Chapter Seventeen
Garrett
He moved into a flat in the West Loop on Saturday.
It was on the fourth floor of a converted warehouse, exposed brick and high ceilings and windows that faced west, which meant the light in the morning was indirect and the light in the evening was the specific orange of a Chicago sunset coming off the lake in the distance.
He had seen three flats in two days. He had taken this one because it had a desk that faced the windows and because the building manager, an older man named Kowalski who wore the same grey cardigan both days Garrett saw him, had not tried to sell him anything about the place. He had simply shown it and waited.
Garrett appreciated that in a person.
He had very little with him. A case of clothes, his laptop, three books he had been meaning to read for six months.
He had arranged for the rest to be shipped from his New York apartment, which he had sublet to a colleague with little ceremony.
New York would be there when he came back.
The West Loop flat would be his for the duration.
He set up the desk first, then made coffee with the machine he had bought on Friday, then stood at the window and looked west at the city laying itself out below him in the late afternoon light.
Chicago in November: the grid of it, the flatness, the lake you could feel without seeing from this angle, the particular grey-blue quality of the sky over the Midwest that he had not grown up with but that he had always found, when he encountered it, more honest than the sky he had grown up with in Boston.
He called Victor to confirm he was settled.
"The term sheet is signed," Victor said. "Dubowski's counsel came back this morning. Effective Monday."
"Monday."
"You're the liaison as of Monday. Quarterly reports to me. First one in ninety days."
"Understood."
"Garrett." A pause. "Don't get comfortable."
He looked at the city out the window. The light was going already, the orange deepening toward something closer to rust. "Six months," he said. "Then I'm back in New York."
"Good," Victor said. And then, after a beat: "The flat is decent?"
"It has a good desk."
"That's all you ever need." Victor hung up.
Garrett drank his coffee. He looked at his phone. He did not send Cait a text because there was nothing to report yet and he did not have the habit of communicating without a reason, or had not had the habit, and was not sure whether he was about to acquire one.
He opened one of the three books. He read four pages and then looked out the window again.
He had been, in twelve years of this work, in eleven cities for extended periods.
Houston twice, Dallas once, Seattle, two separate stints in Los Angeles that had blurred together in his memory into a single long stretch of highway and light.
He knew what it felt like to arrive in a place as an instrument of a decision rather than as a person, to move through a city without it moving through you, to leave without looking back because looking back required an attachment you had not made.
Chicago was doing something different. He was not sure yet whether that was the city or the circumstances or the woman in the small office with the wobbling desk and the intervals of warmth from a radiator that could not be relied upon.
He suspected it was all three in proportions he could not yet separate.
He had not texted her since Wednesday. He had decided this was correct behaviour and had then spent more time than was warranted confirming to himself that it was correct, which was its own kind of information.
Garrett was not, as a rule, uncertain about decisions once he had made them.
He made them from available data, he committed to them, he revisited them only when new data required it.
The decision not to text Cait Doyle on a Saturday was not the kind of decision that should require revisiting.
He texted her on Saturday evening: Settled in. West Loop. Good desk.
Her reply came forty minutes later: Good desk is the main thing.
He looked at this for longer than forty minutes warranted. Then he set the phone down and went back to the book, and this time he read thirty pages before he looked out the window again.
The city was doing what cities did at dusk, going from one version of itself to another, and he sat in the new flat with the good desk and the light going west and thought about Monday the way he had not thought about the start of a work week in a very long time.