Chapter 5
The propane came late and the hoop house came early, and by the third week of January Renee had a routine.
Up at five, which she had stopped fighting. Stove. Coffee. Boots. Out to the rows by six thirty with a headlamp, because there was work you could do in the dark and there was work you could not, and she had gotten efficient about which was which.
The south fabric came off over four days.
Under it the beds were exactly as she had left them in the spring of the year she closed — the rows holding their shape, the edges soft, a rime of last year's chickweed.
She pulled fabric until her shoulders locked and then she sat on an overturned bucket and drank cold coffee and looked at eleven acres in the gray light and did not think about her husband for whole hours at a time.
That was the part she had not expected. Not the grief. The hours.
Nina Ackley called twice and Renee told her nothing both times, pleasantly. The Denver lawyer called and she did not call him back. A television producer from somewhere left three voicemails using her first name.
Bette sent a wool blanket, a good one, with a card that said For the trailer. — B. and nothing else.
Chase did not call.
She noticed that and made herself stop noticing it, twice a day, for eleven days.
The inquiry opened its evidence phase on the twenty-second.
It was procedural — schedules, witness lists, the order of the utilities. Renee did not go. She had a supplier coming from Fort Lupton about a used hoop house and she chose the hoop house, deliberately, and felt good about it for about four hours.
At two in the afternoon her phone started.
Maggie first. Then Bette. Then a number she did not know. Then Maggie again, twice, and Renee finally picked up standing in the mud with a socket wrench in her free hand.
"Are you sitting down," Maggie said.
"I'm holding a wrench."
"Put the wrench down."
He had filed a statement.
Not through the company. Not through Danielle Keegan. Chase Ridgeway had filed a signed statement with the county inquiry in his own name, three paragraphs, and it was public the minute it was docketed, and by two thirty it was everywhere.
Renee read it on her phone sitting on the tongue of the trailer with mud to the knee.
I left the property in the first vehicle at approximately 3:33 p.m. on December 12. I did not confirm that my wife was in any vehicle. I did not ask, and I did not look. There was time to do both.
I have seen the county's timeline and the company's statement. Both are accurate and both understate this. I was not confused about where she was. I did not think about where she was.
I have nothing to add about the rest of that afternoon, and I do not intend to answer questions about it, because any answer I give would be an attempt to make this smaller than it is. I would ask the inquiry not to let me.
That was the whole thing.
Renee read it four times.
Then she got up and walked the north fence line to the second gate and back, which was a little under a mile, and she did it fast, and when she got back she read it again.
I did not think about where she was.
He had put that in writing. Under his own name. In a public docket, in an active proceeding, with forty-one client properties and two utilities and a company whose entire product was knowing what was coming, and he had written I did not think about where she was and signed it.
Her hands were not steady.
She could not have said, in that moment, what she was feeling. That was the problem with the whole day. She kept reaching for it and coming back with nothing, and the closest she got was that it felt like being handed something heavy without warning and being expected to hold it.
Bristlecone dropped four points before the close.
Renee did not understand what that meant in dollars and did not want to.
What she understood, from the six different people who explained it to her over the next two days without being asked, was this: he had walked into a proceeding that was already looking at his company's fire modeling and handed it a signed admission of judgment failure on the day of the fire, and he had done it while under no obligation whatsoever, and his own lawyers had told him not to.
The board had told him not to.
Gil Vogel had told him not to, at length, which Renee found out later and in a parking lot.
By Thursday there were two op-eds. One said it was the most honest thing a man in his position had done in a decade.
The other said it was a calculated act of reputational jujitsu by a very smart operator who had gotten out ahead of a story, and that people should notice how well it played, and Renee read that one twice as carefully as the first.
"He did it in public," she said.
She was at Maggie's kitchen table, which she had not been at in three weeks, with her feet on a dog.
"Yeah," Maggie said.
"That's what's wrong with it. That's what I've been trying to get at for two days.
