening in her chest. "You'll intimidate them properly now."