Chapter Twenty-Two
Cait
She was there at seven fifty-five.
The bar was on Randolph Street, a narrow room with exposed brick and a back wall of bottles lit from below and a bartender who had been there long enough to know the difference between someone who wanted to talk and someone who wanted to drink.
Cait wanted to drink, moderately, and to sit somewhere that was not the plant and not her kitchen table, and to see whether the thing that was happening between her and Garrett Knox held up outside the context of the negotiation and the restructure and the room at the end of the corridor.
She ordered a whiskey. She sat at the bar. She did not open her phone.
He arrived at eight-oh-two, which for him was late and which probably meant he had been making himself not arrive early. She found this information useful in a way she did not examine too closely.
He sat beside her. He ordered what she had, which had become a habit of his she had noticed from the restaurant in Pilsen. Not indecision. An efficiency: she had already done the assessment, he trusted the result.
"Kelleher," he said.
"We're not talking about Kelleher tonight."
He looked at her. "All right."
"We talk about work every day. We're in the same building for six months. If we only ever talk about work we will have wasted something."
"Agreed," he said. He turned the glass on the bar, slowly. "Then what."
"Tell me something I don't know about you. Not professional. Not related to the restructure or Ashford Meridian or private equity."
He was quiet for a moment. He did the thing he did with pauses, the considered one, the pause before the thing he had actually decided to say.
"I grew up in Boston," he said. "South End.
My father was an architect. My mother taught secondary school history.
I was the first in my family to go into finance, which my father has never quite forgiven me for, and which my mother regards as a temporary phase I have not yet grown out of. "
"How long have you been in the phase."
"Twelve years."
"And your father."
"Still waiting." He drank. "He draws buildings. He thinks the best thing you can do with your working life is make something that stands up. A thing that people walk into and feel differently for having been in." He set the glass down. "He is not wrong."
She looked at him. "But."
"But I don't build things. I assess them." A pause. "I thought, for a long time, that was a different kind of useful. Finding the accurate picture of a thing. Telling the truth about it even when the truth was difficult."
"You thought," she said. "Past tense."
He looked at his glass. "Meridian is the first time the accurate picture has pointed toward keeping something rather than closing it. I've been thinking about what that means."
She sat with this. Outside on Randolph Street a group of people went past the window, laughing about something, their voices briefly loud and then gone. The bar was warm. The whiskey was good.
"Your turn," he said.
"I wanted to be a musician," she said. "Until I was seventeen.
Piano. I was good but not exceptional, and I had enough self-knowledge at seventeen to understand the difference.
" She turned her glass. "I chose law because it was the closest thing I could find to making an argument that had to be internally consistent.
You can't play a wrong note in law. Either the case holds or it doesn't."
"And the union work."
"Law without the billable hour." She looked at him. "I couldn't do the work I care about and charge two hundred dollars an hour to do it. The math didn't work for me."
"The math," he said, with something in his voice that was not quite irony.
"You find that funny."
"I find it consistent," he said. "You make decisions on what things actually cost. Most people make them on what things appear to cost."
She looked at him. The bar light caught the angle of his face, the same way the parking lot light had, showing something underneath the stillness that was not absence but presence, held.
"The first meeting," she said. "When I walked in late."
"Yes."
"What did you think."
He was quiet for a moment that was longer than the others. "I thought: this is going to be more interesting than I planned for."
"That's a careful answer."
"It's the accurate one."
She held his eyes. "And now."
He turned on the bar stool so he was facing her more fully, one arm on the bar, close enough that she was aware of the warmth of him even through her coat, which she had not taken off because the bar was the kind of place where you kept your coat on and then forgot you had.
He reached out and tucked the same strand of hair back from her face that he had touched in the parking lot, deliberate and unhurried.
"Now," he said, "is considerably more interesting than I planned for."
She kissed him first this time. She leaned forward on the bar stool and put her hand at the back of his neck and kissed him in the amber light of the bar on Randolph Street with the whiskey in front of them and the bartender at the far end polishing glasses with the practiced incuriosity of someone who had seen every permutation of this and considered none of them his business.
He kissed her back with his hand at her jaw and his arm coming around her, and it lasted long enough that she was faintly aware of the temperature of the room changing, or of herself becoming less aware of it, which was the same thing in practice.
When she pulled back he was looking at her with the directness she had seen in the conference room and the restaurant and the parking lot, but there was nothing managed about it now. It was simply what it was.
"I live six blocks from here," he said.
She looked at him. She thought about the discipline, the careful separateness, the things she had been holding at the back of things for three weeks.
She thought about her father saying be careful and about Diane saying keep them separate and about the legal pad where she had written not competing and left it there because she did not know what to do with it.
She had been careful. She had kept them separate. She had done both for three weeks in the same building and it had cost her something she was no longer certain she wanted to keep spending.
"Six blocks," she said.
"Yes."
She picked up her glass and finished the whiskey. She set it down. "Let's go."