Chapter Forty-Eight
Cait
Friday evening she brought Barolo.
It was better than adequate and she knew it and she set it on the counter without explaining the choice, because if she had to explain the choice it would not have been the right bottle and she had chosen correctly.
The flat was warm. The west-facing windows had the May light in them, the long evening light that arrived at this time of year and stayed past the reasonable hour, the city outside looking the way it looked in the last hour before dark, all its edges softened and its distances compressed, everything visible and closer than it seemed.
She had spent the day at the CWA office on Wacker for the first time in six months.
Not exclusively, she had maintained her work there throughout the Meridian case, but today had been the first day with no reason to go to the South Side, no report to compile or handover document to finalise or monitoring data to check.
The Wacker office had the same layout it had always had, the same desk in the same position, Diane's door open or closed depending on whether she was on a call, the same coffee machine that worked correctly the first time every time, which was one of the things she had always taken for granted about it.
She had sat at her desk for an hour in the morning going through the incoming case files, the facilities that were on her monitoring spreadsheet, the acquisitions in the county filings that were moving toward the kind of announcements that required preparation.
Three hundred rows. She had added two new entries in December and one in March. She would add more.
The work continued. It had always continued.
What was different, sitting at the Wacker desk in the first Meridian-free morning in six months, was the weight of what the work now contained.
Not heavier. Fuller. She had the vocabulary of what a successful restructure looked like, which she had known theoretically before and knew now in the specific way of someone who had built one and watched it hold.
She also had, in the pocket of the coat on the hook behind the door, a key to a flat in the West Loop with west-facing windows and a good desk and a man who cooked one thing well and had called his boss on a Thursday without telling her first.
She poured the wine. He came in from the kitchen and looked at the label.
"Barolo," he said.
"Yes."
"That's not adequate. That's excellent."
"I know." She handed him the glass. "It's Friday. The liaison term is done. We signed the Kelleher three-year renewal. The cohort is eight weeks from completion. The pension is ahead of schedule." She raised her glass. "It deserves Barolo."
He looked at her. He raised his glass. They drank.
The evening settled around them with the ease of something that had been finding its shape over months and had arrived at it.
They ate, something he had made without announcing it, pasta with a sauce that was better than she had expected, which she told him and which he received without false modesty because he had been the one who made it and he knew whether it was good.
After dinner she stood at the west-facing windows and looked at the city going from its evening version toward its night version, the lights coming on building by building, the grid illuminating itself from east to west across the flat expanse of the Midwest. She had looked at this view many times. She had never grown tired of it.
He came to stand beside her. Close enough that their arms touched. He did not put his arm around her. He simply stood there, looking at the same city, and she thought about two people who looked at the same thing from the same window and found it, separately and together, worth looking at.
"Wisconsin," she said.
"Next week. Preliminary only. I don't know yet what the picture looks like."
"When you know, tell me." She looked at him. "Not because I'm on that case. Because you'll have been thinking about it and I want to know what you think."
He looked at her. Something moved in his face, the unguarded version, the one she had learned to recognise as the thing underneath the composure, the actual feeling before it was managed. "All right," he said.
She turned from the window. She put her hand at the back of his neck, the way she had at the bar on Randolph Street, and kissed him with the city outside and the Barolo on the counter and the key in her coat pocket in the hall, and he kissed her back with his arms around her and six months of the same building and the same corridor and the same thing being built between them, stone by stone, the way her father would have said, the way things were built that were meant to last.
Later she stood in the kitchen making tea because she was not quite ready to sleep and the kitchen was warm, and she looked at the cup ring on the good desk from across the room, visible in the lamplight, the mark she had left that he had asked her to leave.
She thought: I am going to be happy here.
She had not thought that sentence before. She had thought: I am content, and I am purposeful, and the work is good. She had not thought: happy, specifically, in this city, in this flat, with this man and this desk and this window and the key in my coat in the hall.
She was thinking it now. She let it sit, the way she let facts sit when they were settled: without arguing with them, without testing them further, simply present to what they were.
She made the tea. She went back to the sofa. She stayed.