Chapter 16
The kettle had boiled and gone quiet, yet she still had her coat on.
She'd come home from work at six-thirty, put the water on, and then stood in the middle of the small kitchen with her keys in her hand while the kettle rolled and clicked itself off and cooled again on the ring. Despite all that, she didn’t actually make a cup of tea.
She still had Millie's bag on her shoulder, the brown leather gone pale at the corners, the too-long strap she'd never once shortened to her own height.
She looked at the kettle for a while, then she picked her keys back up off the counter, where at some point she must have set them down, and let herself out.
Outside, the air was warmer than any night in late May had a right to be.
The street had emptied out for the night, and a bus expelled exhaust at the corner as it turned.
Under the neon pharmacy sign, a woman squatted on the balls of her feet as she talked to her dog.
And past the railings, the harbor had gone flat and black, the water uncharacteristically still.
The apartment was too small to be inside of.
That was the reason she told herself after she had walked the first block, and it was even true.
She told herself she just needed to move.
She walked east, along the harbor, past the shuttered seafood place where she saw two women sharing a bottle of wine, past the little park with its lilacs and foxgloves, out to where the town gave way to warehouse blocks and the streetlights thinned.
Somewhere deep inside, she already knew where she was going.
She massaged the softest part of her wrist as she walked.
She'd been useful all day, and usefulness was its own anesthetic.
You didn't feel much while you were busy being needed.
And Wren had been needed since nine that morning: clearing the inbox, building the deck for the two o'clock meeting, and fielding questions and requests from office staff.
It all helped her stay half a step ahead of whatever she was feeling the entire time.
But that only worked as long as someone needed the next thing, and at six, she walked out of the lobby into an evening where there were no requests, no tasks to do, no way for her to stay occupied, and it all caught up to her.
She wanted it to feel like a betrayal, a thing done to her, something she could clearly point to.
But the coast came back instead. The morning when she was awake before Cordelia because she couldn't sleep in a strange bed, standing in that cold kitchen fighting the unfamiliar machine so coffee would be made when Cordelia came down.
She'd been happy doing it, all of it. That was what turned her stomach and stung now—that she'd been happy.
She came up on the purple door before she'd let herself admit that was where she'd been going the whole time.
The bay window was warm from the candles and jovial conversations.
The chalkboard stood out on the sidewalk with the night's specials etched on it, and she didn't stop to read it.
She pushed the door open. The bell rang out its one clear note, and she went inside.
The door swung shut behind her and cut the cool harbor air off at the threshold.
In the cafe, the sounds and scents enveloped her and overloaded her senses at first. There was the bitter smell of coffee and something rosemary-heavy in the oven, and the low hum of a dozen conversations were all running at once.
After the empty street and the even emptier apartment, the racket landed on her almost like a kindness.
She stood on the mat a second and let it wash over her.
It had been like that the first time, too, on the spring night she'd finally pushed through the purple door after passing it since February.
She'd walked in not knowing a soul, and Lavender had taken one look at her, set something small and dark in front of her, and told her nobody in the room needed a thing from her.
It was the first time since after Millie's funeral that Wren had felt like a person instead of a set of arrangements.
She'd found her way back once since. This was the third time she had been here and by far the worst night of the three.
Lavender was behind the bar in a dark blue sweater and her silver rings, cutting a lemon into wheels, and she glanced up when the bell chimed.
She read Wren in about a second, the way she read everyone, and didn't make her perform being fine.
"There you are, love," she said, low, and tipped her chin toward the room.
At the long communal table, six women were discussing a film animatedly, their hands flying around their faces as one bounced up and down in her chair explaining something.
From the armchairs at the window, a regular Wren half-knew lifted a hand, and Wren returned the gesture with a half-hearted wave of her own.
Wren was three steps in before she saw Remy. She was at the far end of the bar, sitting alone, her dark hair down. A hardcover book laid face-down on the wood, and there was a glass of something pale at her elbow. It looked like she had been there a while.
Something came loose in Wren's memory. The face-down book, the pale wine—she knew this woman from somewhere else besides the office.
That first spring night, this was the stranger who had swiveled around on her stool and initiated a conversation with her.
A friendly local, Wren had thought, and never placed her again.
And all that while, she had been Cordelia's daughter.
Remy looked up, and for a beat neither of them said anything.
Then she lifted two fingers off the bar, not quite a wave but a greeting nonetheless.
Wren tipped her chin back and took a stool a few spots down from her, setting her bag on the one beside it.
When Lavender came down the bar with a questioning eyebrow, Wren opened her mouth to order and found she didn’t know what she wanted.
She'd wanted a drink the whole length of the walk.
Now that it came to choosing one, she couldn't manage the smallest decision in the world.
"Something," she said. "I don't— Honestly, you choose. I'm all out of decisions for one day."
Lavender didn't make her struggle for it.
She reached for the squat dark bottle on the back shelf and poured an amber whiskey in a short glass.
She slid three rosemary crackers alongside it.
"Start there," she said. "Wave if it's wrong.
" Then she was off to the couple at the far end settling their tab.
The liquor was warm and herbal but not too sweet, and it went down easy.
Wren wrapped her hands around the glass and didn't drink much of it.
Down the bar, Remy closed her book over her thumb, stared into the empty air in front of her for a few breaths, and then gave it up, collected her wine, and moved to the stool next to Wren.
"You look how I feel," she said.
Wren huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh. "Rough day."
"Yeah." Remy turned her glass by the stem.
"I keep telling myself Mondays are like this and tomorrow's an ordinary Tuesday.
" She meant it to sound easy, but it missed the mark.
Wren let it go. Everybody walked in here carrying something they wanted to put down for a while; that was half of what the place was for.
