Chapter 8
The private road ran a quarter mile through fir trees old enough to close over the top of it, and for that stretch, the light turned green and spotty.
Wren eased the car slowly around bends. She had been driving for two hours already, and the GPS had lost its signal on the cliff road somewhere back and found it again at the turn-off, announcing it with the flat confidence of a machine.
Then the trees opened, revealing a clearing on a low headland, the grass long and silver where the wind moved through it.
At the far end, Wren could see the house, facing the water.
It was older than she had pictured. Cordelia had said there was a guest wing, back in the office, so she expected something a little more modern, something that would fit her idea of Cordelia’s aesthetic.
This was a two-story cedar cottage weathered to a gray color of the rocks below it, with a porch running the entire western side of the house.
The roof was low and settled, and the cottage looked like it was approaching a century old.
Wren spotted a garden that ran the length of the sound wall and had gone all the way to weeds, but the slightly raised beds were still visible, somebody’s old attempt at order holding on underneath the chaos of it.
Cordelia’s sleek, black Porsche was in the gravel driveway.
Wren pulled in beside her and cut the engine.
The chilly wind whipped off the water and stripped the warmth of the long drive off her in one salty pass.
As she walked toward the house, she noticed Cordelia had opened all the windows to let the house breathe and release stale air.
“You made good time,” Cordelia called at her from the porch, lifting a hand in acknowledgement.
“The roads were clear.”
“They usually are.” She carried a canvas bag of groceries against one arm. “There’s more in the car, if you don’t mind.”
Wren didn’t mind. She grabbed the rest of the groceries and her own bag, then walked inside.
She stopped a few steps in the house and scanned the layout: kitchen to the left, a long dining table straight ahead and set lengthwise along the windows with a lovely view of the water, a stone fireplace to the right, and stairs rising at the back into the dark of the second floor.
Indoors, the air was cooler and stiller than the air outside, despite the windows flung open.
They put the groceries away together. Cordelia both knew the kitchen and didn’t.
She went straight to the right drawer for the corkscrew, then opened two cabinets before she found the pots, and once stood with a bag of onions in her hand and looked at the counter as if it had moved on her while she wasn't watching.
A person could know a kitchen by heart and still have to hunt for the pots, if it had been long enough. Wren handed her things and didn't ask.
Cordelia cooked. Onions and anchovies going soft in oil, then garlic, a can of tomatoes, olives, and a spoon of capers.
And at the end, a handful of parsley off the one plant in the garden the weeds hadn’t suffocated.
The smell of it filled the downstairs, and Wren set out two place settings on the wooden dining table.
After Cordelia plated the puttanesca on top of a bed of pasta on both plates, she chose a bottle of white wine from the rack and uncorked it.
They ate with the light going down over the water.
Cordelia asked what she'd thought of a piece that had gone around the week before, some argument about how the small coastal towns would pay for the things that might save them.
Wren had read it on a train and said so, and then she said what she thought was wrong with it, which no one had asked of her in a long time.
Cordelia set down her fork and listened like it mattered.
And Wren, who fed powerful women what they needed and kept the rest, felt herself wanting to keep talking and didn't trust it, but she kept talking anyway.
“You disagree with him?” Cordelia asked.
“He wants to build the structure and let the town grow into it. It’s backwards. A better way is finding out what the town already does and you fund that.” Wren twirled some pasta on her fork. “Bridges to nowhere get built by people who love bridges.”
Time passed easily, the two of them discussing the finer nuances of the article and civil stewardship philosophy.
Wren couldn’t remember the last meal she had eaten that wasn’t standing up or alone or both.
After, they cleared the dishes together.
Cordelia ran the water too hot, but she washed the plates and Wren dried them with a towel she found hanging on the oven door.
By time they had worked down the stack of dishes in the sink, the last hint of twilight disappeared.
Wren passed Cordelia the towel, and she dried off her hands. “The room at the top of the stairs on the right is already made up for you. Let’s come down and start at eight.”
“Thank you. Eight it is,” Wren said.
“Good night.”
Wren picked up her bag still by the foyer and climbed the stairs.
The room was small and plainly decorated: a double bed with a white quilt, a dresser, a side table with a reading lamp, and a window with a view of the ocean just beyond the sheer curtains.
Wren set her bag on the floor and let out a large exhale.
The water was black now, and far down, Wren could barely make out a scatter of lights illuminating houses, small and warm, belonging to people she would never meet.
Around her, the house made its small, strange noises she couldn’t hear during the day.
Wren felt the familiar ache of not having something to do to pass the time or feel useful.
It was just her and the darkness until morning.
Her right hand fiddled with the watch face before she worked loose the wristband and slipped it off.
She stripped down to her underwear and put on her pajamas, then crawled into the bed. Sleep was a long way off.
Fog had swallowed the water by the time Wren came down at ten to eight. The house was cold. Cordelia sat at the long table with coffee already brewed and the files fanned out in front of her, her hair pulled back in a messy bun. She looked up when Wren’s foot hit the bottom stair.
“There’s coffee,” Cordelia said.
“Thanks. I smelled it.”
They worked in tandem. Cordelia read each page slowly, wrote some notes in the margins, and then sorted it in one of two piles. Wren took the piles and made sense of them, this paper behind that one, collated until the documents told a story.
The house warmed by a few degrees as the sun climbed.
The only sounds around them were Cordelia’s pen scratching against the papers and the waves lapping at the rocks below the headland.
By ten, the fog had thinned and the light came in off the water, and Wren found herself in a flow state.
There was a lot to do and Wren moved through it quickly, piles growing at her elbow and cold coffee drunk without fully tasting it.
