Chapter 6 #3
By half past six, she had worked on the calendar as much as she could for one day, so she shut the laptop, locked the bottom desk drawer, and hoisted her grandmother’s bag off the hook, the leather strap worn pale and soft where Mildred had held it for forty years.
Cordelia’s door was firmly closed now, but Wren could hear the low resonance of Cordelia’s voice beyond it.
She stood there a second longer than she needed to, listening to the sound of it without being able to make out the words, then forced herself to leave.
The elevator was mirrored on three sides and always a few degrees too warm for comfort.
The doors closed and the car descended. She caught her reflection in the mirror: tired with dark circles under her eyes, a little haggard in her face, her grandmother’s watch loose on her wrist that had only gotten thinner than she liked in the last few months.
And, underneath all of it, she had nowhere to be, no one left to be useful to.
She was just by herself, alone in a warm box, which was everything she had been trying to outrun since this morning.
She had spent all day not thinking about the morning.
Now, with nothing to do but drop eight floors, she couldn’t avoid it any longer.
She thought about how Cordelia had looked at her when she came back after Wren had patched the leak.
The way Cordelia had glanced up as Wren stepped into her office, and for half a second before the mask slid over her face, Cordelia had looked genuinely, simply glad.
Glad that it was Wren. It had been so long since anyone had looked at Wren and been glad that she existed, rather than glad she was there to fix something.
So long, in fact, that Wren had nearly not recognized the expression when she saw it.
Wren had tucked it into her chest and had been carrying it around with her all day since, warm yet slightly uncomfortable, like a coal she couldn’t set down.
She shook her head to come back to herself and stop with the flights of fancy.
Cordelia was just a good boss who was pleased with good work.
Wren told herself that she was just reading too much into a look that meant nothing because she was tired, and the day had been long and strange, and she was—she made herself think it—lonely.
Lonely was familiar, a simple fact about her life.
It certainly wasn’t a feeling about any one person.
Except…it was about one person. That was what she kept coming back to.
She had learned Cordelia by now. The small things underneath the surface, the ones you only came to know from observing someone closely and often, and from wanting very much to understand what you saw.
She knew that Cordelia’s eyes were gray most of the time, but that there was a flash of light that turned them an almost green hue when something excited or reached her deeply.
She knew the particular stillness that meant Cordelia had already decided on something and was waiting patiently for others to catch up to her.
She knew that Cordelia had a fresh scent, like the air off the harbor just before dawn, and that getting close enough to know it had become, god help her, the thing Wren had quietly built the rest of her day around.
And she knew what it did to her, letting something matter.
Except last time, it was her work, not a person.
She had found something she could pour herself into and she poured until there was nothing left.
By thirty-one, she was so burned out that she had sat on the edge of a hotel bed in a city she couldn’t, for a moment, name and cried for the better part of an hour over a houseplant.
It was a pothos that she had left behind in the last apartment and had forgotten to give away, dead by now for certain, the only living thing that had ever depended on her and she had let it wither and die.
That was what being constantly needed made of her.
She refused to hand herself to a person and let it reduce her to that again.
So, no, whatever this was or wasn’t, she wasn’t going to indulge in it.
She was going to drive up to the coast on Friday and build the data room and be very good at her job, and then she was going to come home on Sunday.
And if some disloyal part of herself spent the weekend aware of Cordelia’s presence, it would pass.
Things passed, and she was very good at allowing things to fizzle out.
The elevator car slipped past the third floor.
Her left hand found its way to the pulse point on her right wrist without her realizing it, and she closed her hand around the watch, turning the loose face of it.
Mildred had done that all her life, a hand at her own wrist, turning the watch face, as she thought through a problem.
Somewhere along the way, it had become Wren’s go-to tell too.
Mildred had loved her plainly without asking her to earn it, which was the one kind of love Wren had never quite known what to do with.
She held on to the watch until the doors opened to the lobby.
Then she let go, and stepped out into the evening, and went home to her rented room.