Chapter 23 #4
"I did it to her." Wren leaned back against the counter. "To Millie. I moved home and I paid the taxes and did the pharmacy runs. I ran that whole house for three years, and I never asked her for one single thing. Not one. And the worst of it was that she would have given me anything I wanted."
The silence went on long enough that Wren checked the screen to see whether the call had dropped.
It hadn't. She knew what was happening in it.
Lillian would be in the yellow chair by the front window, still as she contemplated her thoughts, and she wouldn't speak until she had the words she wanted.
"She knew," Lillian said, finally.
"What?"
"She knew, little bird. She talked to me about it.
Six weeks before… Well, she said, ‘Lil, when I'm gone, that girl won't ask a living soul for anything.
She'll keep herself very busy and nobody will notice a thing.’" Lillian stopped and started again.
"She asked me to call you every week. She said, ‘Don't wait for her to call you or ask because you'll be waiting a long time.’"
Wren stopped moving. Millie had seen her, really seen her, but never said a word about it to her. She'd gone to Lillian instead and made sure Wren would be looked after when she was gone. "You've been calling me because she asked you to."
"I started because she asked me to. I've kept on because I wanted to, so don't go making it into a favor. You're good company and I'm eighty-two and my friends insist on dying."
Wren laughed, and she wiped her face on her sleeve. "I want to ask you for something.”
"Well, there's a first."
"Come out here and stay with me. You can have the bed."
"Yes," Lillian said. "But in October. I don't fly in summer; it's a nightmare."
"October."
"Now, tell me about the woman."
Wren opened her mouth and shut it again. "I don’t think I’ve mentioned a woman."
"No," Lillian agreed. "You haven't."
They talked until twenty past. Afterward, Wren stood in the kitchen a while, and then she scrolled through her text messages.
The last two new messages in the thread were from Cordelia, from the Saturday before the story broke.
You seemed tired this week. Are you all right?
And four minutes after that, Disregard that. Enjoy your weekend.
She'd drafted no less than eleven answers over three weeks and sent none of them.
She started a twelfth version just now. She wrote that she was sorry for the silence and that none of it had been Cordelia's fault.
She wrote that she understood about that Sunday now, that she knew what it had been, that Cordelia owed her no explanation for any of it.
She got three lines into telling her how easy she was going to make all this.
She read it back and deleted every word.
Then she wrote what she wanted. Friday, your coastal house.
I'll drive myself. She read it three times, wondering how Cordelia would interpret it, and then sent it.
Then she set the phone face-down on the windowsill and walked out of the room, which was harder than sending the text had been.
At four, she folded Millie's afghan over the back of the green chair, put her shoes on, and went out to walk the harbor, leaving the phone exactly where it was.
Chapter 25: Cordelia
"Nine o'clock," Veronica said to Cordelia from the doorway. "Remy's note to the staff goes out with the press release."
Cordelia had written hers on Tuesday and had it ready. Veronica came into the office and went as far as the end of the desk and stopped there, holding a manila folder. "She's been at it since half the morning."
Cordelia looked up from her screen. "Has she asked you to look at it?"
"She has."
"And?"
"It's better than it needs to be."
Remy walked in with her sleeves pushed up, holding a piece of paper. "Petra wants to know if we're doing anything for lunch. I said no. Do we have plans?"
"Good. No, we don’t."
She put the page down on the desk. "That's the note. If you hate any of it, now's the time to tell me so I can revise it. I’m emailing it to everyone in the company in—” she checked her wristwatch—”thirty-five minutes."
Cordelia scanned it first, then read it line by line.
It was only four paragraphs, but Cordelia had taught her to choose every word with intention.
People didn’t want long, rambling notes with no substance.
She smiled in approval after she finished reading it.
Remy had named seven people and put beside each name the project that person had actually done, and she hadn't used the word team anywhere in it. Cordelia instinctively grabbed a pen to sign the memo, but she paused mid-air after clicking the cap. At the bottom of the page, there were already three signatures neatly written and stacked on top of each other: Remy, Lauren, and Veronica. There wasn’t any space for her name, of course there wasn’t, and she mentally chastised herself for falling into old patterns.
