Chapter 11 #3
It happened all at once, like a faucet turning off.
Her face changed. The soft, sad girl on the velvet couch was gone, and something else was looking out of her eyes.
It was the thing Caroline had seen in the doorway.
It was the thing that had sat behind Caroline’s desk on Sunday morning and made coffee in her coffee maker.
“You think this is over?” Brittany said, and her voice was not soft anymore.
It was low and hard and it carried to the back of the atrium.
“I have two months of texts from your husband. Two months. Every night. You want to know what he said about you? You want me to put those on a screen? Because I will. I’ll sue him, and I’ll sue you, and I’ll sue this whole sad little store, and I’ll put every single thing he ever told me about his boring wife in the Inquirer—”
“Go ahead,” Caroline said.
Brittany stopped.
“I know what’s in them,” Caroline said quietly.
“He told me. Budgets. The Newark deal. His board. What he had for dinner. He told you about his day.” She looked at Brittany steadily.
“He never loved you, Brittany. You weren’t a love story.
You were somebody who asked him about his day, and listened, because you wanted something.
And you wanted this.” She lifted one hand, a small movement, and the whole atrium seemed to follow it.
The dome. The tree. The clock. The mezzanine.
“You wanted my floor. You wanted my name. You wanted to stand where I stand. So you paid a kid five hundred dollars to hold a light.”
Nobody in the room made a sound.
“And you’ll never stand there,” Caroline said. “Not here. Not ever.”
For one more second, Brittany Vail stood in the second row in her white coat, with every face in the atrium turned toward her.
Then Ned Stroud stood up beside her, very carefully. He buttoned his suit jacket. He did not look at Brittany. He looked at Caroline, and nodded once, and walked away down the side aisle toward the Walnut Street doors, alone.
The man from Philadelphia magazine was already on his phone.
Somewhere at the back of the room, somebody clapped. Then somebody else. It spread. It was not the wild, happy applause of the carol broadcast. It was slower and harder than that. It was the sound a room makes when it has decided something.
Brittany looked around her. At the clapping hands. At the camera crews, whose cameras were all pointed at her. At the gift-wrap ladies at the edge of the crowd, standing in a row with their arms folded.
Then she picked up her white coat and walked out of Hadley’s, fast, with her head down, and nobody got out of her way.
Caroline did not watch her go.
She turned back to the podium and looked at Carla Weiss, who was standing beside it with her cardboard check and her mouth wide open.
“Carla,” Caroline said. “I think Santa’s waiting for the kids from the fourth floor.”
* * *
By five o’clock, it was everywhere.
Stroud’s put out a statement at two. Ms. Vail will not be joining Stroud’s.
Bradshaw Freight put out a statement at three.
Ms. Vail’s employment has been terminated for cause, effective immediately.
The man from Philadelphia magazine took the interview off the website at three-thirty and put up a new story at four.
It was called The Spotlight Was Paid For.
By six, the two boutique owners from Rittenhouse had told the Inquirer that Brittany Vail had been “calling everyone in town” for weeks, “trying to set herself up.” By seven, the hotel manager from across Walnut Street had said on the evening news that he had cancelled her holiday party booking.
Caroline sat on Stephanie’s pull-out bed at nine o’clock that night with her phone face-down beside her and the radiator banging, and she felt very tired, and very clear.
She did not feel happy. She had thought she might. Instead she was like a room after a long party, when all the guests have gone home and all that’s left is the mess and the quiet.
You weren’t a love story.
She had said it to Brittany. But she had been saying it to herself too. For two weeks, somewhere down deep, she had been afraid of it. Afraid that under the budgets and the takeout and she’d ask me about my day, there had been something real. Something Connor had wanted more than he wanted her.
There hadn’t been.
There had been a flattered man, and a woman who wanted what Caroline had. That was all it had ever been. And it was so small. It was so much smaller than the damage.
Her phone buzzed.
She turned it over. It was Connor.
I just saw the news. I didn’t know. About any of it. The booth, the kid, the money.
Then, a minute later:
I should have been the one who found it. I should have been there.
And a minute after that:
No. That’s wrong. You didn’t need me there. You didn’t need anybody. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Caroline.
Caroline read all three messages. She held the phone for a long time.
Then she put it down, without answering, and lay back on the pull-out bed with the metal bar in her spine, and looked at the ceiling. She realized, lying there, that for the first time since the lighting, she was not waiting for him to fix anything.