Chapter 3 #2
"Yes. Ask yourself why."
"I did ask him why."
"And?"
Imogen stood in the window of the guest wing looking at the plywood on the morning room from above. "He said he wasn't going to be one of those men."
Her mother made a small sound.
"Your father," Augusta said, "gave me the Wickford house in 1974."
She had never said that before. Not once, in Imogen's whole life.
"For the same reason?"
"For a reason," Augusta said. "I still have it.
I have had it for fifty-one years and I have been extremely grateful for it and I would like you to understand that I have never once been free of him for a single day of them.
" A pause. "A deed is not an apology, Imogen.
It's a room. He has given you a very good room to stand in while you decide, and he has made absolutely certain you'll be standing in it where he can see you. "
"That's not fair."
"It may not be. It's also true. Both happen."
"Mother—"
"Your room is made up," Augusta said.
The story got out on Thursday.
Not the real story. The Journal ran nine inches on a break-in at a Sakonnet residence, no names, values not disclosed, no one injured. That was fine. That was nothing.
What went around the point was better than that, because what went around the point always is, and by Friday the version had settled into something smooth and wrong: that Cormac Severin's house had been done over in the middle of the night, that the family had gotten into the safe room in time, and that the wife had been up in Providence.
Imogen heard it in that form for the first time from the glass man's brother-in-law, who said it kindly, who said thank God she wasn't there.
She did not correct him.
She thought about that for a long time afterward, too.
Fiona was still on the payroll.
That was the other thing about that week, sitting in the middle of it like a chair nobody would move.
She had driven to Providence on the fifteenth at eight in the morning and she had not resigned, and nobody had asked her to, and on Thursday there was a call at four and Imogen heard her husband say, through a door, "—no, run it past Fiona first."
She stood in the hall outside the study with a laundry basket on her hip.
Five weeks to close. Eleven people on a deal that had been eleven months in the building.
She could construct the whole argument herself without help — that you do not detonate a nine-figure transaction over where a woman slept for six weeks, that Fiona knew the file better than the lawyers did, that there was no version of this where Cormac fired the person who had done nothing that anyone could name.
Nobody had said the obvious thing out loud, and Imogen understood that nobody was going to, and that the reason nobody was going to was that the obvious thing was not about the deal at all.
She went and put the laundry away.
Lennox Draycott came out on Saturday with a case of wine and an air of enormous sympathy.
He kissed her cheek in the hall and said, "My God, Imogen," and looked at the plywood, and said it again. He had driven down from Boston. He had, he said, canceled two things.
He was good at it. He was always good at it. He asked exactly the right questions and listened to the answers and put his hand over hers on the table once, briefly, at the right moment.
Then, over the second glass, he said: "Can I say one thing? And then I'll shut up."
"You won't shut up."
"I won't shut up." He smiled. "Here's the one thing. There is not a man alive who gets that right."
"Gets what right."
"Ninety seconds." Lennox turned his glass by the stem.
"A siren goes off at two in the morning and you've got a minute and a half and no information.
Nobody gets that right. Soldiers don't get that right.
He did what the protocol says — get to the room, get the people in front of you into the room — and he has not slept since, and he will not sleep for a year, and none of that is going to be any use to you at all, so I'm not going to pretend it is. "
"That's more than one thing."
"It's the preamble to one thing."
He looked at her over the glass, and his face did something warm and regretful.
"The one thing is this," he said. "Don't let it become the story of your marriage. That's all. Things happen to people at two in the morning. It doesn't have to be the whole book."
Imogen turned her own glass around on the table.
"Lennox," she said. "Who put her in the guest wing?"
He did not miss a beat. She would give him that for the rest of her life: he did not miss one.
"I did," he said. "Closing's in Providence, the diligence room's in Providence, and Cormac won't sleep anywhere but here. It was a logistics call and it was mine and I'd make it again." He shrugged, easy. "You said it was fine, love. I asked you in September and you said it was fine."
"I did say that."
"You did."
"Yes," Imogen said. "I did."
She looked at the plywood in the morning room doorway, and thought about a row of three pens lined up straight, and about her own voice in September saying of course, it's no trouble at all, and about the fact that she had said it in this exact chair.
She did not sign anything that week.
Her lawyer, when she got one — a woman in Providence named Nuala Reddington who had been recommended by the institution's counsel and who took eleven days to have an opening and then made one — told her on the phone that she was in an unusual position.
"Unusual how?"
"Unusual in that you have everything," Nuala said. "The property's yours. He's instructed his people to stand down in writing, which I have never seen, and I would like a copy for my wall. In practical terms you can do whatever you want and it costs you nothing. Which sounds like good news."
"It doesn't sound like good news the way you're saying it."
"It isn't. When leaving is expensive, people know why they stay. When it's free—" Nuala made a sound like a shrug. "You'll have to know for yourself. Nothing's going to decide it for you."
Imogen sat on the terrace in her coat with the phone against her ear and looked out at the water going the color of a nickel.
"Mrs. Severin," Nuala said. "Do you want me to file anything?"
"No."
"All right."
"Not yet."
"That's the same answer," Nuala said, "but I'll write down the one you gave me."
Imogen hung up.
Behind her, inside, she could hear her husband on the roof of the north side with a bucket, doing the gutter he had been promising to have somebody look at since September, in the dark, in November, on his own, because it had rained Thursday and the water had come in over the library window.
She sat out there in the cold and listened to him work.
She stayed.