Chapter 5
By Tuesday of Wren’s second week, a little after five, the acquirer’s counsel had sent over the consolidated package.
Cordelia read forty pages of it at her desk before she admitted to herself that she was reading it the wrong way.
She had been reading it in the order it was assembled instead of the order it would fail.
The first week had been an education in watching Wren find the seams in things: the buried renewal date and projection dated two weeks off.
The package in front of her now was all seams. Two hundred pages of them, in fact.
Counsel wanted her position on the valuation by Monday, and she refused to walk into that round with a number only she had read.
She had spent a week and a half watching Wren work, and however reluctant Cordelia was, there was no one else in the building she would hand off the package to.
Except the file couldn’t leave the building.
Everything in it sat under the agreement she had signed across the table from the only competitor she trusted to keep everything intact and her people secure.
Two hundred confidential pages did not go home in an assistant’s bag.
No, her own home was the only place she trusted as much as the office. That was it, then.
Cordelia capped her pen and went to the door of the inner office. In the antechamber, Wren had the desk lamp on and was working between two screens.
“Wren.”
She stopped typing and looked up at her.
“Counsel sent the full package this afternoon. I want you to read it before Thursday and tell me if anything jumps out at you or doesn’t make sense.”
“Okay. I’ll read them tonight.” She reached out her hands for the file, but Cordelia kept them against her chest.
“I can’t let you take it home. There’s too much sensitive information for that.”
Wren frowned slightly. “Okay…” She looked like she was trying to figure out a complex puzzle. “Where do I read it then?”
Cordelia took a deep breath and trained her voice to stay level. “My home. It’s the only place off-site that I can trust to bring this file to.”
Wren leaned back slightly in her chair but said nothing.
“Tomorrow evening, if that suits you, of course. We’ll go through the file together. You’ll naturally have questions as you read, and I would rather answer them as they come rather than read your notes cold later.”
Wren seemed to be weighing the implications of going to her boss’s house at night for work while she chewed the inside of her cheek. Cordelia was worried that Wren would politely decline, but Wren nodded.
“What time should I be there?”
Cordelia fought the urge to exhale in relief. “Six-thirty.”
“Got it, Ms. Hale.” Wren wrote a note in the notepad beside her—the date, time, and address—then looked up at Cordelia. “Can I read the file before leaving for the night? I’d like to glance at it before I come so we aren’t starting from nothing.”
Of course she would. Cordelia had described a problem, and Wren immediately went into her natural problem-solving mode. Something in Cordelia loosened at that. She handed over the file, reminding Wren to give it back before she left.
The next evening, ten minutes before six, Cordelia set the second place at the island.
A folded napkin, a knife and fork squared to it, a small plate for bread.
She laid everything beside the laptop she had left open on the far stool.
She intuitively knew the spacing without having to consciously think about it—fork’s edge to the napkin’s, the plate at eleven o’clock.
The silverware didn’t need straightening, but she straightened it anyway, then made herself stop obsessing.
Since five, she had been readying the apartment without thinking of it in that way.
She had wiped down the counter twice. She had moved the mail off the island and into a drawer.
And she had finally shelved the stack of David’s annotated books she had meant to deal with for a month, just so she wouldn’t have to explain anything to someone who Cordelia knew was an exceptionally observant person.
Cordelia had cooked a meal, which she hadn’t planned on doing, but she knew the session would run late and they both needed to eat.
At least that’s what she told herself at four when she walked down to the bakery on the harbor block then to the outdoor market to get thyme and lemon to zest. The chicken was now resting under the foil.
The scent of freshly cooked food permeated all the rooms, even into the curtains, and the rooms had smelled like this when the long table by the windows was laid out for eight people and when Eleanor was alive to fill the chairs with friends and family.
A bottle of wine stood open and breathing on the counter, a Rh?ne she had bought herself last winter.
Eleanor’s bottles were further back along the rack, against the wall.
The lobby buzzer went off at six twenty-eight, two minutes early, which Cordelia had expected.
