Chapter 9
Libby Carter told her where Heather would be. Libby didn’t mean to.
She called on a Monday in early November, the way she called every week or two now, bright and sorry and fishing. Amelia had stopped answering most of them. She answered this one because she was in her car at a red light and her hand did it before she thought.
“Sweetheart! I’ve been thinking about you. How are you holding up?”
“I’m fine, Libby.”
“You’re always fine. You’re amazing.” A pause, and then the thing Libby had actually called to say, dressed up as nothing.
“Listen, I don’t want to upset you. But I thought you’d want to know.
Heather’s hosting the Denison partners at the Waverly on Thursday.
A big lunch, the private room upstairs. Tom’s going, for the bank.
And Lucas isn’t.” Another pause, heavy with pleasure.
“Isn’t that odd? His own deal? Tom says he’s barely been at any of the meetings since—well.
Since. Tom says Heather’s practically running the whole thing now. ”
The light turned green. Amelia drove.
“Thursday,” she said.
“At noon. I just thought you should know. I’d want to know, if it were me.” The wind-chime laugh. “Not that it means anything. I’m sure it doesn’t.”
“I’m sure it doesn’t,” Amelia said. “Thank you, Libby. That’s very helpful.”
She hung up. She drove the rest of the way to the Foundation with both hands on the wheel, and she did not feel anything she could have named.
It had been like that for three weeks now.
Since the conference room. Since the ring.
She moved through her days like a woman walking on ice she knew was solid.
Calm on top. Everything underneath going on down there in the dark, hot and awful, where she didn’t have to look at it.
She parked. She sat in the car.
Thursday. Noon. The private room upstairs.
She had known she would do this. She had known since Heather’s card. Maybe since the car line, under the white columns. She had just been waiting to know when.
* * *
She didn’t tell Roxanne. Roxanne would have wanted to come, and Roxanne would have said something in a loud voice about Heather’s shoes, and it would have been wonderful, and it would have been the wrong thing. This one was hers.
She didn’t tell Lucas either. She hadn’t spoken to him since the conference room. He hadn’t tried. No calls. No envelopes. No Walt at the door. He had done what she’d asked. He had gone.
On Thursday morning she dressed the way she dressed for work. Gray slacks. A white blouse. Flat shoes. Her grandmother’s pearls. She put her hair up.
She took Heather’s card out of the kitchen drawer, the cream one with the watercolor magnolia. Thinking of you both. —H. She put it in her bag.
She left the list where it was. She didn’t need it. She knew every name on it by heart.
* * *
The Waverly Club at noon on a weekday was a different place from the Waverly Club at night.
Quieter. Older men in the grill room reading the paper.
Women coming in from tennis in white. The ballroom doors were shut.
The great staircase went up from the front hall in a slow curve, all dark wood and red carpet, to a hallway of private dining rooms named after dead men.
The Denison lunch was in the Hollis Room. She could hear it from the stairs. Voices, the clink of glasses, a man’s big laugh.
The door was half open.
She stood outside it for one breath. Her face was hot. She let it be hot. Nobody could see her face yet.
She went in.
It was a long room with dark paneling and one tall window.
A table for fourteen, white cloth, silver, little bowls of soup nobody had finished.
Men in good suits and two women in better ones.
She knew Tom Carter, halfway down on the left, who went white when he saw her.
She knew Zane, at the far end, pink and loose in the middle of a story.
She didn’t know the others. The Denison people, from Charlotte.
She had never met them, because she had never been part of this.
This was the work. She had only ever been at the dinners after.
At the head of the table, in pale gray silk with her back to the window, sat Heather.
The room went quiet in stages. First the people nearest the door. Then the middle. Then Zane, last, still talking, until he looked up and saw her and stopped with his hand in the air.
Heather saw her last of all. Or seemed to. She looked up from her plate, and her face did nothing at all for one second. Then it opened, warm and kind, the listener’s face.
“Amelia,” she said. “What a surprise.”
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Amelia said. “I won’t be long.”
She walked down the long side of the table. Nobody stopped her. There was an empty chair at Heather’s right hand. She could guess whose it was supposed to be. She didn’t sit in it. She stood beside it with one hand on its high carved back.
Then she took the cream envelope out of her bag and laid the card on the white cloth in front of Heather, open, so the handwriting showed.