" Renee turned her mug around on the table.
"He could have said that to me. He could have said it to me in the kitchen on Mapleton on the fifteenth of December.
He could have said it at the fence when he brought the mail.
He's had six weeks and about forty chances and he has never once said that sentence to my face, and now it's in a docket. "
Maggie let that sit.
"Can I say the other side of it," she said.
"You're going to."
"I am, and I'm going to hate it." Maggie leaned back.
"He also can't take it back. That's the thing about a docket.
He didn't tell you and then get to walk it back at Christmas dinner in front of his mother.
He put it where his board and his lawyers and every client he's got can read it forever, and there is no version of that man's life where that gets undone.
" She scratched the dog with her boot. "The gestures I've watched that family make for twenty years have all been the kind you can un-make. That one's welded on."
Renee sat with her hands around the mug.
"It's still performance," she said.
"Might be."
"It might be exactly what that op-ed said. He got out ahead of it. He's good at that, Mag, he is extremely good at that, it is the thing he is best at in the world —"
"Might be," Maggie said again. "Here's what I know.
In twenty years I've never once seen that man do a thing that cost him and got him nothing.
" She held up a hand. "And I'm not saying that means he's changed.
I'm saying it's new, and I don't have a shelf to put it on, and neither do you, and that's why you've been driving me insane about it for two days. "
Renee looked at the table for a while.
"I'm not going to let it count," she said.
"No."
"I mean it. He doesn't get to write a paragraph and have that be the end of the cellar."
"Course not."
"Then why do I feel like I'm being unfair?"
Maggie got up to put the kettle back on, and said, with her back turned, "Because you're a decent person and he finally did something true. Those two things are going to be at war in you until about April. Might as well know it now."
He came out on the first Sunday in February to sign the insurance forms on the ridge, because two of them needed both names and neither of them wanted to do it in a lawyer's office.
They did it on the tailgate of her truck at the north fence with the wind coming down, because the trailer had one chair.
He looked bad. Not tired — Chase had always been able to run tired and look expensive doing it.
This was something else. He had lost weight out of his face and there was gray coming in at the temple that had not been there in October, and his coat was one she recognized from about six years ago, which meant he had been buying nothing.
"Sign here and here," she said. "And the date's the fourteenth, not today, because that's when the adjuster came."
"Okay."
He signed. His handwriting had not changed. Nine years of seeing that signature on Christmas cards.
"They're going to total the whole structure," she said. "There's no argument. The chimney's the only thing standing and they'll want that down before summer because it's a hazard."
"Whatever you want to do with it."
"It's not what I want to do with it, it's what the county —"
"Renee." He put the pen down on the tailgate. "It's yours. Whatever you want to do with it."
She let that go, because they had already had it twice.
And then they stood there in the cold for a minute, and this was the part she was not ready for: there was nothing hostile in it.
The wind was loud and they both had their hands in their pockets and they were two people who had been married nine years, standing at a fence, and it was almost — almost — easy.
He looked out at the rows.
"That's more than four acres," he said.
"It's about four."
"That's more than four." He squinted. "You've got the whole east side turned."
"That's not turned, that's fabric off. It's not the same thing."
"What's the difference?"
And she told him. She told him about lifting fabric versus breaking ground, and why you did not break ground in this county before the middle of March unless you wanted to lose the top two inches to the wind, and he listened to the whole thing, and asked one question, and it was a good question.
Then he was quiet again.
Here is what he had sitting in his pocket, and Renee did not know the half of it yet.
He had a docketed statement with his own name on it that had cost him four points and pulled his own product out of a release.
He had a board with a governance problem.
He had told his co-founder I know, Gil and gone ahead.
He had, eleven days earlier, done the single most expensive honest thing of his life, and it was public, and she had read it, and he knew she had read it, because Bette would have told him.
He had every opening in the world.
He said, "The road's frozen past the second gate. You want to keep to the left coming up."
"I know."