Chapter 21 #2
Meg’s eyebrows shot up, less like a question and more like a confirmation of something she had been holding to herself. She set the portfolio down again.
“What?” Alexandra asked.
“Oh nothing. I just notice things. It’s my job.”
Alexandra felt something tighten and release in her chest. “What did you notice?”
“More than I was going to mention.” Meg picked up her mug and swallowed the rest. “I’m really glad you slept.”
Meg stared at her pointedly, and Alexandra felt a flush rise up her neck despite herself, like she had been caught doing something she wasn’t supposed to do.
Meg picked up the portfolio again. “I’ll work on the new sequence with Ruth this afternoon. She’s going to want to hear about Friday from you directly, but I can take the rest off your plate.”
“Thank you.”
Meg walked to the back door. At the threshold, she paused with her hand on the frame and looked back at Alexandra still at the kitchen table. “Whatever happens at four o’clock, good.”
She didn’t wait for a reply and walked out.
Alexandra sat at the kitchen table for a few minutes after Meg left, listening to the car start in the driveway and recede toward the gate.
The kitchen was warmer than usual now. She picked up her phone and called Ruth, a call that lasted only eleven minutes because Ruth rarely asked any personal questions, preferring to keep conversations grounded in professionalism.
When Alexandra hung up, she closed her laptop and washed both coffee mugs by hand then set them on the rack to dry before wiping down the counter.
At three, she put on her coat and grabbed her keys. She flipped off the kitchen lights, set the alarm, and walked outside. The drive north took forty minutes. Alexandra parked at the trailhead a quarter til four. Simone’s rental car was already there.
Simone was standing at the trail map by the gate, wearing jeans and a charcoal-colored wool coat that wasn’t built for Phoenix Ridge weather. Her dark shoulder-length hair fluttered in the wind. She turned when the door of Alexandra’s car closed. For a second, neither of them moved.
Alexandra paused, recalibrating. Simone was here, in daylight on neutral ground, and was the same woman whose breathing Alexandra had listened to in the dark, and the two versions of her did not yet know how to occupy the same space.
Alexandra had spent months keeping Simone-the-acquirer and Simone-in-a-bedroom in separate compartments in her own mind.
Standing on this gravel trail, she could feel the walls of those compartments collapsing into each other, and she didn’t have a plan for what to do with the woman who emerged from the wreckage.
“You’re early,” Alexandra said.
“I’ve been here since three-thirty.”
The wind whipping off the water cut between them. Alexandra looked at Simone’s coat again. It was wrong and she debated offering the fleece in the back of her car then reconsidered. Simone didn’t come here to be looked after by a mother hen.
“Would you like to walk?” Simone asked.
“Yes.”
The trail ran a quarter-mile through second-growth Douglas fir before it broke into open headland.
They walked it without speaking. Alexandra was conscious, in a way that she hadn’t been before, of their height difference—Simone slightly shorter, the top of her head in line with Alexandra’s mouth—and of Simone’s stride, which was shorter than Alexandra’s by a margin she had to actively account for to stay at pace with her.
Simone wasn’t in a hurry, but she didn’t dawdle.
Alexandra had spent her entire adult life moving as though she were already late, and she slowed her pace by half a step. Simone matched it without comment.
Alexandra could hear Simone’s breathing beside her, slightly faster than the cold or pace warranted.
She let their shared silence carry them to the open ground, and then she stopped.
At the headland, the water was the color of slate.
A line of cormorants sat on a rock fifty yards out, drying their wings.
The grass was flattened by the wind. Alexandra turned to look at her.
Simone looked back, hands stuffed in her coat pockets, the wind moving her hair across her face. She didn’t push it back.
“I have a question,” Alexandra said, breaking their silence. “I’d like an honest answer to it.”
“You’ll get one.”
The casualness of the exchange was, Alexandra realized, the careful thing. Both of them were speaking at the same volume of the ambience, and neither moved the conversation faster than what the other could carry.
“On Friday, you told me you couldn’t continue with the acquisition. I’ve been trying to understand what you meant by can’t.” Alexandra paused, and the wind took the edge off her voice. “Whether the deal stopped making sense or whether I did. I need to know whether you walked away because of me.”
There. She had said it. The relief of having said it was not, as she had expected, immediate.
What came in its place was the more vulnerable feeling of having stripped herself bare and put herself out there while waiting for an answer.
It was a position Alexandra had spent decades arranging her life to avoid being in.
But now, she held the feeling without flinching.
Simone didn’t answer right away, and she looked out at the water. Alexandra followed her gaze, just in time to see the cormorants lifting off the rock together and fly low across the choppy water north, toward the point. She watched them go, and she waited for Simone to choose her words.
“Alexandra,” Simone said.
“Yes?”
“I want to answer you properly. Will you walk with me?” She held out her hand.
Alexandra looked at it for a moment—at her pinkened knuckles from the cold, at the delicate line of Simone’s wrist where her coat sleeve had ridden up—and then reached out and took it.
“Yes.”