Chapter 11
The Atterbury Foundation dinner fell on the first Friday of May, in the small private room at the back of the club where the board had met every quarter for as long as Cordelia had been on it, low-lit and set with the good silver.
By the time the soup came, the room had filled with the leisurely conversation of women who had done this together for years.
Cordelia had chosen the same seat for the last seven of them: Margaret Holloway on her right, lately retired from the federal bench, and Dr. Edith Park on her left, who ran the children's hospital and had been on the board four years longer than Cordelia had.
There was good work on the agenda and no need to perform any of it.
In seven years, she had missed one of these dinners and she had never once left before the coffee.
Between soup and the main course, Margaret asked her perspective on a grant request: a rural county whose one literacy program had lost its state funding and needed eighteen months of the Foundation's to keep going.
Cordelia took the page and read it through before she answered, the numbers first and then the case they were making.
She weighed what the money would buy against what the county could keep running on its own once it stopped.
"It's a good proposal," she said. "They're not asking us to save it, only for time. It'll take eighteen months for it to be self-sufficient, and after that they can carry it on their own. That's the one place out there where those children learn to read. I'd give them the time."
"That's my thought too," Margaret said, and wrote it down.
Cordelia knew she wouldn't be around to see the program flourish.
In eighteen months, she would be gone from this board and every other obligation like it, and she had planned her exit so that no one would suspect a thing until she was already gone.
She thought of the evening they had given Margaret last spring, when Margaret had retired as a federal judge: the lavish dinner in her honor, and the toasts, people saying out loud what she had meant to them.
There would be nothing like that for Cordelia, and she wouldn't have wanted it anyway.
Once the handover was complete, she would mail a letter of resignation to every board and community service role she held and simply stop showing up. Clean break with no fuss.
The conversation turned to the endowment, and Cordelia followed it well enough, though she'd stopped really listening.
She was thinking about the office. Wren would still be there; she'd said she wanted the documents ready before the morning call, and she wasn't the sort to say a thing like that and then go home at six.
So she'd be at her desk with the lamp on and the rest of the eighth floor dark around her.
Cordelia had left her there two hours ago and could picture her now without the least trouble: Wren bent into the lamplight, the screen throwing its pale wash up under her chin, the cold cup of coffee she'd have forgotten an hour ago sitting at her elbow.
Something about it sat just under her breastbone.
She checked the time without meaning to.
Eight-thirty. She made herself come back to whatever Edith was saying.
Between courses she got up, told Margaret she needed a moment, and went down the carpeted corridor past the coat check to the lobby. The door attendant, an older woman named Ruth who had worked that door thirty years, looked up as she came. "Can I get you anything, Ms. Hale?"
"No, thank you, Ruth. I only wanted some air."
She hadn't really wanted air. Standing in the lobby with no reason to be there, she thought how strange it was.
She never did this. Eleven months she'd sat at Eleanor's bedside without once needing to move; tonight she couldn't keep still.
After a minute, she went back and sat down, and the main course arrived as she reached her chair.
She got through the rest of the dinner. Over dessert, Margaret leaned in, her voice pitched low, just for the two of them. "You all right, Cordelia?"
"I'm fine," Cordelia said. "I have an early call tomorrow. I'm slipping out before coffee, if you'll forgive me."
Margaret studied her for a moment. Old friends could read a face.
She nodded and let it go, and she didn't ask again.
Twenty years had taught Astoria not to push at her, and Margaret had the same restraint; it was the thing Cordelia leaned on most in the women closest to her, that they took what she gave them and never went looking for the rest. Usually, she was grateful for it.
Tonight, she only wanted to be gone. She said her goodbyes and was out on the sidewalk by a quarter past nine.
Ruth held the door and wished her goodnight; if she thought anything of the early hour, she kept it to herself.
The night air wafted off the harbor, cool and faintly salty, and Cordelia stood in it a moment before she moved.
She did not want to go home. There it was, the plain fact she'd kept just out of reach all evening.
The penthouse would be dark, and the silence would be exactly as it had been for eight years, and she could not make herself walk toward any of it.
The restlessness was still in her, low and steady under everything, and out on the sidewalk she finally had somewhere to direct it.
Instead of walking home, she went the other way, two blocks north, toward the single lit window on the top floor, where someone was still awake and still working and certain to look up when the door opened.
She told herself she was only going to look in and make sure the work was going smoothly.
Then she let her feet carry her toward the light.
The fog had come in off the harbor while she was at dinner, and the streets had the muffled, underwater quiet the city took on when the marine layer was down, the lamps burning inside their own soft halos.
She went without hurrying and without looking at anything in particular and let herself into the Hale Capital lobby by half past nine, where Thea was at the night desk with her phone and a paper cup of tea and straightened when the door chimed.
"Evening, Ms. Hale."
"Thea." Cordelia crossed to the executive car and rode up alone, watching the floor numbers as she had a thousand times before, and thought, once and without wanting to, of the note she'd sent Wren after the coast: two careful lines thanking her for the work she had done, with nothing underneath them anyone could overanalyze or read into.
She had been good at that for a long time. She was not being good at it now.
The eighth floor was dark end to end except for the one lamp.
Wren kept it at her desk because the fluorescent overheads were much too bright this late, and it laid a long panel of yellow light across the corridor and left the rest to the dark.
Cordelia stepped out into it. She had built this floor.
She had slept fewer hours in her own bed than she had spent standing on this carpet, and in twelve years it had never stopped being the surest thing she owned. She went down it toward the light.
Wren was folded over the desk with her sleeves shoved to her elbow and her hair was loose down her back, a pen moving in the margin of a page, her mug long empty beside her, so far down inside the work that Cordelia stood at the edge of the antechamber a full moment before she was noticed.
The restlessness that had been in her since the sidewalk went out of her all at once, like a breath she'd been holding.
Then Wren felt her standing there and looked up. Her face went quick and competent, already hunting for what might be wrong. "Is everything all right?"
"Fine." Cordelia heard how even her own voice came out. "I couldn't sit through the post-dinner coffee."
It was the kind of answer Wren never pushed at. She accepted it, nodded once, and went back to her page.
Cordelia went past the desk into her office and left the overhead off.
The lamplight from the antechamber filtered in through the open door and lay across the carpet in a long stripe.
She sat down and opened the laptop, because after a late dinner she answered the morning's mail, and she had done that in this chair for years, in the near-dark, while the building went quiet around her.
She answered the first message. She answered the second.
On the third, she stopped, because she had started listening to Wren through the open door.
There was nothing to hear. The tap of the keyboard, the turn of a page, the small complaint of the chair when Wren shifted in it.
Cordelia had worked through that sound a thousand nights without once hearing it.
Tonight, it was all she could hear. She sat with the message open and unread in front of her and listened to her breathing twenty feet away, and the whole long day narrowed down to that.
It had been coming for a while. She could see that clearly now, sitting in the dark where she didn't have to keep her face composed.
She could see the coast in it: the second evening on the porch, when she had told Wren about Eleanor and Wren had only listened, had not reached for a single one of the useless platitudes people offer her, and Cordelia had sat there afterward wanting, absurdly, never to go home.
She could see a dozen smaller evenings than that one.
She had explained every one of them to herself as it happened, and the explanations had held, one after another, right up until tonight, when she had simply run out of them.
She was not going to pretend, at least not to herself, that she'd come up here for the mail. She had come because Wren was here. That was the whole of it, and it had been the whole of it for longer than she could stand to count back.