Chapter 4 #2
Amelia was in the big conference room on the second floor with the scholarship files spread across the long table.
The Foundation’s offices were in an old brick warehouse in Midtown that the Fletchers had bought and were slowly fixing up, and the second floor was half finished.
There was sawdust in the corners and plastic sheeting over one wall and a smell of fresh-cut wood.
Amelia liked it. It felt like a place where things were still being built.
She heard Tasha’s voice downstairs, bright and uncertain. Then steps on the stairs. Then Heather was in the doorway.
She was wearing a pale blue dress and carrying a small white envelope. Her hair was smooth. Her face was open and kind.
“Amelia,” she said. “I’m not staying. I just wanted to drop this off.”
Amelia did not stand up. She put down her pen.
“Heather.”
“I know it’s awkward. I know.” Heather came two steps into the room and stopped, as if she were being careful not to crowd.
She had a gift for that. She always seemed to know how close to stand.
“I just wanted you to know I’m thinking about you.
That’s all. Whatever’s going on, it’s none of my business, and I’m not going to pry.
But I’ve known Lucas a long time, and I’ve known you for five years, and I hate to see either of you hurting. ”
“That’s kind of you.”
“It’s not kind. It’s just true.” Heather laid the white envelope on the corner of the long table. “He looked so tired on Tuesday. I told him he needs to eat something. He never eats when he’s like this. You know how he is.”
On Tuesday.
Amelia had not seen him since the door. Since the keys. Seven days.
Heather had seen him on Tuesday. And she said it the way you’d mention seeing someone at the grocery store.
Easy. Casual. As if of course she had seen him on Tuesday, and of course Amelia would know what he looked like when he was tired, and of course they were both just two women who cared about the same man.
“I know how he is,” Amelia said.
“Of course you do.” Heather smiled. Then she looked at the files spread across the table, all three hundred of them, and her smile got a little softer. “Your little program. Well. I’ll let you get back to it.”
She went. Her heels were quiet on the old wood stairs. Amelia heard the front door open and close. She sat still until she was sure the car had pulled away.
Then she picked up the envelope.
It was heavy cream paper, the expensive kind. Inside was a card with a watercolor of a magnolia on the front. She opened it.
Thinking of you both. —H.
The handwriting was small and round. Blue ink.
Amelia looked at it.
She knew that handwriting. She had only seen it once, but she had read it three times, standing in a cold study with the party laughing through the wall.
She had stared at it for two hours at a kitchen table waiting for her husband to come home.
The small round letters. The way the g looped under.
The blue ink running across the white border of a dollar bill and over George Washington’s face.
The cleaner on 28.
Heather hadn’t just been there that night. She hadn’t just known. Heather had held the pen.
The room was quiet. Somewhere downstairs a saw started up, and stopped, and started again.
* * *
She went home and took the envelope out of the drawer where she’d put it.
She didn’t read it this time. She went through it looking for one name, running her finger down the left side of each page, front and back, all six.
Zane was there. Zane was the first line.
His mother was there. Carl Benning. The Whitfields, the Carters, the Hartwells. The banker and the museum woman and the couple from Charleston and the caterer with no name.
Heather was not there.
Amelia went through it again, slower, to be sure. She read every entry. She read the margins. She read the last line, Me. Every day on every page above.
Not once. Heather Stiles was not on the list anywhere.
He had written down his own mother, word for word. He had written down his oldest friend and the men on his board and the families he’d grown up with. He had written down a caterer whose name he didn’t know. And he had left out the woman who held the pen.
Why?
She sat on the air mattress with the pages in her lap and let herself think it through.
Maybe he didn’t know Heather wrote it. No. He was there. He watched her write it. He signed under it.
Maybe he forgot. No. He didn’t forget things. That was the whole point of the list. He remembered everything.
Maybe he was protecting her.
That one landed like a stone.
Or maybe he just couldn’t. Maybe Heather was the one name he couldn’t make his hand write. Because writing it down would mean admitting what the car rides were. What the eight weeks were. Who he’d been talking to while his wife slept.
She didn’t know which was worse. She thought they might be the same thing.
* * *
She put the list back in the envelope. She put the envelope back in the drawer. She put Heather’s card in the drawer on top of it, face down, and closed it.
Then she stood in the tiny kitchen with her hands on the counter and made herself say it, out loud, to the empty kitchen.
“It was different.”
It was. She couldn’t pretend it wasn’t. The keys through the door were what he always did.
The account in her name was what he always did.
The apology was what he always did, the right words in the right order.
Those were a rich man doing the thing rich men do, which is try to make a problem go away by making it smaller than the money.
The list was not that. The list was the first thing he had ever handed her that he couldn’t take back.
It cost him his friends, if she used it.
It cost him his mother. It cost him every room he’d ever walked into.
And he’d handed it over with one line on top that said I’m not asking for anything, and he’d meant it.
She could tell he’d meant it. That was the trouble with being married to someone that long. You could tell.
It was different in kind.
And he had still left Heather off it.
She turned off the kitchen light. She stood in the dark with the fig tree moving outside the window.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Not yet.”
She said it again, to be sure she’d heard herself. Then she went to bed on the air mattress. She lay awake for a long time looking at the drawer.