I looked at him for a long moment. Then I picked up my bag and walked out. I did not answer, and I did not close the door behind me.
The hallway was empty. I walked past my own office because I could not sit in it yet. In the elevator I stared at my reflection in the brass and thought how tired I looked, how much like a woman in a viral video. The doors opened and closed twice before I remembered to get out.
Thomas was waiting at the curb, wipers going, engine running. He stepped out and opened my door without a word. I saw the question in his face, and the decision not to ask it.
"Home," I said.
He nodded. We drove.
The rain came down hard, blurring the avenue lights into long smears. Thomas drove the way he did everything, steady and unhurried, and the silence in the car was total. No radio. No small talk. I watched the wipers sweep and counted nothing. The city pressed against the windows, gray and indifferent.
It struck me, somewhere past Canal Street, that Thomas had driven me every day for six years and had never once asked where I was going. He simply took me there.
"Thank you," I said quietly.
He met my eyes in the rearview for half a second. "Of course," he said.
The loft was dark when I let myself in. I dropped my bag by the door and stood in the entryway listening to the rain against the glass. The apartment was exactly as I had left it: clean lines, white walls, nothing on the surfaces. A showroom of a life, staged for no one.
I poured a glass of water and did not drink it. I sat on the edge of the sofa and did not lean back.
And then I heard him. Not a memory, exactly. A whisper under the rain, in a voice I had been hearing all day without hearing it.
"You didn't even look back."
I set the glass down too hard. Water beaded on the marble.
"Stop it," I said to the empty room.
The room said nothing. The rain said everything.
I walked to the window and stood there. The city glowed through the wet glass, smeared and trembling. Somewhere out there, in a shelter bunk or under an awning in the Garment District, was a boy who believed I had chosen a life over him. A boy who had pocketed my card like contraband.
Sterling's ultimatum sat in my chest like a stone. Step back from the boy, or step back from the merger. As if those were the only two doors. As if he had ever understood which one I had already walked through, eleven years ago, without looking back.
I stood at the window a long time. The rain did not stop. Neither, I knew, would I.
Chapter 9: Vivian
I gave Thomas the address and he drove without a word, the way he had driven home the night before. The city thinned into rain and then into bare trees. Two hours. I watched the mile markers and said nothing.
Vivian's house stood at the end of a gravel drive in Rhinebeck, a Victorian that had been beautiful once and was now mostly curtains. The porch boards sagged. I stood on the steps with rain in my collar and knocked, and when nobody came I knocked again, harder, and heard something fall inside.
She opened the door in a cardigan and a stare. "Eleanor."
"Mother."
She looked past me at the car. "You could have called."
"You would not have answered."
"That is not my fault," she said, and stepped back.
The house smelled of dust and something burned and left to cool. Books stood in towers on every flat surface. Newspapers from months ago, tied with string. The parlor had been arranged once for visitors, long ago, and she had never rearranged it. A cat slept on the window chair, gray and thin.
"Sit," she said. "I will make tea."
"I do not want tea."
"You never want anything," she said, and went into the kitchen anyway.
Through the wall I heard the kettle whistle and then stop. She came back with two cups and set one before me and one before her own chair. Neither of us reached for them.
"So," she said. "It is on the news."
"Parts of it."
"Claire's boy."
"Yes."
She looked at her hands. "I wrote to you about him. Years ago. When you were still deciding whether to have a life that included your family."
"I have a life."
"You have an office," she said. "There is a difference."
I picked up the tea and set it down again. The cup was chipped. Everything here was chipped and she kept it all. "I came to ask you something."
"Ask."
"Did Claire ever write to me?"
Vivian almost smiled. "She wrote to everyone. That girl could not stop writing. It was how she forgave people."
"That is not an answer."
"She wrote you letters. Every year. On Noah's birthday, mostly. Sometimes Christmas." She lifted her cup and did not drink. "I told her it was a waste of stamps."
"Where are they?"
"Where are what?"
"The letters, Mother."
She studied me, and I saw something move behind her face, calculation or grief, and with Vivian it was always hard to tell them apart. "You never opened them."
"I never received them."
"Because you changed your address three times and never told anyone." Her voice did not rise. That was worse. "She mailed them to the Tribeca apartment. They came back. She mailed them to your office. They came back. Then she gave them to me."