Chapter 5 #2
"He gave up money." Bridget put her carton down. "He has more. That's the thing about it. It's the one thing he's got a spare of."
"He cut his mother off in front of the family."
"And how do you feel about that?"
Nicole opened her mouth and found nothing in it.
"Because that's the one that worries me," Bridget said, and she wasn't hard about it, which was worse. "The money I can explain. That one I can't, and I can see it's got in under your ribs, and Nicole — love — you have been on your own for one week."
"I know."
"He had twenty-four years to say say the next part."
"I know."
"So why now."
"Because it stopped being free," Nicole said.
Bridget sat back.
"That's it, isn't it," Nicole said slowly, working it out as she said it, which she hadn't done in front of another person in a long time.
"Nothing he did ever cost him anything. Laughing at the joke was free.
Letting Vera talk was free. Whitney was free — she didn't take a thing off him, she just took the two a.m. and gave him back an easier version of his own life.
" She looked at the window. "And the second it cost something, he did it.
Immediately. He didn't even hesitate, Bridge, he did it inside forty-eight hours. "
"Fine. So he's brave now. He's brave now."
"That's not — " Nicole shook her head. "I'm not saying it's good. I'm saying it's worse."
Bridget stopped.
"He could always have done it," Nicole said. "That's what it means. He was never a coward who couldn't. He was a man who could and didn't, because it was cheaper not to, and I was the thing that was cheap."
Neither of them said anything for a while. Outside, somebody's car alarm went off and stopped.
"Right," Bridget said quietly. "Okay. That's worse."
On Friday morning a project turned up on her desk.
Not a real one. A feasibility review on a library in Malden, forty pages, six weeks old, with a note attached from an operations manager she barely knew saying it would be great to get your eye on this.
Nicole read the note twice, then walked it up to Lattimore.
"Did you send me this?"
"No." He looked at the folder. "Malden? God, no, that's been dead since January."
"Who runs it?"
"Nobody runs it. It's a maybe." He read the note over her shoulder and made a small noise. "Ah."
"Ah what?"
"That's a keep her busy," Lattimore said, and had the decency to look uncomfortable about saying it. "Sorry. But that's what that is. Somebody wants you to have something on your desk so that when a person asks whether you're working, the answer's yes."
Nicole stood in his doorway with forty pages of dead library in her hand.
Here it was again, then. Not a shove — an upgrade.
Not you can't sit here — let me find you something.
It had been done to her for ten years and every single time it had arrived with a warm note attached, and she had said thank you, every single time, because the alternative was to be a woman who threw a folder at somebody's chest.
"Do you have anything real?" she said.
"Not for a person with no title, no." He said it plainly, and she liked him for the plainness. "That's not me protecting you, that's just how the machine works. Everything real has a client and a contract and a budget code, and all three of those need a person the system recognizes."
"So how does the system recognize somebody?"
Lattimore thought about it.
"Orange," he said. "Something nobody wants."
The papers came Saturday by courier, because everything in her life now arrived by courier.
Regina had gone through them line by line and had highlighted nothing, because there was nothing to highlight. The trust was executed. The separation agreement was clean and it was generous and it did not ask her for one single thing in return — not silence, not distance, not the last twenty years.
Regina's note was one line, paper-clipped to the front.
It's exactly what it appears to be. Signature tabs are marked. Take your time. — RH
She called Bridget first, which she recognized, even at the time, as looking for permission.
"Are you asking me or telling me?"
"I'm asking you what you'd do."
"I'd sign it in about nine seconds," Bridget said. "And then I'd take the money and buy a boat I don't know how to drive." A pause on the line, and the sound of a hospital corridor behind her. "But I'm not you, and you're not asking me about the paperwork."
"What am I asking you about?"
"You're asking whether it counts."
Nicole didn't answer.
"It counts," Bridget said. "That's what I'll give you and it's the last kind thing you'll get from me on this subject.
What he did on Sunday at that lunch counts.
It doesn't pay for anything, Nic. It doesn't buy a single one of those three hundred people back.
But it counts, and you're allowed to have it count, and you're allowed to sit with it for a week without me shouting at you. "
"You've been shouting at me for a month."
"I have," Bridget agreed. "I'm very tired."
Nicole made a cup of tea she didn't drink. She sat down at the counter of a rented kitchen with a dead burner and she put the pen on the page.
She had come here to be finished. That had been the whole point of the four-month lease.
The pen sat there.
Sign it, and she'd have everything she'd need for the rest of her life, and she'd have it from a man who had made sure she could say whatever she liked about him forever, and who had stood up at his mother's table and made the room listen to what it sounded like.
He was still the man who wrote gordon built a company, nicole built a front desk.
Both of those things were true at once. That was the part nobody warned you about. She had spent a week building a version of him she could survive — a small man, a coward, an easy story — and every day of this one he had gone and done something that wouldn't fit in it.
Nicole put the pen down.
Then she picked it up and put it in the drawer, and shut the drawer, and sat there in the dark with her hands flat on the paper for a long time.