Chapter Forty-Two
Cait
He was gone two days.
She noticed the two days in the way she noticed things she had decided not to make into a larger thing than they were: the room at the end of the corridor with the door closed, the absence of his footsteps on the stairs at eight-forty in the morning, the conference room without his laptop open at the far end.
She noticed these things and she noted them and she did not construct anything from them, because two days was two days and she was not the kind of person who turned an absence into a statement.
She had lived alone for six years in Pilsen and had been, by any honest measure, content with that.
She had her work and her colleagues and Petrov and Diane and her father on the phone on Sunday evenings and the legal pad and the cases that needed her full attention, which they reliably got.
She had not been lonely. She had been focused, which was a different thing, and she had made the trade willingly.
She understood now that the trade had had a cost she had not been accounting for, because she had not known what she was not having.
You could not miss what you had no reference for.
She had a reference now. Two days without the footsteps on the stairs and the room at the end of the corridor occupied and the coffee made for two without thinking: these were two days with a cost she was able to measure, which was new information.
She had work. She had the Kelleher term sheet, which came through Wednesday afternoon and which she went through with the red pen and found clean except for one clause in Section 7 that needed tightening, which she flagged and sent back with a note.
She had the month-five data for the liaison report, which she compiled and sent ahead of schedule so that Garrett would have it for the board briefing.
She had a call with City College about the cohort's completion forecast, which had moved up to September second from the twelfth.
She had plenty of work. She did the work.
On Wednesday evening Diane called.
"He went back to New York," Diane said, without preamble.
"For two days. Board briefing."
"How are you."
"I'm fine, Diane."
"Caitlin."
"I'm good," she said. The distinction her father had made, standing at her door with the casserole. Not fine. Good. "It's two days. I have the Kelleher term sheet and the City College update and the month-five data. I'm not at a loss."
"I know you're not at a loss. I'm asking how you are."
She sat at her kitchen table. The legal pad was open in front of her, a fresh page, nothing written yet.
"I miss him," she said. She said it the way she said things she had decided to be honest about: directly, without preamble.
"It's two days and I miss him and that information is useful to me.
It tells me something I wanted to confirm. "
"What does it tell you."
"That what I'm in is real and not situational." She picked up the pen. "That it would exist outside the building and the restructure and the specific context. That I'd miss him in an ordinary week in April regardless of whether we were working in the same place."
Diane was quiet for a moment. "You've been thinking about this carefully."
"I think about everything carefully."
"More carefully than usual," Diane said.
"Yes."
Another pause, the comfortable kind that Diane had earned through twenty-two years of being someone worth the silence. "He looked at you when you laughed on Friday," she said. "Not at me, not at the room. At you. The whole time."
Cait did not say anything for a moment. "I know," she said.
"Good," Diane said. "That's all I wanted to say." And hung up.
Cait sat at the kitchen table with the phone on the legal pad and the fresh page still blank.
She wrote one thing on it: real and not situational.
She underlined it once. Then she put the pen down and went to finish the term sheet review, and outside the kitchen window the alley had more yellow flowers in it than it had had that morning, the particular extravagance of things that had been waiting for the right conditions and were now making up for lost time.