Chapter Ten
Lucy
She held the bottle up by the neck, the way you’d hold up a hostess gift at a dinner party nobody had invited you to.
“Surprise,” Margot said. “The door downstairs was locked, so I waited. I hope that’s okay.”
“How long have you been waiting?”
“Forty minutes.” She smiled. “I answered sixty emails. Honestly, it was the most productive forty minutes I’ve had all week.”
She was in cream linen, wide-legged and perfectly unwrinkled, with white sneakers that had never met sawdust in their lives and sunglasses pushed up into her hair.
She looked like the after picture in a magazine about getting your life together.
I had graphite on my hands, a fire station under my arm and the agenda with my name on it in my back pocket, and I was suddenly, stupidly aware of all three.
I knew the wine. A 2019 Napa cabernet off the Glenbrook list, three hundred and forty dollars a bottle in the dining room. I knew because I’d chosen the glasses it was poured into there, and the table it was set down on, and the chair the guest sat in while the sommelier told him about the soil.
“Margot,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
“Can’t I visit?” She tilted her head. “Okay, no, fair. We’ve never done that. But I thought maybe we should start.”
I could have said no. I think about that now.
I could have stood on the stairs and made her talk to me in the parking lot, and she would have done it gracefully and gone.
But she was holding the bottle out, and I had spent ten years being the person who says Come in, come in, and my hand found the key and turned it before the rest of me had voted.
She walked in ahead of me and turned a slow circle in the middle of the room.
“So this is where you’ve been hiding.”
“I’m not hiding. I have a mailbox.”
“It’s charming. It’s very…” She looked at the box fan, the sloped ceiling, the coffee maker on its stool. “Authentic.”
I put the drawings down on the drafting table, face down.
“What’s that?” she said.
“A fire station.”
“Oh, that’s sweet.” She said it the way you’d say it about a child’s macaroni art, warmly and all the way down. “Community stuff. Good for you. That’s so good for you right now.”
I didn’t have wineglasses. I had two mason jars and a mug that said WORLD’S OKAYEST brOTHER, which Owen had left up here.
I gave Margot a mason jar. She poured three hundred and forty dollars into it without blinking and handed it back to me, then poured her own, and we stood there on either side of my drafting table like two women waiting for a bus.
“Rhys is a wreck, you know,” she said.
“Is he.”
“He moved two investor calls last week. Rhys doesn’t move calls.” She sipped. “I told him to give you space. I told him that’s what you needed.”
“That was thoughtful of you.”
“I thought so.” If she heard anything in my voice, she let it slide right off the linen.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
“Of course.”
“The toast. Did you know he was going to do that?”
She didn’t look away. I’ll give her that. She looked straight at me over the rim of a mason jar and didn’t blink once.
“Rhys says what he feels, Lucy. It’s his gift. You know that better than anyone.” She shook her head slowly. “I was as surprised as you were. Honestly, I was mortified. I’ve told him so.”
“Have you.”
“Twice.” She set the jar down on my drafting table, on top of the fire station, and I moved the drawings out from under it without a word. “Anyway. That’s not why I’m here. I want to talk to you about Sterling House.”
I didn’t say anything. I drank a little of the wine. It was very good. I resented it. Somewhere below us a truck went by on the highway with its radio up, and the song leaked in through the box fan and out again, and neither of us said a word until it was gone.
“You know about it,” she said.
“I know it’s the city brand. I know Rhys has been on the phone about it for a year.”
“Six properties in five years, San Francisco first. Summit Ridge is our partner. It’s the biggest thing Sterling has ever done, Lucy.
It’s bigger than all four lodges put together.
” Her eyes had gone bright. Whatever else Margot was, she loved the work, and I’d always known that about her, and it had always made her harder to hate. “And I want you in it.”
“In it how?”
She folded her hands on the edge of my drafting table, and I watched her shift into the voice she uses for board members and journalists. I’d heard it across a hundred dinner tables.
