Chapter 14 #2
Nobody hid a succession. A succession came with a press release, a photograph, eighteen months of speeches, a party with a cake and somebody standing up to talk about legacy.
Cordelia wasn’t doing any of that, and Wren still didn’t know why she was the only person who was able to handle sensitive documents when she had only been at the firm for three months.
There was one more question after that one, and she was already most of the way to it, and her heart was going hard, and she thought: if I ask it, I'm not who she thinks I am.
"Wren."
She came up out of it so fast the room tilted. Cordelia was still looking at the page. She had her glasses on and one hand flat on the paper. The quiet went on long enough that Wren heard the refrigerator start humming in the kitchen.
"The May pages," Cordelia said, finally. "Have they been reconciled?"
"Yes."
"Good." She turned the page.
Wren sat there with her pulse hammering her throat and waited for Cordelia to reveal everything to her, but she stayed quiet and kept working.
About an hour later, Cordelia stood up. She went into the kitchen and stopped at the counter without running the tap or opening a cupboard.
Wren watched her from the table, following Cordelia’s eyeline, and saw she was looking at the wine rack.
She stood there a while. Then she came back and sat down and picked up the next page, and read three lines of it before she said, not looking up, "It's later than I thought."
"It's half past seven," Wren confirmed.
"Yes." She took her glasses off. "That's enough for tonight."
Wren saved the file and closed the laptop.
She stood and felt how sore her back was, then stretched her torso long as she looked out the window.
At some point, the sun set without her noticing, and the only lights came from the half moon and stars.
The wind had picked up hard enough to move the branches at the tree line and the water below the headland thrashed against the rocks.
Cordelia crossed to the kitchen. She went to the rack and put her hand on a bottle in the second row and stopped and stood there with her back to the room. "Hungry?”
“Yes,” Wren said, walking into the kitchen. “I can help. What would you like me to do?”
"It’s okay. You've been working all day."
"So have you."
Cordelia looked at her for a second, and then she pulled open the refrigerator and took out a paper-wrapped package and set it on the counter. "Fine. Four cloves of garlic, sliced, not crushed."
Wren found a board and a knife and started on the garlic.
The paper the fish had come wrapped in was folded on the counter beside her.
She knew the shop. It was on Ludlow, two blocks from the office, and there was a cooler on the floor by the pantry with the ice still sitting in it.
She kept slicing and didn't say anything.
Cordelia dropped the fish.
"It's fine," Wren said.
"It's on the floor."
"Five-second rule." Wren shrugged.
Cordelia looked over her shoulder at her. "That's not a rule. That's a thing people say so they can eat off the floor." She rinsed it and put it in the pan anyway.
Wren had never seen her like this. Three months of a woman who never said anything she hadn't decided to say, and here she was, arguing about eating off the floor with her sleeves shoved up and her glasses off. She looked almost… happy.
"You're slicing that too thin," Cordelia said.
Wren looked down at the cutting board and the growing pile of garlic. “I sliced it like you asked.”
"I said sliced. I didn't say translucent."
Wren looked up at her and held her eye contact. "Then it'll burn, and you'll have something to be right about."
Cordelia made a low growling sound in her throat and turned back to the pan. "Slice it thicker."
Wren smirked and sliced it thicker.
The first gust came up under the porch and something out there started knocking against the boards, and the rain hit the west windows all at once, and they both looked up.
"That wasn't in the forecast this morning," Cordelia said.
"Yes, it was."
Cordelia turned around.
"There’s a storm warning through Sunday," Wren said. "Gusts up to fifty miles per hour. They said everywhere along the coastal road would probably lose power."
"You knew that Thursday."
"Wednesday,” she clarified.
"And you drove up anyway."
"You asked me to."
Cordelia turned back to the pan. She moved the fish once and put the spatula down. "That isn't why you came."
Wren stood there with the knife in her hand and didn't answer, because there was nothing she could have said that wasn't true. Then Cordelia wiped her fingers on the towel and went to the rack and reached past the front row.
