Chapter 7
It was far enough into spring that the flowers on the dogwood trees along the harbor block were dropping, and by two o’clock, the petals fluttered down past the windows whenever the wind moved through them.
Cordelia had the quarterly figures open and had gone through them twice, writing and scratching out notes as she went down the list. She glanced at the clock.
Remy was dropping by the office at two-thirty.
At a quarter past, her daughter’s voice rang through from the antechamber.
Early, which was Remy’s style. She ran ahead of schedule for the things she cared about and arrived precisely on time for everything else.
Cordelia couldn’t make out the words, only the quick, easy sound of them.
Wren’s voice threaded lower underneath. Something Remy said turned into a laugh.
Cordelia capped her pen and went to the door.
Remy stood at the corner of the desk with a brown leather portfolio against her side, in a soft dress in periwinkle blue.
Remy had already gotten Wren talking, and Wren, whom Cordelia had not once in three weeks seen caught off guard, was half-turned up from the desk toward her with the look of someone picking a conversation back up rather than starting one.
Remy had this effect on people, and Cordelia had stopped being surprised by it a long time ago.
“You’re early,” Cordelia said.
“Since when am I not?”
Remy crossed the room and wrapped both arms around her, holding her a few seconds longer than usual.
Remy always held on longest. When she stepped back, the light reflecting off the water was full on her face, and her eyes were suddenly Eleanor’s—dark and level, staying trained on Cordelia past the point of comfort.
Cordelia had never quite learned how to be stared at by Remy. She looked at the portfolio instead.
“Come in. Do you want anything?”
“Wren’s bringing me some water,” she said lightly.
So, Remy had sent Wren to the executive kitchenette. Cordelia stepped aside to let her daughter through to the office ahead of her. Wren came back with the glass as they reached the door and held it out. Remy took it, and there was a small smile shared between them. Cordelia brushed it off.
“Thank you,” Remy said, then took a sip.
Wren smiled again and went back to her desk, and Cordelia shut the inner office door.
Remy took the left chair opposite from the desk, the one that she had sat in since she was old enough to come in after school and wait out the afternoon with a book or homework.
Remy set the water on the edge of the desk and placed the portfolio in her lap.
It was thicker than Cordelia had expected, its edge feathered with the colored tabs Remy used when she was annotating something closely.
Cordelia came around the desk and sat in the chair next to her. “Go ahead.”
Remy looked at her, then opened the portfolio.
For the first few minutes, Cordelia only listened to Remy’s presentation.
It was about water: the towns too small to protect themselves from what the next twenty years were going to do to them and the money that only ever showed up after the flood instead of before it.
Remy had spent over a month, by the look of the tabs, working out how to get it there first. She talked fast, which she only did when she believed deeply in something, and she was half out of her chair, turning the pages face-out on her knee for Cordelia to see.
Cordelia let her finish before asking any questions.
“Who's on the hook when the first town says yes and then can't keep up?”
“Not the town.” Remy said it fast, as if she had anticipated and practiced answering that exact question.
“That’s the whole point of building it this way.
The second the people who live there are the ones on the hook, it’s over.
No mayor signs their name to that, and they’d be right not to.
So they’re not on the hook. We are. If a place falls behind, it comes to us to bail them out instead of showing up on someone’s water bill. ”
It was the right answer, and the one Cordelia would have landed on herself.
Remy led with the people in the town in the center.
Cordelia had spent thirty years leading with money and profit so that one day she could afford not to.
She stayed still, giving away nothing, and asked the harder question.
“And what about when the council turns over? Three years in with new people, and they want nothing the last council touched. What then?”
“Then, by then it’s clear that it’s either working or it isn’t.
” Remy adjusted the portfolio on her lap.
“If we’ve done it right, it’s already paying for itself, and nobody wants to be the one who killed the thing that’s keeping their city dry.
And if we’ve done it wrong, well, then they should pull the plug.
I’d rather learn that in year one than year six. ”
Cordelia sat back. Her daughter had an answer for everything, and she felt a deep pleasure in being outpaced by someone, much less someone she had raised and taught everything she knew.
She said it was good, that it was better than good.
It was the kind of proposal that she would have been glad to hear from someone twice Remy’s age.
She watched her daughter tuck her chin the same as she had at eight years old, holding her whole body still and taut as the compliment fully settled somewhere deep within her.
Remy flipped back to another page to explain something, and somewhere during it, Cordelia’s mind left.
She didn’t choose it. Remy was saying something about the towns that would come once the first ones proved it could be done.
One minute, Cordelia was present with her, and the next she wasn’t.
