Chapter Twenty-Four
Cait
She left at six-fifteen.
Not because she wanted to. Because she had forty-three retraining confirmations and seventeen outstanding and a City College coordinator who sent emails at seven in the morning and expected replies before eight, and because staying would have required a conversation she was not ready to have before coffee.
He was awake when she got up. She had not been certain he would be, but he was, lying with one arm behind his head and watching her find her coat with the particular patience that was simply how he was in every context she had encountered him in.
"Tuesday," she said, from the doorway.
"Tuesday," he said.
She left.
She walked home. Six blocks was not far and it was early enough that the city was in its quiet mode, the streets mostly empty, the sky above the buildings going from black to the particular deep blue that preceded dawn in November.
Her breath made small clouds. Her coat was adequate.
She walked with her hands in her pockets and did not hurry.
She was not sorry. She had been testing herself on that question since the bar on Randolph Street, the specific discipline of honesty she applied to everything, and the answer was consistent: no.
Not sorry. Not alarmed. Not confused about what it was or what she had chosen.
She had chosen it with the same clarity she chose most things, which was the clarity of someone who had been thinking about it for three weeks and had waited until she was certain before moving.
What she was, she decided by the time she reached her street, was awake in a way that was different from the three weeks before it.
The kind of awake that came from having resolved a tension that had been running in the background of everything: the meetings and the reports and the corridor and the wobbling desk and the intervals of warmth from the radiator.
All of it had been underscored by this, the thing she had been keeping at the back of things, and now it was at the front, and the rest of her life did not look smaller for it.
She made coffee. She sat at the kitchen table. She opened her laptop and replied to the City College coordinator at six fifty-eight, which was two minutes ahead of schedule.
She confirmed the remaining seventeen retraining spots by ten o'clock.
She called Petrov at noon to give him the Kelleher update, which he received with the equanimity of a man who had been in this work long enough to take good news with the same steadiness he took the other kind.
"And Knox," Petrov said. He said it the way he said things when he already knew the answer and was asking as a formality.
"Knox is doing his job," she said.
"Caitlin."
"He's doing it well," she said. "The Kelleher connection came partly from his analysis of the production specs. We work well together."
A pause that contained several things Petrov had decided not to say. "The members trust you," he said. "Whatever you're doing, keep trusting yourself on it."
"I always do."
"I know," he said. "That's why I said it."
She hung up and looked at her legal pad, which was open to the page where she had written not competing and left it. Below it, after a moment, she wrote: something else entirely.
She looked at that for a moment. Then she drew a line under it and turned to a fresh page and wrote Kelleher at the top and got back to work.