Cordelia pressed the call button and used the time the elevator took to climb to her floor to wipe the counter one more time then stuff the cloth in a drawer, as if she had something to hide.
Cordelia heard a soft knock on her door, and she opened it to see Wren wearing dark slacks and a soft gray sweater.
Her coat was draped over her arm, and her brown leather bag hung heavy on her shoulder.
Wren’s hair was freshly washed and hung loose around her shoulders.
“Come in,” Cordelia said and stepped back to let her pass.
“Thanks.”
Wren walked in and looked around. Cordelia watched her and noted where her eyeline was to speculate what questions Wren was mentally asking.
Probably the usual ones that most people who didn’t have Wren’s observational skills asked aloud—how long have you been here, do you live alone?
But the space answered all those questions, if one knew where and how to look, and Cordelia was realizing that was Wren’s strength.
Cordelia followed Wren’s gaze as it roved around the space and braced herself for the questions she hoped wouldn’t come.
But they didn’t.
Finally, Wren whirled around, her coat now in her hand. “Um, where…?”
“Over here.” Cordelia pointed out the hook, and Wren hung it delicately and followed her into the kitchen.
Cordelia pulled out the barstool that was closer to the window view for Wren. “Here you go,” she said. “You can put your things here.”
“Thanks,” Wren said, her voice warm. She set a large handbag on the floor, sat, and opened the laptop already on the bar. The screen lit the underside of her face a slightly bluish color.
“Would you like something to drink?” Cordelia asked, remembering how to play host.
“Um, just water is okay.”
Cordelia turned toward the kitchen and grabbed a glass to fill it, grateful for something mundane to do. She set it next to Wren and sat in the stool next to her.
“So,” Wren said. “Where do you want to start?”
Cordelia unlocked her briefcase and slid the file onto the island in front of them. “From the top.”
For the first hour, Cordelia did most of the talking.
She walked Wren through the restructuring: what it changed, the order everything had to happen in, and what had to be true at each stage before the next could begin.
Wren read the papers while she listened, one finger moving down the page, stopping her in the gaps with better questions than the ones the lawyers asked.
Wren flipped between two pages. “It moves in stages. A lot of them. Why so careful?”
“Because once a piece is done, it can’t be undone. People stay or they don’t. Every stage makes one thing absolutely certain before the next is allowed to touch it.”
“And you’d rather it be a slower process.”
Cordelia looked over at her. “Why do you say that?”
“Because you built the whole thing to keep the order in your hands.” Wren tipped her head at the screen. “If it goes too fast, it gets away from you. And it’s clear this can’t get away from you. You set it up so it couldn’t.”
It was true, and Cordelia had never said it aloud to anyone in quite that way, yet a stranger saw through it in about an hour.
“Something like that,” Cordelia finally said, then steered the conversation back to the schedule before the quiet could become anything significant.
They went down the packet line by line. Wren caught a place where a step was dependent on something with no date beside it, only a note that said when, not if.
“This one’s open,” Wren said. “Everything else has a date, but this just says it happens eventually.”
Cordelia leaned over to see what Wren was talking about.
“That one we’ll talk about another night.
” She said it lightly, and it was true enough.
But Cordelia recognized what this was—her having to make the decision all evening what to hand across and explain to Wren and what to keep to herself.
For now, anyway. She realized she’d be having to make these choices all evening as they went page by page, looking over paragraphs Wren wasn’t meant to see, much less understand the implications of.
Outside the windows, the harbor went from pewter to slate to nothing.
The freighter’s lights came up off the breakwater, green and white, and the room drew in close around the two of them.
Somewhere during the second hour, Cordelia plated the chicken dish she had cooked and placed a small woven basket with bread between them.
They ate in relative silence without working, and Wren complimented Cordelia saying, “This is good,” around a mouthful, as if it had caught her off guard.
Cordelia swallowed the impulse to confess the bread wasn’t freshly homemade and that she had walked down to the harbor for it, or she hadn’t cooked for anyone else in longer than she’d like to admit.