Chapter 21
The trick with Jo Ferrante was to call her before she called you.
Cordelia had learned that thirty years ago.
She and Jo had started out in the same year, each of them usually the only woman at the negotiating table, and had done deals against, and twice together, each other since.
Working with her twice had taught Cordelia that Jo forgave almost anything except being caught off guard in front of her own board.
So on Monday, before anyone at Northstar could bring the news to Jo, Cordelia brought it to her herself.
Jo went quiet on the line, and then said, “All right, tell me who I need to make unhappy.”
The week was filled with calls like that one.
Veronica turned up the source of the leak by Thursday, through a contact of her own: a junior associate at Renwick & Sable, Northstar's outside counsel, two years out of law school, who'd said something at a partners' dinner she'd had no business saying.
From there, the information had been whispered to a reporter, as it always was eventually.
Tess Novak. Cordelia wrote the name on the pad at her elbow and drew a box around it.
She didn’t decide, then, what the firm owed her, or whether it was even her call to make anymore.
Jo had the associate off the deal by Friday morning.
Dinah handled the reporter, and handled her well: by the time Teague's two days were up she had a better story to offer Annika Lindqvist than a sale nobody would confirm, and Lindqvist took the trade Friday afternoon.
Cordelia listened to Dinah tell it and thought, well, that's the end of that.
Wren was in before her every morning that week and gone after her every night, doing the work of three people without any wasted motion.
Just a series of “of course,” “understood,” and “I'll move the meeting.” Completely professional, and all of it delivered in a voice devoid of warmth.
Each time, some part of Cordelia caught it but put it aside to examine what had gone wrong later, after the crisis had been handled.
She thanked Jo at half past six on Friday and set the receiver down.
Thirty years of this, and it had gone as well as it ever had.
Once, she'd have let herself feel something about a week like this.
But what she felt now was close to nothing.
It didn't trouble her, and she reached for the next task on her list: the weekly memo to write, and the calendar after that, and the thing after that.
A few hours later, she had, miraculously, reached the end of her to-do list, and she couldn’t find anything else to distract herself with.
The office had gone dark over an hour ago, and the coffee Wren had brought in at four had gone cold at her elbow, a film stretching across the top.
She sat looking at it. All week she'd heard the flatness in Wren's voice and set it aside to get to the next call.
There was no next call now and the crisis had been averted, and yet it hadn't gone anywhere.
She couldn't get at what it meant, only that something was wrong.
She shrugged on her coat. In the elevator, the last two messages in her thread with Wren were the two she'd sent the Saturday before the story broke, and Wren had answered neither one. She put the phone away.
At six the next morning, when she was standing in her kitchen, sipping coffee that she couldn’t really taste, the elevator came up.
She heard it through the wall, the car climbing the shaft and settling, and she sat with her hand around the cold cup and couldn't think who it would be. Remy came on Sundays, and she wasn’t expecting anyone else.
Besides, nobody would come this early on a Saturday.
She heard the elevator doors opened and anticipated a knock on the door that never came.
Instead, she heard the faint squeak of the door hinges and the sound of someone crossing the living room with purpose.
Before the visitor stepped into the kitchen, Cordelia already knew who it was.
For twenty years, at least, Astoria had a key.
She had only used it maybe five times, though, and always on a morning like this one, always when Cordelia wouldn't have opened the door if she'd knocked.
Astoria stopped at the edge of the kitchen and took Cordelia in.
Yesterday's clothes. The cup. The dark circles in the hollows of her eyes.
She skipped the polite niceties and crossed to the counter, then poured the cold coffee down the sink.
She rinsed the cup and reached for a filter to make a fresh pot.
The fresh aroma of percolating coffee filled the kitchen, and when the machine beeped to signal it had finished, Astoria set one cup in front of Cordelia, took the other, and sat down across from her at the island.
Cordelia lifted her cup, tilting it toward Astoria in gratitude.
Her hand was shaky, but Astoria said nothing and instead lifted her own cup toward Cordelia like a toast and drank.
