Chapter 9 #2
"Because six prices the work," she said, "and nine and a half prices finding out what's there."
He went very quiet.
"That's the school," he said. "Dorchester."
"That's the school."
"I've never once put that number in a bid," Gordon said slowly. "In twenty years. I've priced the discovery into the schedule and eaten it in the margin every single time, because I couldn't work out how to justify it on a page."
"You can't justify it. You just put it in and defend it."
"And Beckett took it?"
"Beckett took it in about four minutes," Nicole said, "because she's been running buildings for thirty years and she's the only person in the room who's ever been on the wrong end of a surprise."
Gordon sat back on his heels in a corridor in Quincy and looked at his wife.
"Fourteen years," he said. "That's the answer to your question. About which of us stopped asking. It was me, and it was about fourteen years ago, and I know exactly when because it was the month I stopped being able to answer the questions you were asking me."
She turned her head.
"You'd ask me about a job," he said, "and I'd have to tell you I didn't know, because I'd stopped being the one who knew. I had four hundred people who knew. And you'd have looked at me the way you're looking at me right now."
"How am I looking at you?"
"Like I'm somebody who used to be good at something," Gordon said, and stood up, and went to get the next jar.
At half past midnight, working along the second-floor rail, she said without thinking, "Do you remember the pizza?"
"On the floor. Cold."
"You said—"
"I said if we could do this we could do anything," Gordon said.
"Yes."
"And you said the roof was going to fall in on us."
"It nearly did," Nicole said. "In 2011."
And they both laughed, and it was completely easy, and it was the first easy thing in three months, and it filled her chest like warm water.
Then Gordon said, "God, I should tell Whitney about the valve, she'll—"
And stopped.
The corridor was cold and quiet.
Nicole stood with a bleed key in her hand and watched twenty minutes of her life go out like a light.
"Nicole—"
"It's fine."
"It's not, I didn't—"
"Gordon, it's fine." She turned around. "That's the thing you're not understanding. It's not that you said it. It's that it was true. You were standing in a corridor at midnight having a nice time with your wife, and the first thing your mind did with it was work out who to tell."
He didn't say anything.
"For three years," she said, "the answer to that question hasn't been me. Not because you chose her. Because you stopped choosing at all. It just — went there. Like water goes downhill."
"I know," he said.
"Do you?"
"Nicole, I have thought about almost nothing else since the sixth of December."
"That's two months," she said. "I've got fourteen years to get through. You're a long way behind me and I'd rather you didn't catch up in a corridor."
They finished at ten to four.
The building was fifty-eight degrees and climbing, and the knock had settled into the steady tick of a system doing what it was designed to do, and outside the sky over Quincy had that particular black that comes before it starts thinking about being blue.
They stood in the parking lot by two trucks with their breath going up.
Nicole was filthy. Gordon had torn his suit jacket at the shoulder on a pipe hanger at midnight and had not mentioned it, and there was plaster in his hair, and he was fifty-one years old and looked about thirty-five, and she was so tired that her hands had stopped being cold and had gone somewhere past it.
"Two hundred people are going to have a funeral breakfast in about five hours," he said, "and not one of them will ever know."
"That's the job."
"That was always the job." He was looking at the building. "I miss it. I've got four hundred and sixty people and a floor with my name on the wall and I haven't touched a valve in nine years and I miss it, Nic, and I'm not allowed to say that to anyone because it sounds like a rich man being cute."
Nicole stood in a parking lot and did not trust herself to speak.
Because she had missed it too. Every day. For fourteen years. And she had never said it to a single human being, and neither had he, and they had lived in the same house.
"Gordon."
"Yeah."
She had no idea what she was going to say. She would think about that for weeks — that she opened her mouth with nothing in it and something was going to come out.
Her phone went off in her pocket.
It was 3:52 in the morning. It was Joanna Pierce, who did not call people at 3:52 in the morning.
Nicole looked at the screen.
"You should get that," Gordon said.
She got it.
"Sorry about the hour," Joanna said. "You're going to want to be sitting down, and I'm guessing from the background that you're outside."
"I'm in a parking lot."
"Right." A rustle of paper. "Your husband's partner sent me eight documents six hours ago and I've now had two of them independently confirmed, which means I have to put a version of them in the piece, and I called because I told you in a café that I'd never surprise you."
Across the roof of the truck, Gordon was watching her face.
"Nicole," Joanna said, "did you turn down a seat on that board nine days after your father had a stroke?"
Nicole closed her eyes.
"Yes," she said. "I did."