Chapter 2
ROURKE
“Did you see that Cavanaugh stayed through the entire presentation?” Jocelyn says, leaning into me. “I don’t have to tell you that’s a rarity. Usually, he’s out the door and looking for the hard stuff before the room gets warm.”
I did notice, and I suspect Jocelyn knows I notice. The announcement was a success.
And success means a signed letter becomes land, permits, and revenue. It becomes a legacy.
I shake another hand. Smile. Hold eye contact. Remember the daughter at Wellesley, the knee replacement, the private airstrip complaint from last winter.
“Caroline is at Middlebury,” Jocelyn murmurs before the man reaches us.
Middlebury. Right.
“Still freezing in Vermont?” I ask when he steps close.
His face opens with the small surprise people get when money remembers them personally. “Every day, according to my daughter.”
Jocelyn stands half a step behind my shoulder with her tablet tucked against her side and her attention moving over the thinning rooftop like a second set of eyes.
When I forget I'm holding champagne, she plucks the glass from my hand before I tilt it into the cuff of a man who controls three coastal parcels I want to discuss before Christmas.
“Careful,” she says softly.
I glance down, register the near spill, and keep talking.
The evening has that bright, humming quality a good event gets at the end, when the work is done but the results are still forming in real time.
People linger. They lean in. They lower their voices and ask the questions they wouldn't put in an email. The city spreads around us, steel and light, and the Carmichael mark glows over Mallory’s west floral installation as if it grew there.
Mallory did that. The flowers. The service.
The timing. The transition from video to toast was perfect, so exact it looked effortless.
That's Mallory’s gift. She can take a thousand moving pieces and orchestrate it like a conductor leading an orchestra.
A quick satisfaction moves through me, warm and solid.
This is what we do. I build the next thing.
Mallory makes the world receive it beautifully.
I look toward the service corridor, expecting to catch a glimpse of her headset or black dress, but the doorway is mostly staff and carts now.
Breakdown starting, probably. Or she went upstairs.
She's never liked the slow, sticky end of investor nights, when everyone repeats the same compliments and no one knows how to leave.
Jocelyn touches my sleeve. “Fredericks is pretending to study the dessert table. He wants you to come to him.”
I follow her glance. Fredericks does, in fact, have the strained expression of a man examining petit fours for strategic refuge.
“Go,” she says. “Before he eats all the lemon ones and gets a stomach ache.”
I cross to Fredericks.
By the time I return, Jocelyn has extracted us from a conversation with Sharpe’s nephew without making it feel like an exit.
She's good at that. Clean pressure. No bruising.
She thanks the nephew for his insight, reminds him my office will circulate updated projections in the morning, and somehow turns his own sentence into a farewell.
Useful. No. More than useful. She understands the nature of the work. I don't have to translate it for her. I don't have to slow the machine down so someone can admire the gears. She stands where the decisions are happening and keeps up.
“North elevator?” she asks as I approach.
“North elevator,” I say.
Beatrice is waiting near the private elevator with the posture of a woman who's never in her life believed a successful evening is a reason to relax.
“That went well,” Jocelyn says as we approach. “The Singapore team wants a second conversation before they leave town.”
“Tomorrow,” I say.
“Tonight, technically,” she corrects, checking the time. “They fly at four.”
I take the phone when she angles it toward me, but she doesn't actually hand it over. Her shoulder presses lightly against mine as I read the message on her screen. Close text. Bad lighting. Three names. One window we can still use if I push the breakfast with the Denver group. Fine. Possible.
“Move Denver to ten,” I say.
“Already drafted the note.”
The elevator doors open.
“Mr. Carmichael,” Beatrice says.
The tone is not one I ignore. I step inside anyway, Jocelyn beside me, Beatrice following. The doors close on the last few sounds of the gala. Music. Glass. Someone laughing too loudly near the bar.
“What?” I ask.
“Your wife left an hour ago.”
I look up from Jocelyn’s phone. “Mallory?”
Beatrice’s mouth flattens. “Do you have another wife I should be tracking?”
I check my own phone. My message to Mallory sits there without an answer.
Great work tonight. Going to be late. Don’t wait up.
No reply.
A small surprise moves through me. Not alarm. Surprise. Mallory always answers eventually, even if it's only a thumbs-up when she's buried in work.
