Chapter 4 Red-Eye #3
She told him about a letter she'd received from her cousin Britta, who was getting married in the spring and had asked, very carefully, whether Anya would be bringing a guest. She delivered this with her voice pitched just above dry, and Cassian found he was laughing — an actual laugh, not the executive laugh he deployed in meetings, but the other one, the one he didn't plan.
"She's met me," he said.
"She's met you once, at Christmas. You were very—" Anya made a small measuring gesture with her fingers. "Controlled."
"I was on my best behavior."
"I know. That's what she noticed." She sipped her coffee, which was certainly cold by now. "She wants to know if you're different when no one's watching."
Cassian looked at her steadily across the laminate table, in the concrete room, under the fluorescent light, in the fog.
"What did you tell her?"
Anya's expression did the left-side thing again.
"I told her yes," she said simply. "Quite a lot different."
He did not know what to say to this. He found he did not need to say anything, which was itself a revelation — that there were moments now when a thing could be said to him and he did not need to neutralize it or redirect it or answer it with something that maintained appropriate altitude, that he could simply sit in the receiving of it and let it be true.
He sat. She sat. The fog sat over the field.
At eight-fourteen, Piotr appeared at the lounge doorway with the expression of a man delivering news he is glad to be delivering. "Mr. Sterling. Visibility is up to one hundred and forty meters. We're projecting clearance to minimums before nine."
Cassian nodded. He began to gather himself — the tablet, the bag, the careful reassembly of the morning's plan, which had always been to arrive in London early and give himself an hour in Harriet's Mayfair office before she had other appointments.
He had lost the early arrival. He would still make the meeting.
He walked out of the lounge and across the hangar floor, and Anya walked with him as far as the door.
Outside, the fog was beginning to thin at the edges — not gone, but going, the amber blur of the runway lights starting to resolve into something with edges.
The tarmac was wet and very cold and smelled of morning.
He turned to her.
"I'll call when I land," he said.
"I know you will." She stood with her hands in her coat pockets and her hat re-deployed, slightly crooked again, and she looked at him across two feet of wet tarmac with that expression — the one that was still counting, still keeping the space open.
He kissed her. She kissed him back. The fog moved around them without opinion.
He went to make the call from outside — his phone had buzzed twice in the past twenty minutes and he'd felt it both times and chosen not to look, and now he stepped around the near corner of the hangar, out of the line of sight of the personnel door, and answered.
"Harriet," he said.
"Cassian." His solicitor's voice had its usual quality — measured, Edinburgh-dry, the voice of a man who has read a great many documents that contained very bad news and has learned to hold that news at a consistent professional temperature.
"I'm glad you're coming. There's been a development this morning. "
Cassian stood in the thinning fog, his coat collar up against the cold, the wet tarmac black and still under his feet. "What development?"
"The claimant's legal team has made contact directly with Sterling Tech's board secretary." A pause that carried its own information. "They're not waiting for you to respond to the preliminary. They've escalated."
He did not say anything for a moment. He looked at the runway lights, which were now almost clear.
"All right," he said. "I'll be there before noon."
He hung up. He stood where he was for another full minute, watching the fog thin over the field, thinking about Anya in the concrete room and what she had told her cousin and the way she had sat across from him for an hour and twenty minutes in a space that offered nothing except the truth of who they each were, and had found it sufficient.
Then he put his phone in his pocket and walked back around the corner to the personnel door.
When he stepped inside, she was still there, standing near the entrance, having clearly not moved — not gone back to the car, not gone to find Piotr, just standing in the thin industrial warmth of the hangar, waiting. She looked at him when he came through the door.
He knew what his face was doing. He had very good control of his face, in general.
He had built an entire professional life on the reliability of that control.
But three months of Anya Pemberton had changed the tolerances on certain things, and she was looking at him now with the particular attention of someone who has learned to read the small movements beneath the controlled surface — a tightness at the jaw, something careful happening around the eyes — and he could see her reading them.
He did not offer her an explanation. He was not ready to offer her an explanation.
But he crossed the hangar floor to where she was standing, and he stopped close enough that she had to look up slightly to hold his gaze, and he said:
"Whatever happens this week — whatever I find out in London — I want you to know that it doesn't change what I'm doing here.
" He heard how imprecise this was; he felt the imprecision, the way a surgeon feels a cut that isn't quite clean.
"What we're building. I want you to know that before I get on the plane. "
She studied him. The inventory expression, but more serious now, the count more careful.
"That's a lot of scaffolding," she said quietly, "for a legal consultation."
He held her gaze. "Yes," he said. "It is."
Outside, through the high steel doors of the hangar, the runway lights were steady and clear, and in the east the fog was breaking apart in long, slow pieces, and somewhere in the field beyond the perimeter fence a kestrel was probably dropping straight down through the clearing air toward whatever it had been waiting all morning to reach.