Chapter 2 #2
Renee sat with her back against a stranger's sofa and did not answer that.
"You know what I keep waiting for," Maggie said.
"I keep waiting for somebody in that whole outfit to call you.
The company. His mother. Any one of the four hundred people who have been to a party at that place.
Somebody who calls and says Renee, I heard where you were, are you all right. Not are you both all right. You."
"Bette called."
"And?"
"She asked what she could send."
Maggie made a small noise through her nose.
"She meant it kindly," Renee said.
"I know she did. That's the whole thing about those people, they always mean it kindly." Maggie got up and went to the window and stood there with her arms folded. "You went down for the boxes."
"Yes."
"Your mom's boxes. That you've had eleven months and never opened."
"Fourteen."
"Fourteen." Maggie kept looking out the window.
"So you had ten minutes and you spent them on the one thing in that house that was yours, and everybody's version of that afternoon is that you got confused and stayed behind.
" She turned around. "I want you to hear me say the thing nobody's going to say to you again, because after this week they're all going to be very sorry for you, and sorry is not the same.
You didn't get left because there was a fire.
There was a fire, and it showed you where you were on the list."
Renee looked at the carpet for a while.
"Mag."
"Yeah."
"I signed a lease on the old ground."
Maggie Sutter did not say anything at all for four seconds. Then she sat back down on the floor, hard, with her hands on her knees, and said, "When."
"Three weeks ago. November nineteenth."
"Does he know?"
"No."
"Renee." Maggie's voice had gone strange. "Nobody knows?"
"You know," Renee said.
Nina Ackley's follow-up ran Wednesday.
It was the fourth paragraph that did it. Renee read it standing up, in her coat, already halfway out the door.
Ridgeway was on a call at the time of the evacuation order, according to two people with knowledge of the company's schedule.
The call was with a colleague at Bristlecone.
Reached Tuesday, the company said Mr. Ridgeway was managing an active emergency across multiple client properties and declined to characterize the call further.
A colleague.
Renee stood in the entryway of a house that belonged to somebody else and something in her chest went quiet and cold, which was not what she expected.
She had expected heat. She got the opposite, and she would come to understand over the next four months that this was simply how it was going to work with her — the hotter it got, the flatter she went, and nobody was ever going to be able to see the difference.
She waited up for him.
He came in at nine forty with his coat over his arm and he was tired in a way that had gotten into his face permanently over four days.
"You want to eat something?" he said.
"Who's Kendall Croft?"
He stopped in the middle of the room.
To his credit — and she gave him this, later, when she was giving him almost nothing — he did not do any of the four things she had braced for. He did not say what? He did not laugh. He did not ask where she had heard it. He did not get angry.
He put his coat down.
"She runs our mitigation practice," he said. "She's been with us eighteen months. She came over from a research group at Fort Collins."
"Ninety minutes."
"Renee —"
"Four forty-one to six eleven. Ninety minutes." Her voice did not go up at all. She noticed that from somewhere far away. "I was in the cellar at four forty-one, Chase. I'd been down there an hour."
"I know."
"Do you."
"I know exactly." He said it quietly. "I have the timeline. I've had the timeline since the fourteenth. I know what minute I got in the truck and I know what minute you sent me that text and I know what I was doing at every one of those minutes, and I am going to know it for the rest of my life."
And then he explained.
That was the part she was not ready for. He explained it, carefully and accurately, and every single thing he said was true.
There were forty-one client properties inside the burn footprint.
Two utilities had called him personally.
Kendall Croft had the modeling and he had the relationships, and the two of them had spent ninety minutes on a call that fed the county's own emergency operations center — he could name the man at the county who had been on the other end of what came out of it — and there were people alive because of what went out of that call, and he was not going to apologize for having been useful on the worst afternoon in the county's history.
He said all of it standing up, in a rented living room, and none of it was a lie, and Renee listened to every word.
When he was done she said, "Okay."
"Renee."
"No, I believe you." And she did. That was the trouble. "Every word. I believe you completely."
"Then —"
"You called her at eleven forty on a Sunday night."
The room got very still.
"You called her at eleven forty at night on a Sunday," Renee said, "the week before last. And twice on the Thursday before that.
And I know that because I stood in a gym at one in the morning and scrolled up on your phone, which I have never done in nine years, and I quit before I got to the bottom because I still wanted to be a person who hadn't. "
He did not say anything.
"So don't hand me the utilities, Chase." Still flat. Still completely level, and her hands were shaking so hard she put them in her coat pockets. "I didn't ask what the call was. I asked who she is."
He looked at her.
And she watched him — genuinely watched him, the way you watch water for a fish — choose the answer that was accurate.
"Nothing happened," Chase said.
Renee stood there in the middle of somebody else's living room and understood that this was going to be the whole rest of it. That sentence. That exact sentence, said kindly, by everyone, for months.
"I know," she said. "That's what scares me."
She went and got her keys.
"Where are you going?"
"Maggie's."
"Renee, it's ten o'clock —"
"Chase." At the door, with her hand on it, not turning around.
"You told me you thought I was in the first truck.
That's true too. I believe that one as well.
" She got the door open. The cold came in.
"I've been thinking about it for five days and I can't figure out what you were thinking about instead.
That's the only thing I want. Not the call. Just — what were you thinking about."
She waited four full seconds.
He did not have it.
She let the door close behind her and got in the truck and sat with her hands on the wheel until she could drive, and out east past the airport the sky was that flat orange the clouds get over a city, and it did not look like fire at all anymore, and she still had to pull over twice.