Wren knew what the rack was. Cordelia had told her in April that Eleanor had chosen every bottle in it, and Cordelia hadn't changed a single one.
She'd said it lightly, then she'd opened a white and talked about her for an hour.
Tonight, she didn't say anything at all.
She just took a bottle from the second row and wiped the dust off it with the towel.
The label had gone soft at one corner. Whoever put it there had been saving it for something.
Cordelia opened it and poured two glasses and set one down in front of Wren.
"Thank you."
"It should have been drunk years ago." She was looking at the pan. "It's probably ruined."
It wasn't ruined. Wren knew nothing about wine, but she could still tell that much.
She drank it and didn't ask about the bottle or what Eleanor had been saving it for.
They ate at the same corner of the long dining table since the rest of it was still covered under the many files.
Cordelia asked about Mildred, and Wren told her about the ferrets.
There had been two of them, and her grandmother had named them after senators.
Cordelia laughed so suddenly that she put a hand over her mouth. "Why senators?"
"She said they had the faces for it."
"That's slander."
"She was ninety-one, and she said whatever she liked. It was the best thing about her."
Cordelia turned her glass on the table. "What was the second best?"
"She never asked me why I was there."
Wren hadn't meant to say it. She heard it land. Cordelia stopped turning the glass and looked at her. Wren wasn’t sure if the torrential rain had suddenly increased its fervor or if it just sounded louder in their silence.
"Wren?"
"Yes?"
When Cordelia opened her mouth, the lights flickered then winked out. They came back a few minutes later, dimmed and then fully bright. The refrigerator shuddered on again, and the wind came across the headland and something on the porch went over.
Despite there being a dishwasher, they cleaned the dishes by hand—Cordelia washed, Wren dried.
Cordelia had her sleeves shoved past the elbow and her forearms submerged in the water, and the steam came up off the water into the loose part of her hair at the temple.
She pushed the hair back with her shoulder.
Wren dried a plate and set it in the rack and took the next one, feeling the heat off Cordelia’s arm and the wet cotton of her shirt where it had soaked through at the front.
"You didn't eat much," Cordelia said.
"I ate."
"You moved it around the plate." She handed over a glass to Wren.
Their fingers brushed against each other on the stem and neither of them made anything of it.
It happened again on the next one. The third time, Cordelia's fingers stayed where they were a moment past the point of the handover and then let go.
Wren dried that glass very slowly and set it down without looking at her.
The wind took something on the porch and rolled it the length of the boards. Neither of them looked up.
Wren became aware, somewhere in the quiet, that the pan in the sink had already been washed. She had watched it go in. Cordelia was doing it again, unhurried, running the sponge over the same clean surface, her head down. She wasn't going to look over at Wren.
"Cordelia."
She stopped. For a second, nothing happened at all, only the water running and the rain slanting hard against the window. Then Cordelia set the pan down in the sink, gently, and left her hands where they were, under the surface of the water, and said, "Wren."
"I'm here." Her voice came out quieter than she had planned.
She turned her head, just enough that Wren could see the side of her face, and it was there, whatever it had been all night, at the table and at the wine rack and over the plates. It was right there and it was enormous and she was trying to get it out.
Ask her.
It had been sitting in Wren since the afternoon, and she could have said it in one breath. What am I building? Who is it for?
But she didn't. Cordelia had chosen her because she was the woman who did the work without asking questions. That was what she was in this house. If she asked, she'd stop being who Cordelia needed her to be. Wren put the dish towel down on the counter and let the urge pass. Eventually, it did.
"I didn't bring you up here for the file," Cordelia said.
"I know."
"You're not surprised?"
"No."
Cordelia lifted her hands out of the water.
She dried them badly on the towel over her shoulder without fully turning around.
Wren looked at the back of her neck, at the two inches of skin below her hair and above the collar, and she was close enough to put her mouth on it.
The desire was overwhelming. She closed the last of the distance and stopped near enough that the heat came through the back of Cordelia's shirt, near enough to feel Cordelia inhale then hold it without exhaling.