“She was probably tired,” I say. “She had a long night.”
Beatrice stares at me. The elevator hums downward. Jocelyn shifts her phone back into her hand, quiet now.
“She doesn’t like these events,” I add, because that's true. Or true enough. “Not the investor side. Once the main sequence ended, there was no reason for her to stand around while everyone congratulated themselves.”
“Your wife left an hour ago,” Beatrice says. “Alone. Again.”
Again.
I loosen my tie. “She knows I had follow-ups.”
"Well, as long as she knows," Beatrice says. To someone else, it might sound like an agreement. To me, it sounds like an admonishment.
Jocelyn’s voice is gentle when she speaks. “Evenings like this must be exhausting for her. Mallory has such a gift for atmosphere, but the corporate side can be a lot for someone who doesn’t live inside it every day.”
Mallory came to this world through me. I've never wanted to trap her in it completely.
She took over the event-side when things got hectic.
A memory surfaces of her nearly falling asleep at a table full of investors when one of the men went on too long about his skiing trip.
Hell, it was hard for me to keep up. Making her sit through that type of thing seemed like a special kind of cruelty.
“She prefers to be behind the scenes,” I say.
Beatrice opens her handbag. I expect mints, reading glasses, one of the small impossible items she produces at exactly the moment someone needs it. Instead, she pulls out a narrow black notebook and a pen.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Making a note.”
“Event notes?”
“No.”
Her pen moves in small, exact strokes. The elevator reaches the lower event level, and the doors open. Beatrice closes the notebook before I can see the page.
“For my own records,” she says.
Jocelyn steps out first. “Rourke, about Ridgeline. If we’re going to catch the seller before he starts making noise elsewhere, we need to make a decision tonight.”
I look down at my phone again. Mallory is probably upstairs already.
Shoes off. Hair down. Asleep, maybe, though she almost never sleeps before I get home.
She reads in bed with the lamp on my side dimmed low because she says the light is better there.
Some small-town movie on mute beside her.
Something with a bakery, a misunderstanding, and a man who discovers the virtue of chopping firewood.
I should call. The thought forms. Then I see the Ridgeline attachment Jocelyn has opened. Updated parcel map. Boundary issue on the western ridge. If the seller is talking to Moreland, we have a narrow window before this turns ugly.
Mallory is asleep. Or trying to be. I'll see her when I get home.
“What changed?” I ask Jocelyn.
She steps closer, and the work catches me by the throat.
The executive floor is nearly dark by the time we spread the Ridgeline files across the conference table.
Hotel night lighting is designed to flatter guests, not keep men awake at one in the morning, so the glass walls reflect us back in pieces.
My jacket on the chair. Jocelyn’s burgundy dress reflecting the light of the room.
The city behind us. The renderings, topographical surveys, seller disclosures, aerial photographs.
“Seller is nervous,” Jocelyn says, dropping into the chair beside mine instead of across the table. “He thinks a large group means a formal process. Formal process means attention. Attention means he shops the number.”
She's taken off her shoes. They sit tucked neatly beneath the table, burgundy heels abandoned on the carpet like this is her office, like nights like this are ordinary. Maybe they are. There've been a lot of them lately.
My phone buzzes with a food delivery confirmation.
“I ordered,” Jocelyn says before I ask. “Turkey club, no tomato. Black coffee. And those awful salt-and-vinegar chips you pretend not to like.”
The coffee arrives seven minutes later, carried by a night manager who looks as if he'd rather be anywhere else.
Jocelyn takes mine from the tray and places it near my right hand without looking down.
One sugar. No cream. Too hot to drink yet, which is how I like it when the night is long. Gives me something to wait on.
“We can send a team,” I say.
Jocelyn leans in, close enough that I catch the clean, expensive edge of her perfume. Not floral. Something sharper. It becomes part of the room, like coffee and printer toner and the faint chilled smell of the vent.
“Just us and him,” she says. “Fewer people, fewer leaks.”
I know she's right. That bothers me for half a second because I'm tired enough to want a better answer and awake enough to know wanting one doesn't create one.
“When?” I ask.
“Tomorrow night. We fly after the Singapore breakfast, land before dark, and walk the lake access at first light.”
I glance at my phone. No message from Mallory. The screen goes dark in my hand. The itch to hear her voice, make sure she's okay, is right there.