"There's nothing in this house to eat, is there?" Astoria said. It wasn't a real question, just an ordinary assumption from a friend who read her all too well over the years. Then she set the cup down. "What do you want, Cordelia?"
Not what happened. Not what are you going to do about the leak.
She knew Astoria read the financial pages every morning as if her life depended on it, and she knew she hadn't come about any of that.
Cordelia reached for the answer she kept ready.
She began to say something about the sale and how the transition behind the scenes was going.
"Cordelia," Astoria said gently, and Cordelia stopped. "That's the firm. What do you want?"
And Cordelia, who had given this woman years of careful nothings, who had sat across a hundred lunch tables from her and said she was sleeping fine, decided to tell her the truth.
"I was going to disappear." Her voice was level, which surprised her. "I've been planning it for the better part of a year, dressing it up as a retirement. I’d sell the firm, hand Remy her piece, and see every last person’s employment was secured. Then I’d go up to the coast and live in the house on my own.” She could hear how sensible it sounded, laid out like that, in order.
"And what is it really?"
Cordelia turned the cup a quarter-turn on the counter to buy herself some time. This was the part that was hard. The rest of it had cost her nothing to say, but this was a level of vulnerability she wasn’t sure she was quite ready for. She took a deep breath anyway.
"Somewhere to go and not be found." Her voice wavered. She waited a moment and tried again. "I don't want to do this. I don’t want to sit across from somebody who can see me and really know me. I made the plan so I'd never have to again."
Astoria took another sip of coffee but otherwise stayed silent. Cordelia was grateful for the space to untangle her thoughts.
"After Eleanor, I decided I wasn't going to need anybody." She was looking at the counter. "And I've spent eight years making sure of it." She had never said any of it out loud, to anyone. She waited to be sorry she'd said it, and she wasn't.
Astoria didn't say I know. She didn't say finally, the way another friend might, to take a little of it back for herself. She looked at Cordelia across the island. "Do you still want to?"
Cordelia didn't answer right away. She looked at the counter, and at the pale light coming up over the harbor, and asked herself the one question she had avoided ever really asking herself, the one question she had been running away from this whole time.
She didn't have an answer ready, but what she felt underneath the murkiness was no.
"I don't think I want what I was planning," she said, finally. "I don't know yet what I want instead. I'll have to work it out." She looked up. "That's the truest thing I've got."
"That's the truest thing you've said to me in eight years," Astoria said.
She knew that Astoria didn't say it to reproach her. She said it like a welcome, to someone who had been a long while gone. They finished their coffee and stood. Astoria walked around the island and picked up Cordelia’s mug and brought it to the sink to wash then place into the dish rack on the counter.
Astoria walked back over and put her hand on Cordelia's shoulder, closing the distance between them.
Cordelia looked up at her, thankful for the physical tether to reality.
"Call me," she said. "I mean it this time.
Not just for our Tuesday lunches, but to talk or to just share space. "
Cordelia knew this time Astoria’s request went beyond polite manners, and she took it as an instruction. She nodded.
“Good.” Astoria turned and let herself out. A minute later, Cordelia heard the gears from the elevator shift as the car descended.
The light had come all the way up over the water while they had talked, and the kitchen had gone bright with it. Cordelia stood where Astoria had left her, in yesterday's clothes, with nothing to fill the morning with to avoid her thoughts.
And then she saw it. She had done something to Wren.
She didn't know how bad it was or what it had cost. She knew only that the flatness from Wren all week had never been an assistant keeping her professional distance.
It was what she herself sounded like and had sounded like for years.
A whole week, she'd looked straight at Wren, and not once seen the woman who had been in her bed two weeks ago and held her while she shook.
It went through her low down, under her breastbone, and stole her breath for a moment.
She couldn’t go to Wren, not right now. It wasn't seven yet, and besides, she had no idea what she would even say. But she was going to have to work out what she wanted, all of it, and then go across the city and say it to Wren's face.
She picked up her phone and opened a blank note. She typed three words at the top of it: What I Want. Then she stayed there with the cursor blinking and didn't look away from it.