Chapter 4 #2
"No. It's in a ledger." She looked at Yolanda.
"If you isolate that hall in January you'll freeze the rectory and a day-care that runs in the basement Monday to Friday, and you'll be doing it in the first week of a thirty-one-building program, in front of every pastor in the diocese. You'd never get the other thirty."
Nobody said anything.
Yolanda Beckett put her glasses back on and looked at the screen for a long moment.
"Who are you?" she said, not unkindly.
"Nicole Doran. I priced your parish hall the year we started and I got it wrong by four hundred dollars."
Yolanda Beckett laughed.
"Start with St. Anselm's," Nicole said. "It's got the worst boiler and the best access and if you fix it in February everybody in the diocese will hear about it by Lent."
The meeting ran another ninety minutes. Nicole stayed for it because Yolanda asked her to, in a tone that made it a condition, and Lattimore ran the rest of the deck with a stiffness in his shoulders that she almost felt sorry about.
Gordon didn't say a word the whole time. He stood by the window and he watched his wife work.
Whitney caught her in the corridor before she got ten feet.
"That was extraordinary."
"Thank you."
"No, I mean it." And she did; that was the thing.
Whitney Larkin had never in her life said a thing she didn't mean, which was the whole problem with her.
"Yolanda Beckett has been rude to me for four years and she just asked you to stay in the room.
Nicole, that's — you should be doing that.
You should have been doing that the whole time. "
Nicole stopped walking.
"Say that again."
"You should have been—" Whitney heard it. Not all of it. Enough of it to slow down. "I only mean you're wasted on—"
"On what?"
"That came out wrong."
"It came out fine," Nicole said. "You've just never had to hear yourself say it in a corridor before."
Whitney was quiet for a second. Then, carefully: "There's a version of this where you come back properly.
A real role. I'd back it. I'd back it tomorrow.
" She said it warmly, with her hand half-raised, the way you offer something to someone who has been standing outside in the rain.
"That's what I've been trying to get five minutes with you about. "
And Nicole — this was the part she would turn over for months — felt it work.
Some old thing under her ribs went yes, immediately, the way a dog stands up at a sound. Fifteen years of wanting exactly that from exactly this woman, and here it was in a corridor, offered kindly, and every part of her wanted to say yes and be given a job by Whitney Larkin.
"No," she said.
"Nicole—"
"You don't have anything I want," Nicole said. "You just gave me something, and I felt it land, and that's the most frightened I've been all week."
She found him in the stairwell afterward. Or he found her; she'd never be sure which, and it mattered a little.
"Nic."
She kept going down. He came after her.
"That was — " He stopped on the half-landing. "You just saved thirty-one buildings."
"I saved one day-care."
"Nicole." His voice did something it hadn't done in years; it came unmanaged. "Thank you. Honestly. Thank you."
She stopped two steps below him and turned around, so that for once she was looking down at him.
"Don't do that."
"Do what? I'm thanking you—"
"You're thanking me for helping. Like I came in and did a favor." She said it without heat, which she could see was worse for him. "Gordon. I didn't help. That's the company. Half of what's on that screen is a thing I did before you were allowed to sign a check."
"I know that."
"You don't. You know it the way you know a fact." She adjusted the box under her arm; she'd carried it down with her. "You've been standing in that room being grateful. Gratitude is what you feel toward people who don't have to be there."
He opened his mouth and shut it.
"That's the whole thing," she said. "That's been the whole thing for fourteen years and you're still doing it while you're apologizing."
She went down two flights before he said anything, and when he did it came over the rail, too loud in the concrete.
"What do I do?"
She didn't answer him. She hadn't worked it out yet herself.
She caught Ross at the elevators at half past five.
"Who put a hold on the archive?"
He didn't pretend not to understand. That was the thing about Ross; he had never once in twenty years made her do the work of asking twice.
"Not him," he said.
"That wasn't my question."
"I know." He shifted the folder under his arm. "But it's the answer you wanted first."
She waited.
"Records got a note on Tuesday," Ross said.
"Not from Gordon. Nothing with a name on it, either — it came through as guidance from the executive floor, which means it came from somebody's assistant, which means it came from somebody who knew better than to send it themselves.
" He pushed his glasses up into his hair.
"It said historical materials were sensitive at the moment and should be routed for review before release. "
"Routed to who?"
"That's the good part. It doesn't say." He almost smiled. "Twenty years of filing and I can tell you: when a note doesn't say who reviews it, it's because the answer would be embarrassing in writing."
Nicole stood with her hand on the cold steel of the elevator frame.
"She wants the whole record in one place before I get it," she said. "Doesn't she."
"I didn't say that."
"Ross."
"Nicole." He looked at her steadily. "I've worked for that woman for fifteen years and I've never seen her do a dishonest thing.
Not one. That's not a defense of her, it's a warning about her.
She doesn't have to lie." The elevator came and he put a hand out to hold the door.
"Whatever she brings you, it'll all be true.
Every page. That's what you want to be ready for. "
At six twelve, a calendar invitation arrived on the machine she'd had for five days.
W. Larkin — private — 30 min Subject: The record. Please.
She sat looking at it with her coat already on.
The floor had emptied around her. Down on Farnsworth Street somebody was scraping ice off a windshield in long screeches.
Nicole didn't accept it. She didn't decline it either.
She left it sitting there, unanswered, and went home to a rented kitchen with one dead burner, and she did not sleep much, because the record was her phrase — she had said it to nobody but Joanna Pierce, in a café, at eight o'clock in the morning, four days ago.