Thinking of you both. —H.
“You wrote it,” Amelia said.
* * *
She didn’t say it loud. She said it the way you’d say you dropped this. Plain. Level.
Heather looked down at the card. She looked back up.
“I did,” she said pleasantly. “I thought you might need a friend. Was that wrong?”
“Not the card.”
A small silence.
Around the table, not a fork moved. The Denison people were looking at each other. Tom Carter was looking at his soup. A server had frozen in the doorway with a tray of bread.
“I’m not sure what you mean,” Heather said.
“Then I’ll ask you one thing at a time,” Amelia said. “You can answer or not. You were in the bar that night. Six years ago. September. With Lucas and Zane.”
Heather tilted her head. “Everyone knows that.”
“Yes. Everyone does.” Amelia kept her hand on the chair. “Whose idea was it to write it down?”
“Amelia—”
“It’s your handwriting,” Amelia said. “On the dollar. The small round letters. The g that loops under. I’ve read it enough times now.
I read it three times in Zane’s study, the night you told me to go look at the wall.
” She touched the card with one finger. “And I read it again here. It’s the same hand. ”
At the far end of the table, Zane made a sound. Half a laugh. Nobody looked at him.
Heather went still. Her face stayed pleasant. But something behind it had gone flat and careful, like a woman adding up a bill.
Amelia watched her do the math. Heather looked around the table: the Denison partners, Tom Carter, the server in the door. She decided that the room was already lost, that denying it now would only make it worse, that the only thing left was to own it and make it sound like nothing.
“Mine,” Heather said. She smiled a little. “Fine. It was mine. We were all very drunk, and Lucas was being dramatic, and I said, if you’re going to make a bet like that, somebody should write it down. It was a joke. It was six years ago.”
“Why?”
“I just told you. It was a joke.”
“No,” Amelia said. “Why write it down?”
Heather looked at her.
For one second, before the pleasant face came back, Amelia saw what was under it. Five years of it. The thing she’d felt at every dinner and never been able to name. Not dislike. Something colder. Contempt, flat and patient and old.
“You really want to know?” Heather said softly.
“I really want to know.”
Heather leaned back in her chair. She folded her hands on the white cloth. When she spoke, her voice was low and even and almost kind, the way you explain something to a child who isn’t very bright.
“Because Lucas was going to marry somebody,” she said.
“Sooner or later. His mother was going to see to it. And I thought, if he’s going to do something that stupid, then let it be in writing.
In my handwriting. On a wall somewhere, where it would sit and wait.
” She shrugged one shoulder. “A marriage that starts as a bet is a marriage that can end any time somebody decides to show the bet to the wife. I just had to wait for the right time.”
The room was dead silent.
“You waited six years,” Amelia said.
“I’m patient.”
“And this summer he finally talked to you. In the car. Every day for eight weeks. He told you about the year he turned twenty-nine. He told you about the money under my program. He told you everything he never told me.” Amelia’s voice didn’t rise.
It got quieter, if anything. “And once he’d told you everything, you knew it was time.
So you came to my kitchen and dropped half a sentence to make sure I’d be looking.
And that night you sent me into Zane’s study. ”
Heather didn’t answer right away.
“Somebody had to tell you,” she said at last. “You were the only one in Atlanta who didn’t know. Honestly, Amelia. It was almost a kindness.”
* * *
Amelia let that sit.
Heat filled her face and her chest and her hands. She let it stay. She didn’t need to hide it. She had spent years hiding everything in rooms like this one, keeping her face still for these people. She didn’t owe them her still face anymore.
“He drove you,” she said. “For eight weeks. He has a driver who’s been with him nine years, and he walked past him every morning and put you in his own car.”
“He did.”
“And you talked. You had the inside of his head. The things his wife had never been told.”
“We talked,” Heather said. “He’s easy to talk to, when you already know the worst thing about him. You should try it sometime.” She smiled faintly. “Neither of those is a crime, you know. Driving. Talking.”
“No,” Amelia said. “They’re not.”
She turned from Heather and looked down the long table. At the Denison partners. At the men and two women from Charlotte who had come to Atlanta to do a large piece of business and had put their trust in the woman at the head of this table. At Tom Carter, who had told his wife. At Zane.