Twice, Cordelia’s hand crossed into her line of vision to set a page down, and both times Wren’s flow hiccupped for a second before she found it again.
A little before noon, she hit a snag. Three of the contracts overlapped. Each one referenced the other two, and she couldn’t file any of them without a reviewer needing the others for context. There was no good place to start to untangle the thread.
She turned her laptop so Cordelia could see. “These three, each page points at the other two. I can’t put one first without the other two—”
“Don’t order them.” Cordelia set her pen down. “Group them instead. One entry, all three, a note at the top—”
“To read as a set.”
“To read as a set,” Cordelia said at the same time. She looked up at her for a second, then went back to reading.
It was the solution where Wren had been circling but hadn’t landed yet. Her chest went warm and stupid. She pulled the file over and got back to it, faster than before. They ate standing at the counter around one: bread, mozzarella, basil, and the last soft half of a tomato.
Cordelia held her caprese sandwich without eating it and watched the ocean. “You don’t have to feed me.”
“Somebody does.”
Cordelia turned and looked at her. She held the look a beat longer than she needed to, and then she picked up the sandwich and took a bite.
By late afternoon, Wren had stopped being able to keep her mind engaged with the work.
She kept resurfacing and noticed small details around the house: two wine glasses turned over in the rack, the air conditioning that kicked on, and the view that was visible from any point of the room.
It struck Wren, then, that someone had built the place around it on purpose.
She wondered who designed the space and who they had designed it for, then pulled her gaze back to the page.
"That's enough for today." Cordelia pushed back from the table and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. "Leave it. We’ll figure out the rest in the morning."
Wren shut the laptop. Her eyes ached, and her back had set into a bend from the chair. Cordelia was already up and moving toward the kitchen and the wine. They had a whole evening in front of them with nothing left in it that had to be done. That was the part Wren would have to watch.
Cordelia opened a bottle at six and carried it out to the porch with two glasses.
Wren followed. Two low chairs sat facing the water that had gone silver with weather, and sometime in the afternoon Cordelia had wiped the dust off both.
They sat. What was left of the day was thinning out over the water, and the windchill was coming up off it already.
For a while neither of them said anything, and the water settled from chop to a long slow roll. A pair of dark birds came down the coast low to the surface and were gone. Wren drank her wine and let the quiet linger. She was good at that, being easy to sit beside.
"My wife found this place," Cordelia said, her eyes still on the water.
Wren looked over, waiting for her to share more.
"Eleanor and I had wanted somewhere up here for years." Cordelia kept her eyes on the water while she talked. "Talked about it, never did anything. Eleanor was the one who actually went and looked." A pause. "She found it the summer Remy turned twelve."
So Remy was Cordelia and Eleanor’s daughter. She tucked that knowledge away. "How'd she find it?"
"The woman who owned it had just lost her husband.
She didn't want to sell to somebody who'd knock it down for the lot.
" Something moved at the corner of Cordelia's mouth.
"Eleanor sat right there with her for most of the afternoon.
By the time we drove home, the woman had all but pressed the keys into her hand.
That was Eleanor. She had an easy way with people. "
Wren didn't say anything, but she turned a little toward her in the chair. After a moment, Cordelia went on.
"She planted the garden along the south side.
Pretty much all of what's under those weeds now is hers.
" Cordelia turned the glass by its stem.
"The wine downstairs too. She chose every bottle.
I've been drinking my way down the rack for eight years, and I still can't tell one from the next the way she could. "
Wren put it together quietly and all at once: the past tense, and the house bought for two. A wife, gone eight years. She felt the impulse to say I’m sorry rise up in her throat, and she swallowed it. She let Cordelia have her undivided presence instead. "What was she like?"
Cordelia’s eyes went soft at the edges. "Warm. Warmer than I ever managed. People told her things they'd never have told me." She was quiet for a moment. "Twenty-two years. You'd think I'd have picked some of it up from her in all that time."
"Twenty-two years is a long time to be seen and known."
Cordelia looked over at her, like she'd been figured out. "It is," she said, and turned back to the water.
They sat with it. The last of the light waned, and down the coast the first house lights winked on. Cordelia didn't speak to fill the quiet, and Wren didn't either. It was, she thought, the easiest she had been beside another person in longer than she could remember.
"My grandmother raised me," Wren said after a while.
"My mother left when I was three, and Mildred took me, and that was that.
" She shared about Mildred and her life: a librarian for forty-two years, the rent-controlled apartment, then the smaller place a few blocks over when the building sold.
She'd moved back in last year when Mildred’s health started to decline.
The six months she spent looking after her were the most present Wren had been in her own life in a long time.
Mildred went into hospice in November and died three months ago.
"The funeral was small. Her oldest friend gave the eulogy. Lillian, thirty years they knew each other." Her thumb had found the watch face. "I was going to speak. When it came to it, I couldn't get up, so Lillian did mine too."
Cordelia didn't tell her she was sorry either, and Wren understood it now for the kindness it was. In their silence, the darkness wrapped around them. Neither of them moved to go in.
After a time, she asked the thing she had no business asking. "Where's your name from?"
Cordelia was quiet for a moment. "My mother loved Shakespeare. She named me after a daughter in King Lear."
Wren knew the play and the king’s youngest daughter, who was the favorite but then disowned for her unexaggerated love for her father. She didn't say so.
"We should go in," Cordelia said, but she didn't move for a while, and Wren didn't push her to.
When they finally stood, they carried the glasses and the bottle to the kitchen. Wren rinsed the glasses and set them in the rack; Cordelia corked the bottle. At the foot of the stairs Cordelia said goodnight, and Wren said it back and went to her room.