9. Chapter 9
Sawyer
***
I invite Maya to the estate for practical reasons.
The Conservatory proposal requires a site review, the preliminary vendor contacts need to be cross-referenced against the Main Street footprint, and Grace has flagged three logistical questions about the greenhouse corridor that would be answered more efficiently in person than across a chain of emails that has already reached eleven messages without resolving anything.
These are the reasons I ask. They are all legitimate.
I write them down before I call, which is something I have never done before making a phone call in my professional life, and I don't examine why.
Maya arrives at ten on a Saturday morning in the van, which I hear before I see it, the particular sound of an engine that has covered a great many miles in service of other people's occasions.
She parks on the gravel drive and steps out in her work clothes, dark jeans and a cream knit and her hair pulled back, and she stands for a moment looking up at the Harwick estate with the expression of someone taking in new information and filing it carefully.
I meet her at the door before she knocks.
"You were watching from the window," she says.
"I heard the van," I say.
She looks at me. I look at her. She decides, apparently, to let this pass, and steps inside, and I show her through to the study where Grace has laid out the preliminary Conservatory plans across the large table by the window, elevation drawings and site maps and the vendor contact sheets that arrived from the architect on Friday.
Maya sets her tote on the chair and leans over the table and looks at the plans with the same focused attention she brings to everything, her eyes moving across the drawings with the quick, specific intelligence of someone who knows how to read a space before she's stood in it.
She asks three questions in the first five minutes, each one precisely the question the plan needs, and Grace, who is sitting at the side table with her laptop, looks up after the third one with an expression I have learned to recognize as restrained approval.
We work through the vendor contacts methodically.
Maya knows three of the five suppliers personally and has opinions about all of them, delivered with the direct confidence of someone who has been buying wholesale for eleven years and knows exactly what reliable looks like and what it doesn't. I take notes.
This is not something I typically do in meetings.
Grace notices and says nothing, which is its own
kind of comment.
At half past eleven Grace excuses herself to take a call, and the study settles into the particular quiet of a room that has just lost its third person, and Maya straightens up from the plans and rolls her shoulders and looks around the study properly for the first time since she arrived.
"This is a good room," she says.
"It works," I say.
The cat is sitting in the armchair near the window, where he has apparently relocated himself at some point during the morning, watching the proceedings with the specific, assessing expression of an animal who has decided, in the way cats decide things, that the room has gotten more interesting.
His name is not Fitzgerald.
I have not been calling him Fitzgerald for four months.
That would imply a level of attachment that is inconsistent with the position I have maintained, clearly and consistently, since Mrs. Alderton, my housekeeper, brought him in from the garden on a rainy Tuesday, that the cat belongs to Mrs. Alderton and is Mrs. Alderton's responsibility and I have no particular feelings about him in either direction.
There is a knock at the study door, brisk and familiar, and Mrs. Alderton appears before I have finished saying come in, a woman who has worked in my household for eleven years and has never once, in that time, waited for permission she considered unnecessary.
"Mister Sawyer," she says, in the warm, decisive accent that has been informing me of things I did not ask to know since the week I moved in. "Fitzgerald's doctor called to confirm his appointment. Thursday afternoon, two o'clock."
I am aware, with a precision that does not improve the situation, of Maya going very still over by the bookshelves, where she has just begun to browse.
"Thank you, Mrs. Alderton," I say, in the tone of a man hoping a sentence might simply end on its own if given sufficient encouragement.
It does not end on its own.
"Fitzgerald?" Maya says, turning from the shelves with an expression of polite, devastating curiosity. "Who's Fitzgerald?"
"It's his cat," Mrs. Alderton says, before I can produce any version of the sentence I am attempting to produce, which begins, internally, with he is not and goes rapidly downhill from there.
"He's not my…" I start.
I stop.
"Thank you, Mrs. Alderton," I say again, with considerably more finality.
Maya presses her lips together. It is not, I think, an entirely successful effort.
Mrs. Alderton turns to leave, reaches the doorway, and then, with the timing of a woman who has clearly been waiting her entire career for an audience this satisfying, stops and turns back.
"Oh. Doctor also says, don't send Grace this time. Like last time." She gives me a look that suggests she has opinions about last time that she is choosing, for now, to keep to herself. "He wants to see you."
Maya turns sharply back toward the bookshelves, which she has, by this point, examined more thoroughly than any bookshelf has ever needed to be examined, and her shoulders are shaking in a way that has nothing to do with the books.
"Thank you, Mrs. Alderton," I say, for the third and, I hope, final time. "I'll take care of it."
Mrs. Alderton departs, entirely satisfied with herself.
The study is very quiet.
Maya turns around. She is, by now, openly fighting a losing battle with her own expression.
"He's not my cat," I say, under my breath, with what dignity remains available to me.
"Sure," Maya says.
She returns to the bookshelves, walking slowly along them the way people do when they want to know something about a person without asking directly, her eyes moving across the spines, and I watch her from the table and say nothing because there is nothing on those shelves I am particularly concerned about her seeing.
Except possibly the volume of French poetry on the third shelf from the top, which is, fortunately, at a height that requires looking for it.
She stops.
I watch her head tilt slightly to the right, the way it does when something has caught her attention, and I feel the specific, unhurried dread of a man whose afternoon has already exceeded its planned quota of revelations.
She reaches up and pulls the volume from the shelf.
She turns it over in her hands. She looks at the cover.
She looks at the pages, which fall open at a particular page the way books do when they have been opened there many times before, and then she looks at me across the room with an expression I have not seen from her before, something delighted and surprised and warm all at once.
"French poetry," she says.
"It was here when I moved in," I say.
