Chapter Two
Christian picked me up at five.
We didn’t talk. What was there to say? He drove the way he did everything, five under the limit, both hands, and when the first thunder came in low and long over the bridge he glanced at the sky and said, “It’ll break around nine,” and that was the whole conversation for twenty minutes.
The Meridian doesn’t have a sign. There’s a man at the door who knows who you are before you say it.
The roof is one level below the restaurant roof — a service terrace with two heat lamps and a view straight down onto the party through a wall of glass and a row of olive trees in pots. Christian had a key card for it. He didn’t explain the key card.
“Left side,” he said. “Long table.”
Twelve people. White tablecloth. No flowers, because he thinks flowers on a table are for weddings.
Marcus was at the head of it.
He had the navy jacket on. The one I bought him when we closed the seed round, the one he calls his lucky ugly jacket. He was standing up. He was mid-story, one hand out, and I watched the table go over the edge into laughing together, all twelve, the way people do when the man talking has already won.
There was no mother.
There was no cake.
There was a man on his right in a gray suit with a folder in front of him, closed, and Marcus put his hand flat on that folder while he talked, the way you hold down a napkin on a windy day.
“Rothwell,” Christian said. “My old boss. He flew in Tuesday.”
“Don’t say anything else.”
“Okay.”
Marcus lifted his glass. Everybody stood.
I took out my phone.
I don’t know what I thought I was doing. My thumb did it. I called him and I watched him through the glass, and it was seventy feet, maybe eighty, and I saw him look down at his pocket mid-toast.
I saw him check it.
I saw him smile — at the phone, a small private one, the smile you make when it’s someone you like — and hold up one finger to the table, and step back from his chair, and turn toward the olive trees.
“Liz.”
Warm. Slightly out of breath. Happy.
“Hey,” I said. “How is it?”
“Ohhh, it’s a nightmare. My aunt’s here.” Through the glass he put his hand over his other ear like the room was loud. It wasn’t loud. Nobody was talking. Twelve people were standing there with their glasses up, waiting for him. “Mom cried at the toast. Uncle Ray brought a *ukulele*, Liz, a ukulele, he’s going to do the song.”
“Is she having a good time?”
“She’s in heaven. She’s got her hair done.” A pause. Two seconds. Through the glass I watched him laugh silently at something the gray suit said and lift his chin at him — *one minute* — and then his voice came back gentle and unhurried and entirely mine. “I’ll be home by eleven. Don’t wait up, though. You look wrecked, you’ve been carrying everything for weeks.”
“I don’t mind waiting.”
“Wait up then. I’ll bring the bad cake.” Another laugh, and this one I heard in my ear and watched leave his mouth at the same time, and that’s the part I still can’t put anywhere. There’s no shelf for it. “Love you. Fifty-fifty, Liz. Always.”
“Always,” I said.
He hung up first.
He put the phone in his pocket. He fixed his cuff. He turned around, and he raised his glass again, and he said something, and twelve people said something back in one voice, and they all drank.
He never even changed his face.
—
I put the phone down on the ledge very carefully, like it was full.
My legs went first. Not down — just gone, the way they go on stairs in the dark when you think there’s one more step. Then my ears. Then the cold started in my hands and worked in toward my chest, slow and even, like a bruise being pressed.
Christian moved.
Half a step. Toward me, not away. His hand came up about six inches and stopped, and he put it on the ledge instead, close to mine but not touching, and he looked at the side of my face for one second too long before he looked back at the glass.
“You don’t have to watch this part,” he said.
“Yes I do.”
He didn’t argue.
Down there they were clinking. Rothwell opened the folder. Marcus reached across, took a pen out of the man’s inside pocket like they’d done it before, like it was a joke they had, and everyone laughed again.
Fifteen years.
Fifteen years, and he had a pen joke with someone I’d never met.
“His toast,” I said. “Can you hear it?”
“No.”
“Guess.”
“He’s saying it was a team effort.”
The first drop hit the back of my hand. Then the ledge. Then the awning above the party, all at once, a hundred small hard taps, and the sky came open the way Christian said it would, an hour late, and the whole roof below us stood up laughing and grabbing at glasses and tablecloths and ran for the doors, twelve people, holding their jackets over their heads.
Marcus stayed the longest. He always does. He stood in it with his arms out and his face up, my ugly navy jacket going dark at the shoulders, and he was laughing so hard he had to bend over.
I stood in the same rain, one floor up, eighty feet away, and let it go through me.
My phone lit on the ledge, face-up, water beading on the glass.
**Monday, 9:00 a.m. — Board Meeting: Project Northlight. Attendance: required.**
I’d never heard of Project Northlight.
I had thirty-six hours to decide what I’d be when I walked into that room — and whether I’d walk in as the woman he thought he’d already erased.
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