Chapter 18
The spicy, resinous sweetness of cardamom reached her before she was fully down the hall.
Nadine was standing at the stove stirring something, the same way she had been every morning for the last ten days.
For as long as Simone could remember, her mother had always woken up and been in the kitchen earlier than anyone else.
The kitchen smelled of cardamom and something else underneath it, dark and warm, the beginning of whatever Nadine was already putting together for tonight’s dinner.
Last night, it had been a chicken colombo, the apartment filling with the scent of turmeric and anise until it drew Simone from her laptop where she’d been working diligently until she couldn’t concentrate.
Nadine’s spices stood in a neat row along the backsplash where before there had been nothing.
A ceramic bowl on the counter held three oranges.
The dish towel hanging from the oven handle was not the one that had come with the apartment, and the colander had migrated from the cabinet above the refrigerator where Simone had put it when she had moved in because it had to go somewhere to the cabinet by the sink where it made considerably more sense.
None of these changes had been mentioned aloud by either of them.
Simone poured herself a mug of coffee and settled at the island, watching her mother work.
Nadine moved through the kitchen with the unhurried pace of someone who had cooked in dozens of borrowed spaces and had made peace with all of them.
Her hand movements were precise and unself-conscious—rinsing, trimming, setting aside—and Simone had spent enough of her childhood watching her mother work in the kitchen that the sight still had the same pull it always had.
The Villeray apartment had smelled like this, and so had the import shop on Beaubien Street, the small back room where Nadine kept the accounts and where Simone had sat at a folding table after school doing the bookkeeping while her mother worked through invoices beside her.
She had been twelve the first time Nadine handed her the ledger.
By fifteen, she was negotiating with vendors on the phone, her French more formal than her mother’s.
The only sound between them had been the radiator clicking in the walls.
It hadn’t occurred to Simone until considerably later that this was also a kind of love—the two of them working in parallel, the numbers either adding up or not, and the comfortable silence between two people who trusted each other enough to not have to rush to fill the space.
This penthouse was some thirty-odd years removed from that back room, and Simone had spent that time maintaining that same distance, deliberately, one acquisition at a time. Standing here now, watching Nadine chop vegetables, she couldn’t find the feeling she was supposed to feel about that.
She wrapped both hands around the mug and said nothing.
“You slept,” Nadine said, still not turning from the stove.
“Yes. Did you?”
Nadine made a small, noncommittal sound that Simone knew meant there was an opinion underneath the yes. In fifty-one years, Simone had never successfully lied to her mother, so she had simply learned which truths to offer and which to leave in a drawer.
“The summit is this morning,” Simone said.
“You mentioned.” Nadine reached for something on the backsplash, inspected it, and set it back down. “What time is it?”
“Ten. It goes until mid-afternoon.” She turned the mug slowly in her hands. “I’m not sure when I’ll be back.”
“Well, I’ll be here.”
Nadine had said she was coming for a week. The week had ended four days ago, and her return flight was now rebooked for Thursday. Simone had not asked about it, and Nadine hadn’t explained it further.
Nadine turned from the stove and looked at the windows with the same attention she gave their Villeray apartment before she had left for work, then her gaze moved to the counter, and she was quiet for a moment. Simone recognized the look; Nadine was deciding whether she wanted to say something.
“There’s good lighting in here,” she said, eventually. “Especially in the mornings.”
“It faces east,” Simone said matter-of-factly.
Nadine looked at the counter again, as if inspecting it. “You know, you could put things here. It’s a nice space for it. A plant, maybe. Or a photograph.” She paused. “Something personal.”
Simone went still. Nadine turned back to the stove and adjusted the heat under the pot, leaving the observation where it was. If her mother noticed that her living space was devoid of mementos, what else did she notice?
“I should get ready,” Simone said, quickly recomposing herself.
Nadine glanced over her shoulder. “Go. I’ll have something here for when you get back.”
Simone took her mug to the sink and rinsed it.
The ceramic bowl sat beside the tap, the oranges vivid against the stark white counter, the first color in this apartment that hadn’t come from the view.
She didn’t know when Nadine had bought them.
She stood there a moment longer than was strictly necessary, staring at them, then set the mug in the rack and went to get dressed.
The Phoenix Ridge Civic Center had been built in the nineties with the optimism of a city that believed in itself, all clean lines and tall windows and a main hall that could seat three hundred people without feeling crowded.
By ten-fifteen, it was close to capacity with business owners, city officials, community stakeholders, and the specific group of Phoenix Ridge citizens who showed up when something mattered.
Simone had been to enough of these events in enough cities to read a room before she’d fully entered it.
This one was warm and friendly. People knew each other here; they saved seats for each other.
She found an empty chair toward the back and settled in with her program and coffee in a paper cup.
Alexandra was already standing on the dais.
She was mid-answer to something, leaning slightly forward, and the room had gone quiet with more than just politeness.
The city official in the front row had set down his pen.
The woman from the Small Business Coalition—who had been checking her phone when Simone passed her in the lobby—had her hands folded in her lap and her eyes on the dais.
Two rows ahead, an older man in a work jacket had turned slightly in his seat, angling himself toward Alexandra the same way you shifted slightly, almost unconsciously, toward a window when the light was good.
When Simone had read the Vaughn Industries’ community portfolio—the civic endowments and partnership agreements stretching back to Dorothy’s tenure—she had categorized all of it as simple strategic goodwill: tax-advantaged and reputationally valuable, the kind of thing a company maintains because the alternative costs more in the long run.
Simone hadn’t been wrong about the mechanics of it, but she had been wrong about what it looked like from inside the room.
Alexandra was answering a question about the water treatment facility timeline, her voice patient and precise, and a woman three rows ahead of Simone—mid-fifties with the weathered look of someone who worked outside—was nodding along before Alexandra had finished the sentence.
The panel continued. A city councilwoman asked about the sustainability initiative’s job projections, and a representative from the Phoenix Ridge Teachers’ Union asked about the school partnerships.
Alexandra answered both with the same quality of care and attention, and Simone sat with her program in her lap and let her gaze shift from between the audience and Alexandra.
She felt something shift in the room that she couldn’t immediately account for.
She had come here to gather data. She wanted to see the public relations in action, the return on thirty-plus years of strategic community investment.
Simone had spent her entire career knowing exactly what she wanted from every room she walked into.
The clarity of it had been so complete that she had stopped noticing it, the way you stopped noticing the weight of something you had been carrying long enough.
But Simone noticed its absence now.
The panel ended with sustained applause.
Alexandra stepped down from the dais and strode through the room, offering handshakes, brief exchanges, a hand on the shoulder here, a name remembered there.
Near the side door, a woman intercepted her.
She was a petite woman with salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a school administrator’s lanyard.
The woman said something, and Alexandra’s expression shifted momentarily into something more unguarded and open.
The woman touched Alexandra’s arm, and Alexandra nodded before the woman walked away.
Alexandra stood still for a moment before the next person reached her, and in that flicker of a moment, she looked like she had been told something fragile.
Simone looked down at her program. She had no idea what had been said, and it was gnawing at her.
She stayed at the civic center through the lunch break.
When their paths crossed near the coffee station—Alexandra was in the middle of a conversation with a councilman; Simone was collecting another cup she didn't need—Alexandra glanced at her.
Simone looked back, but neither of them altered course.
The professionalism of it felt so practiced, like a language they had been speaking for years, which she supposed they had in their own ways.
Simone was the last out of her row. She took her time about it.