Chapter 5 #3
“You’re the bottleneck—on purpose, mostly.
We’ve already said that. But it cuts both ways.
” Wren turned on her stool to face her directly.
“Half of what’s in here is only waiting on you to sign it, and half of that is daily things that don’t actually need you at all.
They need someone steady and consistent, which you already have in Pike and Kepling.
Hand the reins over to them now instead of holding on until the very end, and you could take a year off this timeline.
Maybe more. You’d be free of the day-to-day minutiae, and you could give the rest of it the part of you it actually needs.
” Wren said it gently, like an offering, like it was good news to celebrate.
“You don’t have to carry the whole thing all the way to the end by yourself. ”
Cordelia stopped writing mid-sentence. Wren’s words were kindly meant.
That was the worst of it. She was exactly right about it, too, and it was one of the truest things anyone had said about any of this in six months.
Somehow that it came from a woman who had been in her business for less than a month made it that much more significant.
Hand the running of it to Pike and Kepling, step back, be done a year early.
Wren had read all of it as a reshaping Cordelia would stand at the center of when it was finished—the same firm, reordered, with Cordelia still its head and her hands finally free.
She didn’t know the thing on the page was a smaller scope than the thing underneath it all.
She didn’t know that Cordelia wouldn’t be coming back, that there was no version of this that would play out where Cordelia was still at the head of the company or anywhere the people in this file would even think to come look for her.
But she couldn’t explain all that to Wren now. Or possibly ever.
“That’s further off than tonight,” Cordelia said. “When we’re closer, I’ll want that exact conversation, but not yet.”
Her voice had come out level. She was getting good at that. Wren held her eyes a moment, and Cordelia watched her silently decide to not push it.
“Sure,” Wren said, then wrote two words on her notepad that Cordelia couldn’t make out.
Cordelia forced herself to let it go. There was nothing in that notepad that actually mattered. There was nothing anyone could do with two little words.
They finished a little before ten. Cordelia squared the pages back into the file and closed the cover, the evening coming back into the room around them—the late hour, the cold plates, the wine gone down to nothing, the woman beside her who would now leave.
Wren bent down and reached for her bag. Cordelia walked her to the door where she held open the coat closet for Wren to grab her coat.
She reshouldered the bag. At the threshold, Wren stopped for a second, as if there were something to add to the evening, but then she only said, “Thank you for dinner.”
“You earned it. You found two things I would have completely missed otherwise.”
“I’ll have the comparisons to you before Monday.”
Already back to work, already being useful. Cordelia appreciated that about her.
“Good night, Wren.”
“Night, Ms. Hale.”
Cordelia stood at the door until the elevator doors had opened to carry her down, and then the apartment was hers again.
The chairs weren’t quite pushed in and there were still two plates left to clear and the scent of lemon and herbs was going stale in the rooms. She started clearing the island, and she had a plate in each hand when the phone rang. Astoria.
“It’s late,” Cordelia said in lieu of a hello.
“It’s ten o’clock, and you’re probably standing in your kitchen with a glass of wine. Don’t tell me about late.” A clink of ice on Astoria’s end, then a scrape of a chair. “Come to dinner Thursday. Miller’s cooking.”
Cordelia didn’t say anything at first, just maneuvered around the island with the two plates in hand and the phone tucked in between her ear and shoulder.
“Say yes,” Astoria said.
“Yes.”
“That was too quick. You’re saying it to get me off the phone.” Astoria paused, and then her voice dropped a register, the one she used when she stopped performing for a non-existent audience. “You sound strange. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong.”
Her voice was even, and it came out easily. To her own ear, it came out true. Six months of not telling Astoria the one enormous thing had made a small one—a shared dinner with her assistant to go through files—weigh nothing at all.
Astoria was quiet for a moment. Whatever she evidently heard, she let it go. She’d always known when to stop, which was half the reason why Cordelia had kept her around as a friend for twenty years. “All right,” she said, breaking the silence. “Thursday at seven. Wear something that isn’t gray.”
And then she hung up and was gone. Cordelia finished clearing the island.
She rinsed the plates and staked them, wiped down the board, and corked what was left of the wine.
Two glasses sat by the sink. She washed her own and set it aside to dry.
Then she reached for the second one but didn’t pick it up.
A swallow of red liquid still sat at the bottom of it, and the faint mark of Wren’s lipstick was on the rim.
She set it down in the sink, unwashed, and turned off the kitchen light.