They sat in silence for a minute, the community table laughing at something behind them. Then Remy went still and started turning the loose gold ring on her middle finger around and around.
"Can I ask you something, and you're allowed to tell me it's none of my business?"
Wren's stomach flipped then sank. "Okay."
"How long have you known that my mom's selling the firm?"
It came out soft, nearly gentle, and went straight through her regardless. Wren looked down into her drink.
"Since this morning," she said.
That got her. Remy's eyebrows went up a fraction. "This morning?"
"I saw something I wasn't meant to see. I wasn't told, Remy. I don't think anybody was told."
"No." Remy sat back on the stool. "No. That tracks.
" She let out a long breath, and her shoulders lowered a fraction, as if she had put down whatever heavy load she was carrying.
"I've been here for two hours feeling like I made it up.
Like I'm the paranoid daughter who's decided her mother's vanishing into thin air.
I worked it out three weeks ago, and I have not said it out loud to one single person until this exact minute.
" She looked at Wren, close to helpless with it.
"You just confirmed it, and now it’s a real thing that's actually happening. "
"How'd you work it out?"
"Small stuff, mostly. She rewrote my whole comp package so it'd hold up with her gone.
She's been walking Lauren and Veronica into meetings she used to run herself and calling it development.
And three weeks ago, she asked me, completely out of nowhere, whether I'd want the house on the coast someday.
" Remy turned the ring again. "My mother does not ask hypothetical questions.
She was doing her estate planning over brunch and pretending it was something else. "
Wren almost smiled. "That's very her."
"Right? God." Remy shook her head. "Here's the stupid part.
" Her voice stayed level, which was worse than if it had broken.
"I'm not even surprised. She's had one foot out the door for eight years.
Since my mama died she's just been… going.
A little further out every year, disappearing further into the work, and I kept thinking if I was only patient enough, she'd come back around at some point.
And now she's found a way to make leaving official, and I'm meant to be a grown-up about it because it happens to be genuinely excellent succession planning.
" Her mouth twitched upward, not quite a smile.
"And it is excellent succession planning. That's the part that gets me."
Wren had spent her whole life on the other end of a conversation like this one.
She was the fixer, the one who found the right person to call, who said the thing that made everyone feel like the situation was manageable, even if it was just because they had a hot cup of tea.
Everything in her was already reaching for the next step that would turn Remy's grief into a problem with a clear-cut solution.
But there wasn’t a plan, and Remy wasn't asking for one.
She'd said the hard thing out loud to another person, and now she only wanted company while she sat with it.
She had switched bar stools because she had chosen Wren to be that person.
Wren couldn't remember the last time someone had done that for her. Made room, instead of asking.
She thought, absurdly, of the fern. Her second week at the firm, a small potted fern had appeared on the corner of her desk with no note, and she'd assumed it was some onboarding thing until she caught Remy watering it one afternoon without a word.
Wren had buried her grandmother a couple of months before she ever set foot in Hale Capital and had told no one there.
She never worked out whether Remy somehow knew, or whether Remy was just a person who put plants on the desks of people who looked like they needed them.
Either way, the fern was still on her desk, flourishing.
And here was Remy again, handing her something she hadn't asked for and hadn't known she needed. It was almost more than she could take.
Because she'd wanted it to be simpler than this.
She'd wanted Cordelia to be a woman who had just used her, start to finish, so she could be justifiable in her anger and go home to sleep it off.
Instead, she was sitting next to Cordelia's daughter, who had been left first and longest, and who was being gentle with her.
There was no simplicity anywhere in it. There was just this loud, bright room, and Remy turning that loose ring around and around, and Wren being taken care of by the wrong Hale woman.
Or maybe the right one. She honestly couldn't tell anymore.
Remy looked at her a second too long. Whatever she saw—Wren on a Monday night in her work clothes, more undone than a leaked deal could account for—she let it be. She bumped her shoulder into Wren's, once, and left it there for a beat.
"You okay?" she said. "And I mean the kind of okay where you're allowed to lie to me."
"Yeah, I'm okay," Wren said.
Remy accepted it, and Wren didn’t explain further.
After that, they didn't have to fill the quiet.
Remy went back to her book, present without hovering.
Wren drank slowly and let the place go on around her.
People signed receipts, the women at the community table broke out in raucous laughter, and Lavender continued to work the length of the bar, refilling a water here, sliding a plate there, saying something low that made one of the regulars tip her head back and grin, her eyes lit up.
Under all of it sat the prospect of tomorrow.
There was a version of tomorrow where she went into the office, sat down across the desk from Cordelia, and the two of them pretended like they had all day.
The deal would close in October. Cordelia would leave, and Wren would continue being the executive assistant to whoever bought it.
And there was the other version of tomorrow where she didn't go in at all, where she wrote the short and honest email announcing her departure.
Both versions were real, sitting side by side on the bar like two glasses. She certainly wasn't going to choose between them right now. Some things you had to sleep on, or walk off, until your own body told you which way it had already leaned. Hers hadn't yet.
She finished the drink and left a folded twenty on the bar, more than one drink would ever have come to. Lavender caught her eye from down the bar and gave her a small nod. Wren stood and shouldered her bag.
Remy looked up from her book. "Get home safe.” And then, lower: "Thank you. For making it real. I know that's a strange thing to thank somebody for."
"It's not strange," Wren said with a rueful smile, then left.
She stood on the sidewalk a moment while the door settled shut behind her and the bell went quiet, and she truly did not know whether she'd walk through the doors of Hale Capital in the morning.
But she wasn't the only one carrying it now, and she felt a little lighter for that.
She turned toward home and started walking.
She'd decide when she got there or maybe she wouldn't. The morning would come regardless and find her wherever she was.