Chapter 1 #2
She had been on that floor’s rotation for two years by then.
Two years of emptying his trash can and wiping the long glass table in his conference room and running the vacuum around his feet while he read.
He never looked up. None of them looked up.
That was the job. You were a sound in the hallway, and then you were gone.
Then one night in September, a few days after the funeral, he looked up.
He still had a black tie on. His jacket was over the back of his chair and his eyes were red at the edges, and he looked at her with the vacuum in her hands and said, “I’m sorry. I’ve never asked. What’s your name?”
She had thought it was grief making him kind. She had thought that for about a month. Then she stopped thinking it was grief.
That was the year he turned twenty-nine. That year was hers. She was in it. And Heather Stiles had stood in her kitchen and talked about it like a secret the two of them shared, like something Amelia would surely already know, and Amelia did not have the first idea what she meant.
What did he brood about? What did he tell Heather in the car?
She put down her pen and looked out at the lawn until the green went blurry.
Stop it, she told herself. You are a grown woman with three hundred files. You are not going to sit on a porch and be jealous of a car ride.
She picked the pen back up. She read another file. She did not remember a single word of it afterward.
* * *
Zane Kramer’s house was ten minutes away and twice the size of theirs, which Zane mentioned often and always as a joke.
By nine the party had spilled out of the house and onto the back terrace, where Zane had strung lights through the magnolias and hired a bartender who made a drink with smoke coming out of it.
There were maybe eighty people. Amelia knew most of them.
She had learned their names and their children’s names and their dogs’ names, and which ones had money from the railroads and which ones had money from Coca-Cola and which ones had money from nowhere anyone would say out loud.
She wore the green dress Lucas liked, with her hair down. She had a rule about her hair. Up when she was working. Down when she was performing. Tonight was performing.
“There she is!” Zane came through the crowd with his arms open and his face pink from the heat and the smoke drinks.
He was soft around the edges, pleasant and loud, and he had never in his life needed to be interesting to be welcome anywhere.
He hugged her too hard and kissed the top of her head. “Mrs. Fletcher. The woman of the hour.”
“It’s your party, Zane.”
“It’s everybody’s party. That’s the beauty of it.” He held her out at arm’s length. “Five years next week. Can you believe it? Who would have bet on that?”
He laughed. A couple of the men behind him laughed too.
Amelia smiled. She was used to that one.
She had heard every version of it. Five years of people who could not quite get over the fact that Lucas Fletcher had married a woman who used to clean his office.
They were never cruel about it. They were just delighted, over and over, the way people are delighted by a dog that can ride a skateboard.
“I would have,” she said. “I’d have bet the house.”
“Whose house?” Zane said, and the men laughed again, and Zane squeezed her shoulders and was gone into the crowd.
Lucas found her by the pool an hour later with two glasses of wine. He looked better than he had that morning. The meeting must have gone well. He had the loose, quiet energy he got when something hard was finished.
“Hi,” he said, and handed her a glass.
“Hi. You closed something.”
“We closed a piece of something.” He clinked his glass against hers. “Zane give you the speech?”
“Zane asked who would have bet on us.”
Lucas’s face flickered, gone before she could name it. He drank his wine.
“Zane’s an idiot,” he said.
“Zane’s your best friend.”
“Those aren’t different things.”
She laughed, and he smiled at her laughing, and for a moment it was fine. It was the two of them in the lights by the pool, as it had been at a hundred parties. He put his hand at the small of her back. She leaned into it without deciding to.
Then Heather was there.
“I’m so sorry,” Heather said. She had a hand pressed to her forehead. “I think I’ve had one of Zane’s smoke things too many. Lucas, is there any chance—”
“Of course,” Lucas said.
He said it at once. Afterward, that was the thing she kept coming back to. He did not even look.
Then he did, a second later, and his face was easy and apologetic. “I’ll run her home. It’s fifteen minutes. Walt’s out front whenever you want to leave, all right? Don’t wait on me.”
“Walt’s out front,” Amelia said.
“He’ll take you.”
“I know he’ll take me. I’m saying Walt’s out front. Walt could take Heather.”
There was a small pause. Heather looked at the pool.
“It’s no trouble,” Lucas said. “I want to go over tomorrow with her anyway. I’ll be home before you.” He kissed her cheek. His hand was already gone from her back. “Stay. Have fun. Make Zane dance.”
Then the two of them were walking away through the crowd, and Lucas had his hand at Heather’s elbow, lightly, steering her around a table.
It was nothing. It was how you guide someone who’s had too much to drink.
Amelia watched it anyway. She saw two women by the bar watch it too, and then look at each other, and then look at her, and then look away.
At the terrace door Heather stopped and came back three steps on her own.