Chapter Eight #2
She thought about that. "He looked guilty."
"He has been guilty since the pitch, when I told him you called it hospital furniture."
She laughed, short and real, the surprised one he had been collecting since the first time she had produced it in the elevator on the day of the pitch.
He had not told her he was collecting it.
He thought perhaps she knew anyway, the way she always seemed to know which pieces of information he was holding and which she was meant to ask about.
In the elevator up to the apartment she leaned against the wall with her shoes in her hand, which was a thing she always did when she had been on her feet long enough, and looked at him with the expression she wore when she was deciding something.
"Tell me something true," she said. "Something you have not told anyone else recently."
He looked at her. It was the kind of ask that could go several directions, and he knew which direction he should take it, the one that ended with his actual title and the full scope of what this company was about to become, the direction that resolved the thing Daisy had named and the thing he had been circling for weeks.
"I put a reminder in my calendar," he said. "For every time I meant to tell you something and didn't."
She looked at him for a long moment. The elevator arrived at their floor.
"How many reminders?" she said.
"Enough."
She held his gaze for one beat, two. Then she nodded, the small precise nod she used when she had filed something important and would return to it when the time was right, and stepped out of the elevator, and he followed, and the door of the apartment opened onto the warm familiar smell of the space that was theirs now, and the lake outside the tall windows, and the life they were building around the edges of the arrangement, or possibly instead of it.
He was going to tell her. Tomorrow. He had picked the time and he was going to use it, because Gemma had just told him something true in a car at night with her shoes in her hand, and she deserved the same in return, and he was done deciding that there would be a better moment than the one that was actually in front of him.
He turned the kitchen light on. He went to bed. He set an alarm for six and lay in the dark and thought about what he was going to say, and this time, for the first time, he felt the shape of it clearly enough to believe he was actually going to say it.
He had set the alarm for six and the alarm had gone off and he had lain in bed for eight minutes deciding how to begin the conversation, and then Gemma had knocked on his bedroom door and said, "your coffee is ready and Pete needs a decision on the corridor end-cap by nine," and the moment had dissolved into the ordinary morning, which was, he was coming to understand, simply what mornings did when you lived with someone.
He had told himself he would find another moment. He had found seventeen other moments across the working day and done nothing with any of them. He was aware that this was a pattern. He was less clear on how to break it.
The evening after the reception he had come home to find her at the kitchen table with two things in front of her: her floor plan and a cup of tea that had clearly been sitting for a while, which meant she had poured it intending to drink it and had been distracted before she could.
He made a fresh one. Set it in front of her.
She looked up with the unguarded expression that came when he did something she had not expected, the one that arrived before she had time to arrange a response.
"Tell me something true," she had said.
He had not told her the true thing. He had told her about the calendar reminders, which was a true thing, but not the true thing, and she had looked at him with the particular steadiness of a woman who was choosing to accept the incomplete version while making it very clear that she knew it was incomplete.
He needed to stop doing this. He was going to stop doing this.
He called Toby from the car on the way to the site walkthrough the next morning.
"I need to tell her today," he said.
A pause. "What changed?"
"She told me about her father."
Silence on the line, the considering kind. "Malcolm Sinclair."
"Yes."
"Tristan." Toby's voice shifted into the register he used for the conversations that actually mattered. "If she has told you who she is, and you are still not telling her who you fully are, then the imbalance is no longer accidental. You understand that."
He understood it. He had understood it since the night she had said my father is Malcolm Sinclair with her hands very still in her lap, which was the tell he had learned meant she was being careful, and he had said okay and had meant it and had also felt, somewhere behind the okay, the particular discomfort of a person receiving honesty they have not yet matched.
"Today," he said.
"After the walkthrough," Toby said. "There is a board memo going out this afternoon that references the succession timeline directly. If she reads it before you tell her, which she might if she is in the building, then the conversation becomes more complicated."
He increased his speed. "What time does it go out?"
"Four. I can delay it to five."
"I will be back by four."
He was. He was back at four-fifteen, which was cutting it finer than he had intended because Pete had found a subfloor anomaly in the north corridor that required an on-site decision and Gemma had spent forty minutes working through the options with the kind of focused problem-solving he had stopped finding surprising and had started finding something he did not quite have a word for, something adjacent to admiration but warmer.
She was still on the floor when he got back to the office. He texted: can you come up to fourteen when you are done? I need to show you something.
She replied: twenty minutes.
He sat at his desk and looked at the window and the river and thought about what he was going to say, which was, stripped down: I have been the heir of this company since my father died and I have been running it from a door with no name plate for eighteen months, and I should have told you everything before you signed the terms, and I did not, and I am telling you now, and I am sorry for the gap between those two moments.
He was going to say it. He had said it in his head twice now and it had not dissolved. It was a real sentence. It was going to be said.
His phone buzzed. Toby: Malcolm Sinclair just called Eleanor. He is requesting a meeting with the principal designer on the renovation project. Eleanor is going to ask Gemma directly.
He looked at his phone for a long moment. The sentence he had been preparing rearranged itself. The timing had just changed, which meant the conversation had just changed, and he needed to think about what that meant before she arrived, which was in approximately sixteen minutes.
He was still thinking when she knocked on the open office door.
She was in her work clothes, dust from the corridor on her sleeve, floor plan under her arm, and she looked at him with the expression she wore when she thought the next thing was going to be worth hearing.
"Sit down," he said. "There are some things I should have told you sooner, and I am going to tell them to you now."
She sat. She put the floor plan on his desk. She looked at him with the patience of a woman who had learned that the most important information usually arrived after a pause, and she waited.
He began.