She was mentally at the coastal house. The three days she had blocked off at the end of the week, the quiet work that had to happen there before anything else could be figured out.
She’d asked Wren on Tuesday, quickly, before she could hear how it sounded.
It was legitimate work and the deadline to finish pressed against her, but that’s not why the weekend had been lodged in her chest since she had brought it up, surfacing in the quiet moments of the day when she couldn’t easily distract herself from her thoughts, like while she stood at the elevator bay or while brushing her teeth.
She hadn’t looked forward to anything in a long time.
In fact, she couldn’t remember the last time she had wanted a day to come faster than it would, not since there had been someone to come home to at the end of the day.
She had let that go with Eleanor and had been glad to. It was simpler that way.
“—which is the part I’d want you on,” Remy said.
Cordelia snapped back her attention and filled in the gaps. “The first three.” It was the right guess, or near enough, because Remy nodded and continued without catching her lapse.
The second time, she was looking at the closed door.
Or more accurately, she was staring through the closed door.
The room beyond was quiet, and she wasn’t needed anywhere else besides right here with her daughter, who sat next to her lit up like this.
Cordelia brought herself back and made herself hold the pages that were warm where Remy had held them.
Remy talked about the project as something that would still be growing in three years, even five: the bigger role she’d have by then, the version of the firm she wanted to help build.
She was planning a future here, out loud, across from her mother.
Cordelia gripped the pages harder until they started to crinkle in the middle.
Remy didn’t know there wouldn’t be a firm to build it in, not the way she envisioned. Not with Cordelia in it.
Then Remy stopped speaking, and it took a second or two before the silence reached Cordelia. When it did, Remy was staring at her.
“You went somewhere,” Remy said, no malice in her tone.
The old reflex surfaced first, smooth as ever: give her back the last thing she said, show her you were present. “The towns that come later, once the first ones prove it,” Cordelia parroted back.
“I know.” Remy’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile. “You’ve been doing this since Mom died. Going somewhere the rest of us can’t come after you. For eight years, I’ve watched you check out then come back like you were never gone.”
Cordelia knew she did this. She just didn’t know there was someone who was watching, someone who was keeping a count.
“And for a long time,” Remy continued, “I stopped noticing. It was just how you were.” She gave a small shrug. “But you’ve been around more this year, more present, so now when you go, I actually miss it.” She paused and breathed in deeply. “Because there’s finally enough of you around to miss.”
Cordelia had a line she had been using for years to reassure people, some easy version of I’m fine. She reached for it, but found it wasn’t there so she said nothing. Remy, to her credit, didn’t jump in to fill the quiet; she just waited. Cordelia looked down at her lap.
“It’s okay,” Remy said, and let her off the hook. She stood and wrapped her arms around her mother from the side, her cheek pressed firmly against Cordelia’s hair. The ring on her right hand was cool against Cordelia’s collarbone for a second.
“I’ll send you the rest of what I’ve got,” she said as she straightened up. She slid the papers back into the portfolio. “There’s no rush, honestly. Read it whenever you have a chance.”
“I will,” Cordelia said, standing up and brushing her pants before sitting in her chair.
At the door, Remy turned back. “It’s good, though. Right? Tell me it’s good.”
“It’s the best thing you’ve brought me.”
Remy grinned and it reached the corners of her eyes and crinkled them. “Good.” She left, and the door clicked shut behind her.
Remy had left her water glass on the edge of the desk, still half full, a print from her thumb clouding one side.
Cordelia didn’t get up right away. The whole restructuring plan had been created around not hurting anyone.
It was the part Cordelia had been privately most proud of.
A year and a half of careful work, making sure the ground stayed solid under every person who had trusted her with a career, that the people who had given her their working lives still had stability when the changes came.
No one would ever thank her for it, but it was never about getting applause.
What hurt was that she had thought of her thousands of employees but had kept Remy to the side.
That wasn’t quite true, though. She thought about Remy constantly.
She just never let herself follow it to the end, to the thing that had just happened in this room—Remy laying out five years of her life at a firm that wouldn't be Cordelia's to give much longer, while she sat there and told her it was good.
She had accounted for everyone but her daughter.
The feeling rushed up under her ribs before she could get ahead of it, and her eyes stung. She had been looking at the glass again without meaning to, and she made herself stop. She was not going to sit here and do this. She had a call at three-thirty.
Cordelia stood up and walked out. Wren was at her desk with her earbuds in and her eyes on the screen, and she didn’t look up when Cordelia went past. Cordelia didn’t slow down to find out whether she would.
The conference room was empty, the console already illuminated for the call. She went in, closed the door, and sat at the head of the table. She took a deep breath before picking up the receiver.