“Creative Consultant,” she said. “A real title, in the brand book. A retainer. Twelve thousand a month, one-year commitment, renewable. You’d own the art program—your watercolors could hang in every guest room, can you imagine?
—and you’d weigh in on textiles, finishes, the little touches.
The opening parties.” She smiled. “People are still talking about those place cards.”
I set my jar down, too. Very carefully, so it wouldn’t make a sound.
“The little touches,” I said.
“You’re so good at them.”
“Who’s designing the rooms?”
“Oh, we’ve got a very strong design direction.” She said it smoothly, without a hitch. “The renderers in Denver have built out the whole look. I’ve been extremely hands-on.”
“I didn’t know you drew.”
“I don’t need to draw, Lucy. I need to see.” She touched her own temple lightly with one finger. “That’s a different skill. Honestly, it’s a rarer one.”
Behind her, through the north window, the last of the light was going copper on the ridge. I looked at it for a second so I wouldn’t look at her.
“What would the credit say?” I asked. “In the brand book.”
“I told you. Creative Consultant.”
“Why not designer?”
Margot looked at me with an expression I’d never seen on her before, or maybe I’d just never been looking straight at her when she wore it. It was patient. It was almost fond. It was the look you give somebody who doesn’t understand how the world works and never will, bless her.
“Nobody buys a hotel brand from a wife, Lucy. They buy it from a visionary.”
The box fan ticked in the window.
“And you’re the visionary,” I said.
“Somebody has to be. It’s a role. It’s a story you tell a room full of people with checkbooks.” She lifted one shoulder. “Rhys is the founder. I’m the vision. And you’re—”
“The wife.”
“The heart of it. That’s what I was going to say.
” She reached across the drafting table as if to touch my arm and stopped short when I didn’t move.
“Lucy, I’ve watched you for ten years. You duck out of every photo.
You’ve never once wanted to be on a panel, or in a magazine, or on a stage.
And I have always, genuinely, admired that about you.
I’m offering you the part you actually like, with a paycheck attached. I honestly thought you’d be pleased.”
The terrible thing is that she meant it. I could see she meant it. In whatever story she told herself on the drive home, she was being generous.
“No, thank you,” I said.
Her face didn’t change. “Take some time. Think about it.”
“I just did.”
“Lucy—”
“It’s a no, Margot. I’ve got a job.”
“The fire station.” She almost laughed. “That doesn’t pay.”
“I know. I like it better.”
For a second something went across her face, fast and hard, and then it was gone, smoothed away like a wrinkle in linen. She picked up her jar and finished her wine in one long, elegant swallow, and set it down, and that was when she saw the box.
It was still on the old door on the sawhorses, where Rhys had put it weeks before. I hadn’t unpacked it yet. I kept meaning to. The lid was off, and the spines stood in a row, and a few more notebooks were stacked on the corner of the drafting table, where I’d been reading them at night.
Margot drifted over. She ran one fingertip down the row of numbered spines.
“Are these the originals?”
“They’re the only ones.”
“Well, not the only ones. We scanned them. Rhys told you, didn’t he?
For insurance. They’re in the archive.” She slid one out of the box.
Number twenty-something. I couldn’t see which.
She held it lightly, the way people hold a baby that isn’t theirs, and didn’t open it.
“But paper’s so fragile. You should keep them somewhere safe. ”
“They are somewhere safe. They’re with me.”
“It’s an old building, Lucy.” She glanced up at the rafters. “It’s fire country.”
I walked around the drafting table and held out my hand. She looked at it for a second. Then she put the notebook in it, and I put it back in the box, in its place, between its brothers, and put the lid on.
“Well.” She picked up her sunglasses from where she’d set them. She left the wine. “I should get back down the hill before the deer come out. You’ve got my number if you change your mind.”
“I won’t.”
“People do.” She smiled at me, warm again, as if the last five minutes hadn’t happened, and went to the door, and stopped there with her hand on the frame, the light behind her.
“Oh—I almost forgot. We launch the brand in September. You’ll love it. It’s very… you.”