Chapter 6 #2
It was there and gone. It was not shame — Kristin thought about this a great deal afterward and remained certain it was not shame. It was closer to the look of a person hearing an argument they had already had with themselves and lost.
"You'd get all three," Jocelyn said. "Today. I'd drive to Deephaven and back and you'd have them by two o'clock."
"And in exchange I hand you a sentence you can put in a press release."
"In exchange you get to read what a man wrote about you," Jocelyn said, "which is what you actually want, and which is why you came, because if this were about the claim you'd have sent your lawyer."
The room stayed exactly where it was. The lake stayed gray in the window. A waiter went past with three plates on one arm.
Kristin looked at the envelope under Jocelyn's two fingers.
She wanted it the way you want water.
"No," she said.
Jocelyn did not move.
"I want you to understand I'm not being noble," Kristin said.
"I want to be clear about that, because you're going to walk out of here and tell somebody I was noble and it isn't that.
" She put her hands flat on the table, the good one and the other one.
"If I say that sentence, then in ten years the whole thing is a paragraph about a company with no process.
That's a very comfortable paragraph. Everybody in it is a system.
Nobody in it is a person who read the word Kristin three times and wrote low priority. "
"That's not—"
"I'm not finished." She said it pleasantly. "You are asking me to be the last thing that ever gets handled around here. And I've been the thing that got handled for eleven years, and it turns out I'd rather have nothing."
She stood up.
"Keep them," she said.
"Kristin."
"Send me a bill for the coffee."
"You'll regret it," Jocelyn said.
She said it quietly, and not as a threat, and that was the worst of it — she said it the way you tell somebody their tire is low.
Kristin stopped with her hand on the back of the chair.
"Probably."
"You want to know what's in them."
"Yes."
"Then take the sentence," Jocelyn said. "It's true. That's the part nobody's going to say to you, so I will: the sentence I'm asking you for is true, and you're turning it down because it would also happen to be good for me, and that is not the same as it being a lie."
And there it was. The whole of her, in one paragraph, delivered at conversational volume in a dining room with a duck-hunting theme.
"You're right," Kristin said. "It's true and I'm turning it down."
"Why?"
"Because you'd sleep."
Jocelyn's chin came up about a quarter of an inch.
"I'm sorry?"
"You'd sleep," Kristin said. "If I say it, you'd sleep. And I've been not sleeping since the ninth of February, and I've decided I'm not handing that out."
She got to the door of the dining room before her hands started, and she got out through the lobby and past the coat check and out under the portico into the rain before it got up as far as her arms, and then she stood on the wet flagstone in the cold with her back against a pillar and shook for about ninety seconds like a woman with a fever.
Ninety seconds. She timed it, because timing it was the only thing she could do.
Then she wiped her face with the back of her wrist and walked out to the truck.
Brynn called before she made it to the truck, because Brynn had known where she was going and had spent two hours not calling, which for Brynn was a spiritual discipline.
"Well?"
"I said no."
There was a silence with a whole shape to it.
"Good," Brynn said. "Say it again."
"I said no."
"Good." Then: "Kristin. Are you all right."
"No," Kristin said. "But it's the right kind."
She sat in the lot for twenty minutes without starting the engine.
The thing was, she thought — and she made herself think it all the way through, because half-thinking it was how you ended up doing something stupid at midnight — the thing was that Jocelyn was not lying about the copies.
Jocelyn Harlow did not lie. That was the whole problem with her.
She logged, she filed, she copied, she noted, and every single thing she had said in that dining room was almost certainly true, including the part about her mother in Duluth.
Those letters existed. They were in a box in an apartment in Deephaven, fourteen miles from where Kristin was sitting.
And there were exactly two roads to them.
One went through Jocelyn, and had a price on it that Kristin had just refused and would refuse again.
The other one —
Kristin put her forehead against the top of the steering wheel.
The other one was that a company that shreds its originals keeps its scans.
Not the mail — the mail was gone. But the intake.
The estate's security review. The correspondence files that Jocelyn Harlow had personally maintained for two years, the ones that had come to the lake house in April by accident in a box marked LEGAL HOLD because somebody in an office had pulled a range without looking.
There was more than one box.
There had always been more than one box, and every one of them was in a house at the end of a half-mile drive or in a records room downtown, and both of those places belonged to a man who parked at the wide spot on Sundays and did not get out.
She thought it through the way she would work up a case.
The purge took the mail. The purge did not take the estate's own files, because the estate was not the company and Rosemary Kilbride had never thrown anything away in her life.
It did not take Jocelyn's working files, which had gone under hold in April and were therefore frozen exactly where they sat.
And it had not taken whatever had been scanned in the ordinary course, because a woman who copies everything she logs works for a company that scans, and the two of them are the same habit at different scales.
Somewhere in that house or that building there was a September letter with a dead woman's name in it.
And there was precisely one person on earth who could open either door.
Which meant that after five months of a wall she had built by hand and maintained without one single crack in it, the only road left to the thing she wanted most ran directly through her husband — and he had not asked her for anything, not once, since April, which meant she would have to be the one to ask.
Kristin sat up.
"No," she said, out loud, in the empty truck.
The rain came down on the roof for a while.
Then she reached across to the glove box and got out the little spiral book she kept her calls in, and she turned to the back page, and she wrote down, in her father's handwriting, which was also somehow hers:
Ask him.