Chapter 18 #3
She went out, and Wren sat where she was.
Cordelia had known since April. She'd known this morning.
She'd known in the car. And she hadn't said a word about any of it. Not to Wren, who had built the evening. Not last week, not this week, not at the coast. She stood up and straightened the cards on the clipboard, giving her hands something to do while she processed the information she’d been told.
Then she went back out to the floor and called dinner.
Wren ate half a roll standing at the staff station while three hundred and four people found their seats. Table four filled in. Remy took the empty chair without being asked, said something to the woman on her left, and got a laugh out of her.
A few minutes before nine, Remy came along the back wall with two glasses and set one down on the staff station.
"I'm working."
"It's water," Remy said.
Wren thanked her and didn't pick it up. Remy stayed where she was. She turned and leaned against the end of the table with her back to the room, which was something she'd got from Cordelia, and looked out at the tables.
"You haven't sat down all night,” Remy finally said.
"There wasn't anywhere to sit."
"There’s a chair at table four."
"There was," Wren said. "You're in it now."
Remy laughed. Then she stopped, and started again, and it came out worse.
"Okay, I don't know how to say this without it being strange, so I'm going to say it badly." She was still looking at the room. "You have my number for work things, but… you could use it for non-work things any time."
Since the middle of May, the two of them had been the only people in that building who knew what was happening to the company, and they had dealt with that by never once talking about it. And it had worked, for now at least.
"That's kind of you," Wren said.
"So that's a no."
"It's a thank you."
"Okay." Remy pushed off the table. She got two steps away and turned back. "Drink the water." She went back to table four. Wren stood there for a moment. Then she picked up the glass and drank about half of it and set it back down.
Constance stood behind the dais at nine on the dot. She thanked four people, made a joke about the parking, and had the room quiet and rapt without seeming to try.
"This fall," she said, "the Foundation will open the Eleanor Dalisay Acquisitions Fund."
Wren stood at the back wall and didn't watch the dais at all. She watched table two, where Cordelia sat with a neutral expression, and she caught the moment when Cordelia understood that she wasn’t expected to be in the spotlight.
Cordelia's shoulders came down to a resting position, and she clapped for her wife's fund from her chair, in the dark, along with everyone else.
She didn't look for Wren. Not during it, and not after.
Wren hadn't expected her to. She'd had her second by the auction wall, and she'd known it was all she was getting tonight.
What surprised her was that it didn't hurt.
She stood at the back of a dark room and watched the woman she was in love with sit through the event, and she felt something close to relief because Cordelia was going to get to the end of the night without having to be gawked at.
The auction closed at ten, and the room started emptying at twenty past. Wren made sure the ending of the event went just as smooth as everything else.
She had the coats brought out and the last three cars called, and she found Isabella Montgomery's wrap folded on a chair at table eleven where somebody had left it.
She was standing at the service door with the schedule still in her hand when Dot came and took it from her.
"Go home," Dot said. "You were superb. Better yet, come work here."
"I'll think about it."
"I'll ask you again in September." She smiled and let out a little laugh.
When Cordelia left, it was nearly eleven. She was standing in the middle of a group of women, saying goodnight to four people at once. Wren watched as Cordelia walked out, looking lighter than she had in a month.
The service corridor ran behind the atrium's east wall. Concrete, painted gray, strip lights the whole length that would stay illuminated until somebody cut them at midnight. Wren walked down it toward her car.
Her phone buzzed at the second door. Thank you for tonight.
She stopped walking. Three dots came up, went away, came up again.
The earrings were Eleanor's. I should have told you earlier.
Wren stood under the strip lights with the bag pulling at her shoulder and read it until she'd stopped taking it in.
She typed, I know. She looked at it. It wasn't really true. She'd guessed it, but guessing wasn't the same thing as being told, and Cordelia deserved better than being let off that easily. She deleted it.
She typed, Thank you for telling me. She deleted that too.
It was what you wrote to someone who told you things.
What she wanted to write was, tell me about her, but she didn’t send that either.
She stood there with her thumb over the screen until the phone dimmed and darkened, then she put it in her bag and shoved the door open with her shoulder.
The night was still warm, and she could smell the brine from the salt water.
She got to her car and sat in it for a while without starting it.