Chapter Thirty-Eight
Cait
She cooked pasta, which was what she cooked when she needed to think and feed someone simultaneously.
The thinking she needed to do was not complicated.
It was the thinking she had been doing since Sunday morning on the walk home from the West Loop, the kind that was not solving a problem but settling a fact.
Victor had said yes. The flat was permanent.
Garrett Knox was staying in Chicago, in a role that made professional sense and that he had built for himself and that he had told her about before the answer came back, which was its own kind of statement.
She made the pasta. She put wine on the counter.
She set the table that he did not have, which was a folding one she found in the hall cupboard behind a box of his New York files, which he had apparently shipped and not yet dealt with, and she unfolded it and put it in the space between the kitchen and the west-facing windows and set two places.
He came in at seven-fifteen with his coat still on and looked at the table.
"You found the table," he said.
"It was in the cupboard."
"I know. I was meaning to deal with the boxes."
"The boxes can wait." She handed him a glass. "The table cannot. You need a table, Garrett. A desk is not a table."
He looked at the table and then at her, with an expression she had not seen before on his face: something that was close to undone, the stillness fractured slightly, the composure present but thinner than usual over something warmer. "No," he said. "A desk is not a table."
They ate. The pasta was good, she knew it was good because she had made this particular version enough times to know when it had come together correctly, and he said so without over-explaining it, which was how he said everything: directly, without decoration.
"Diane wants to meet you," she said.
He looked up from his plate. "Your supervisor."
"She's been very patient about not asking questions. She's been patient since November. I think she's reached the end of her patience."
"When."
"Friday. Dinner. The three of us." She looked at him. "She'll ask you difficult questions. She does it to everyone I bring into my life."
"Bring into your life," he said. He said it the way he said things that mattered, quietly and with full attention on the words.
"Yes."
He was quiet for a moment. "What kind of questions."
"The kind that are professionally framed but personally intended.
She'll ask about your methodology on restructures and what she actually wants to know is whether you're the kind of person who treats obligations as negotiating positions.
" Cait picked up her wine. "She knows about the Indiana case.
She knows about every Ashford Meridian acquisition in the Midwest for the past three years. "
"She has a spreadsheet."
"She has three spreadsheets."
He almost smiled. The full version, the one she had seen in the kitchen on Sunday with the sauce catching. "Friday," he said. "I'll be there."
After dinner she did the washing up and he dried, which was a domestic arrangement that had established itself without discussion the way the things that fit establish themselves, and outside the west-facing windows the city went from evening to night in the way Chicago did it, all at once, the light changing fast and then settled.
She put the folding table back in the cupboard. She looked at the space it left, the area between the kitchen and the windows that was neither kitchen nor sitting room, simply space.
"You need a proper table," she said.
"I know."
"I'll help you find one."
He looked at her. "All right."
She stayed. She was not keeping track any more of how many times she stayed, because keeping track implied that the number was surprising, and it had stopped being surprising some time in February when she had stopped pretending she was not going to.
What she was keeping track of, without quite deciding to, was the accumulation: the folding table she had found in the cupboard, the two wine glasses on the counter, the dish cloth they had shared without discussing the division of the washing up.
The way his flat was beginning to have the texture of a place she had spent time in, the texture that came not from things but from use.
The good desk had a cup ring on the left side from a mug she had put down one Thursday without thinking.
She had offered to clean it. He had said leave it.
She had left it. She looked at it sometimes when she was sitting at the desk with the laptop, the ring on the good desk that his cup had not made, and she thought: this is what it looks like when you stop being careful about not leaving marks.
She thought she was all right with that.
She was fairly sure she was all right with that.
She was all right with it in a way she had not been all right with anything this specific in some time, which was not something she was going to say out loud yet but which she was holding as a fact, the way she held all the facts that were still finding their settled form.