Chapter Forty-Six
Cait
The last week of the liaison term had a different quality from all the weeks before it.
Not worse. Simply different, the way the last week of anything significant was different: more visible, each day more present to itself because it was numbered.
She had felt this before, at the end of cases, at the end of academic years when she was still in school, at the end of the two years at the legal aid clinic when she had known she was leaving and had found herself paying attention to things she had stopped noticing: the light in the office at five o'clock, the coffee machine's particular complaint before it produced anything useful, the faces of the colleagues she would not see daily after Friday.
She was paying attention now. The small office with the wobbling desk and the intermittent radiator and the view of the secondary parking lot.
Petrov's footsteps on the stairs, heavier than Garrett's and slower, the distinctive sound of a man who had been walking these stairs for nineteen years and knew them the way you knew things you had stopped thinking about.
The press line below, audible through the floor at certain times of day.
The chipped green cup, which had been on this desk since she arrived and which she was going to take with her when she left because it was hers and because some things you did not leave behind.
She had a meeting with Dubowski on Wednesday to hand over the ongoing monitoring documentation.
The monthly report structure, the Kelleher contact schedule, the pension fund check-in with Lehrman, the City College completion tracking.
She had built systems that did not require her daily presence, which was the correct way to leave a thing: making sure it could continue without you, because the work was not about you, it was about the three hundred and forty.
Dubowski shook her hand at the end of the meeting and said: "I hope I never see you across a table again."
She had understood this as a compliment. "I hope so too," she said.
On Thursday she had lunch with three of the workers from the original secondary line who were now in the City College cohort.
Garza was one of them. He was eight weeks from completion and had already been offered a position on the press line, which he had accepted.
He brought a photograph of his daughter, who was doing well in high school, and put it on the table between the lunch plates without ceremony, simply wanting it to be there.
She looked at the photograph. She looked at Garza. She thought: this is the work. Not the grant documents or the term sheets or the Section 14 analysis. This. The photograph on the table, placed there without explaining why.
She walked back to the plant in the May afternoon.
The South Side in May had a specific quality of light that was different from every other month, warmer and more horizontal, arriving at an angle that made even the industrial buildings along 87th Street look briefly like something worth painting.
She had grown up four miles from here. She had walked streets like these since she was a child.
She would walk them after this case was complete, and after the next one, and the one after that.
She stopped outside the plant entrance. She looked at the building: the dirty brick, the high windows of the press wing, the sign above the main door that read Meridian Steel in letters that were slightly faded from the winter.
The building had been standing since 1961. It would be standing for a while yet.
She went inside. She went upstairs. She knocked on the door at the end of the corridor.
"Come in," Garrett said.
She came in. She sat in the chair that did not wobble. She looked at him across the desk, which had a coffee ring on it that was not from his cup and which he had never mentioned.
"The month-six report," she said.
"Sent this morning. Victor acknowledged."
"Good."
"Cait."
"I know," she said. "Thursday. Last official day."
"Yes."
She looked at him. He was watching her with the attention that had not changed since November, the same quality of focus, fully present without performing presence. She had found it unsettling the first morning. She found it, now, simply true: this was how he looked at things he valued.
"After Thursday," she said. "The building is still the building. The plant is still the plant."
"Yes."
"You'll still be in the room at the end of the corridor."
"Different role. Same corridor."
"Different role. Same corridor," she agreed. She stood. "I'm going to finish the handover documentation. Dubowski needs the full monitoring package by tomorrow."
"I'll have the financial monitoring framework to you by end of day."
She nodded. She went to the door. She stopped.
"Friday evening," she said, without turning. "West Loop. I'll bring the wine this time."
"You always bring the wine."
"Because your choices are adequate and mine are better." She turned. He was almost smiling, the full version. "Friday," she said.
"Friday," he said.