She looks at the book. She looks at me.
"Sawyer," she says, in the tone of someone who has just discovered something they find genuinely wonderful and has no intention of pretending otherwise. "This is yours. There's a bookmark on page forty-three."
I say nothing. There is, objectively, nothing useful to say.
She turns to page forty-three and reads the first two lines silently, her lips moving just slightly, and something in her expression softens in a way that makes the room feel considerably warmer than it did a moment ago.
"I never pictured you as a lover of poetry," she says. She looks up, and there is something in her eyes that is warm and unhurried and just slightly, carefully playful. "You must read some to me sometime."
She slides the book back onto the shelf with the precise, gentle care of someone returning something that matters, and turns back to the window as if she has said nothing more significant than a comment about the weather.
I stand at the table and look at the space on the shelf where the book was and understand, with the sudden clarity of a man who has just had something he kept very carefully hidden treated not as a weakness but as an invitation, that Maya Finch is considerably more dangerous than I had previously calculated.
And that I don't, for the first time in a very long time, mind at all.
She pauses at the window.
The grounds of the Harwick estate stretch out below, the old oak at the far edge of the lawn, the kitchen garden along the south wall, the morning light doing what morning light does in early summer, which is making everything look like something worth keeping.
"It's beautiful," she says, quietly, in the way people say true things when they're not performing them for anyone.
"Yes," I say.
She turns from the window and her eyes find the cat again, still settled in the armchair with the composed patience of an animal waiting for the room to catch up to something he has already decided.
His monogrammed feeding bowl, which Mrs. Alderton ordered without consulting me and which I did not send back, is visible on the floor beside the armchair.
The monogram reads: F.
Maya's gaze settles on the monogrammed bowl. She doesn't ask the obvious question, the one her expression makes clear she already knows the answer to, having heard it spoken aloud not ten minutes earlier by a woman with no interest in my preferred narrative.
"The monogram," she says instead, with the careful restraint of someone choosing to let me dig my own grave at my own pace.
"Mrs. Alderton's initiative," I say. "I didn't ask her to do that."
Her entire face changes.
"Oh," she says, in the soft, involuntary tone of someone who has just seen something that has bypassed every reasonable defense they possess. "Oh, look at you." She takes one step toward the armchair. "Aren't you beautiful. Come here, come here."
The cat, who has not voluntarily moved toward a human being in four months, stands up in the armchair, stretches with the unhurried confidence of someone who has been waiting for exactly this invitation, and walks to the edge of the cushion.
I watch this happen with the specific feeling of a man whose carefully maintained position is being dismantled in real time by a tabby cat.
"He doesn't usually..." I start.
"Hello," Maya says to the cat, holding out her hand. "Hello, gorgeous."
The cat bumps his head against her knuckles.
I close my mouth.
She looks up at me with delight still warm in her expression, and then she looks at the monogrammed bowl on the floor again, and the delight becomes something more dangerous, which is amusement, and she looks back at me with both of them at once.
Maya presses her lips together in a way that is not quite a smile but is in the same neighborhood, and she turns back to the cat, who has settled into the armchair with the composed satisfaction of an animal whose position in that household has just been publicly confirmed, and scratches him gently behind the ears.
He closes his eyes and leans into it with the slow, dignified pleasure of a creature who has never once in four months allowed anyone, including Mrs. Alderton, to do exactly that.
"He likes you," I say, before I can stop myself.
"He's very handsome," she says, scratching behind his ears, which he accepts with the air of someone receiving a compliment they have long considered their due.
She looks up at me from the armchair with something warm and unguarded in her expression and says, in the tone of someone offering a verdict they have considered carefully: "I think he knows he's loved. "
I look at the cat. The cat looks at me with the expression he always wears, which is the expression of an animal who understands the situation considerably better than the humans in the room and is patient enough to wait for them to catch up.
"The vendor contacts," I say.
"The vendor contacts," she agrees.
She gives the cat one final scratch, and he settles back into the armchair with the satisfied composure of a creature whose work here is done, and Maya returns to the plans table and I return to my notes and we spend another hour working through the Conservatory logistics with the focused efficiency of two people who are both, for different reasons, grateful to have something to look at other than each other.
Grace reappears at half past twelve and announces that the site survey team has confirmed for Wednesday.
Maya packs up her notes and rolls the elevation drawing carefully and tucks it into her tote, and I walk her to the door and we say goodbye on the front step with the particular, careful courtesy of two people who kissed each other six days ago and have not mentioned it since.
She is halfway to the van when she turns back.
"Sawyer," she says.
I wait.
"Fitzgerald suits him," she says.
I open my mouth, fully prepared to deliver several minutes of careful explanation regarding Mrs. Alderton, household nomenclature decided without my input, and the precise nature of my non-involvement.
"His name is not..." I start.
"It's on the bowl, Sawyer," she says, already climbing into the van, entirely unbothered. "Well. Part of it."
She gets in the van and drives away down the gravel drive before I can produce a single further word.
I stand on the front step for a moment longer than is strictly necessary.
Behind me, from the direction of the study, I hear the soft sound of a cat settling more deeply into an armchair that is, apparently, no longer exclusively mine.
I go back inside and stand in the study doorway and look at him there, curled into the cushion, the monogrammed bowl on the floor and the elevation drawing of the Conservatory that Maya left her notes on, her handwriting in the margins alongside mine.
Maya's words stay with me. "I think he knows he's loved."
I turn them over for considerably longer than the vendor contacts require, standing in the doorway of my own study, looking at a cat that is not mine, but everyone thinks it is, and I find that I am forced to admit the argument has become impossible to defend.