Chapter 15
Cordelia made it two steps into her office, still turning over the auditors' last question, before she noticed that Wren was in the room and not at her desk in the antechamber. She sat very straight in one of the guest chairs at the desk, a blue folder closed and squared in front of her.
Cordelia stopped. She had left that folder open on her desk not twenty minutes before.
She'd had it out since half past six, going over a last change to the contract before her attorney called, and she'd been gathering the pages to lock it away when Veronica peeked her head in to let her know that the auditors were waiting for her down the hall.
She had gone, leaving the papers there, because she was only going to be a few minutes.
Ten tops. And ten minutes was all it had taken.
She had spent a long career learning to read a room in the second it took to walk into one, and this one was an easy read.
Wren had her thumb pressed into the inside of her own wrist, over the strap of the old watch, hard enough to whiten the skin, the thing she did when she was keeping herself very still.
Her face was expressionless, and that was what told her everything she needed to know.
Wren's face was the most expressive thing about her; it moved ahead of her words, and now it had been shut down and swept blank.
She knows, Cordelia thought, suddenly. The folder was closed now, but Cordelia knew what had been lying on top of it: the signed term sheet.
Northstar's name in the header. The closing date set in October.
Her own signature at the foot of the last page, and beside it a date from last autumn, months before Wren had ever interviewed for the job.
Wren wouldn't have gone digging. That wasn't like her, and she hadn't needed to.
She had spent weeks organizing the papers that informed the information on this one, every one of them dressed as a restructuring, and a single look at the real thing—the word sale where the word restructuring should have been, the buyer with a name, the date that came before her own first day—would have told her the rest in one glance.
She had probably understood the whole situation while standing up, right there at the desk.
And then she must have closed the folder and sat down in the chair across from Cordelia's to wait because she was too honest to pretend she hadn't seen it and too careful to be the one to say she had.
Neither of them spoke. Out in the larger office, a phone rang twice and stopped, the only sound that broke the silence.
Cordelia stood four feet inside her own door with her hand still on the strap of her briefcase and felt the words and emotions swelling in her chest, complete, needing only to be let out of her.
She knew every word of what she would say.
That it was real. That she had signed it in November and said nothing, all through the winter and the spring, through the weekends at the coastal house when they worked together.
That she was sorry for the silence, for making Wren the one who found it without hearing it from her directly first. It would have taken twenty seconds, and there was no one to overhear.
The only thing in the room that could stop the words was Cordelia herself.
For eight years, she had been unable to reach for a true thing when it mattered; grief had made her that way, slowly, until reaching for someone had stopped being something she knew how to do. She could have told herself that was all this was, and she could have believed it.
But it wasn't. She could feel the words sitting in her mouth.
She could feel, underneath them, exactly how it would go if she crossed the four feet of carpet and spoke them aloud: how Wren's face would break open, the relief in it, and then the worse thing waiting behind the relief, which was that none of it would change a thing in the end.
The page was already signed, and she was still leaving.
The truth would only hand Wren the grief early and set Cordelia's own guilt down on top of hers.
That was the reason she gave herself, standing there.
It was even partly true. She let it be enough.
"You didn't have to wait for me," she said. Her voice came out level, which surprised her. "There's the two o'clock meeting. You'll want time to prep for it."
Something flashed across Wren's face, not hurt exactly, something quieter, as if a small hope she'd been carrying all morning had just been answered. She stood. She didn't slide the folder toward Cordelia, nor did she tuck it out of sight.
"Do you want the handover memo left as it is?
" she said. "It still calls the deal a restructuring.
" Her voice was even and exact, just a normal question about a document.
Under it, though, was the only real question in the room: after their shared time in the coastal house, after all of it, was she going to keep lying to Wren's face?
"Leave it as it is," Cordelia said. "It has to match the slide deck for the board."
"Of course," Wren said and left.
She sat at her desk and wiggled her mouse until the screen flashed. After a moment, the ordinary sounds of her working came back through the open door, the small clicks and intermittent pauses, and work papered over the last four minutes as if they had never happened.
Cordelia put the term sheet back in the safe and turned the lock and worked without stopping until the entire office around her had gone dark and quiet.
Then she called Astoria and got her voicemail a third time in three weeks, and she understood that she had let that friendship fracture over the years by being too quiet, by never being the one to reach out first. She gathered her belongings, stuffing them into her bag, and walked out of the office without turning off the desk lamp.
While she descended to the lobby, she was still enough for the day’s thoughts to catch up to her.
She knew that her silence had settled nothing.
It had only put off the day when Wren had decided she had waited long enough for answers that Cordelia wasn’t sure she could give her.
Cordelia had seen that day coming already, that morning, in the stilled face across the desk. The only question left was when.