She adjusted in her chair and put down the pen.
"It's good," Cordelia said.
"You can put something on the end. If you want to," Remy said. No doubt she had noticed the automatic action.
The document Cordelia had written on Tuesday was still open behind her. She closed it without reading it again.
"No. It's yours. It’s important that it’s your voice."
"Okay." Remy picked the page back up.
"Together or after?" Veronica asked.
Cordelia almost spoke up, but noticed Veronica had turned and directed the question to Remy instead.
"After," Remy said. "Give people a few moments to read the memo and let it sink in." Remy was already talking to somebody in the corridor before she was fully through the door. Veronica went after her, tapping the folder twice against the frame on her way out.
The press release went at nine, and four minutes later, Remy's email arrived in Cordelia's inbox with everyone else's, addressed to the whole company. She read it a second time. Nothing in it had changed. Thirty years of writing these, and she had never once been on the receiving end of one.
Petra put four calls through to Remy and two to Veronica.
At eleven, she came in to ask whether Cordelia wanted anything brought up, and Cordelia said no.
Petra stood there a moment as though she had expected a different answer before she went out again.
The press coverage was accurate and dull.
A woman on the Cultural Foundation board wrote to ask, very gently, whether this meant that she was ill, and Cordelia wrote back that she was in excellent health and would see her in September.
At twenty past eleven, she opened her calendar to find out what was next, but the afternoon was empty and so was the following week and so was the week after that. Veronica had cleared them in June after Cordelia had asked her to.
Wren's message had come on Sunday afternoon: Friday, your coastal house, I'll drive myself.
Cordelia had written back that she'd be there.
Nothing had come since. Seven words, and not one of them said whether Wren was driving up to start something or to finish it, and she had decided on Monday to stop reading it and had read it most days anyway.
She read the message again now and put the phone in her pocket.
At half past eleven, she walked down to the room that had been the dedicated conference room for the sale negotiations since October.
Remy had paper laid out in piles along the whole long table.
Lauren was at the far end with a phone cradled against her shoulder and somebody's breakfast going cold in its paper beside her.
"I'm going," Cordelia said, poking her head into the conference room.
Remy looked up. "Okay. If anything comes in this afternoon, Veronica can handle it."
"I know," Cordelia said.
Lauren stood up with the phone still against her shoulder, which nobody had asked her to do, and which she had plainly meant as a courtesy and which came out closer to a salute. Cordelia nodded at her, and Lauren sat back down and went on with her call.
She could have gone without saying so. She had, for years, and it had never once occurred to her that anybody in this building noticed.
She stayed in the doorway a second longer than the conversation needed, and Remy came around the end of the table and hugged her, hard and fast, and was back in her chair before Cordelia reached the corridor.
She lifted her coat off the back of her own door and pulled open the top drawer of the desk out of habit. There was nothing in it she needed. She looked back once, then walked to the elevator bay. She went down to the garage and drove away into the middle of a working Friday.
The cliff road ran dry and nearly empty.
She left the radio off. The last time she had made this drive, she’d had a call scheduled for the whole trip and she didn’t pay attention to the view of the coast on her left.
Come to think of it, she couldn’t remember a thing she’d said on the call either.
She drove north for two hours with the sun reflecting off the water hard enough to hurt, and she stopped in the next town over for crab, bread, and a bag of lemons.
By twenty past four, she had every window on the water side open, and the house was still colder inside than out.
Out on the south side of the house, the parsley had gone leggy.
The beans she'd put in ten days ago were sprouted and starting to lean, so she tied them to the stakes she'd driven in back in June.
Weeds had come back through the far garden bed.
She pulled them and left them in a pile at the end of the row.
The trowel lay under the eaves where she'd left it on Wednesday, out of the rain.
She went inside, leaving her dirty shoes by the back door, and washed her hands in the kitchen sink.