The price of her forgiveness

Chapter 1: The Man Who Has Everything

Lachlan

The speech ran nine minutes. I had rehearsed it in the car, in the shower, once in the lift with my eyes shut, and when I finished the room did what rooms always do for me. It stood up.

Eight hundred people in black tie, applauding a building. Vance Tower. Sixty-one floors of glass the colour of a cold lake. Behind me the screen showed the skyline with our name stamped across it, and I thought, as I had thought all year, that it looked like a headstone.

I smiled anyway. I’m good at that.

Ten minutes earlier I’d stood in the wings with my father’s watch in my fist, squeezing it until the clasp left a mark. Eight years ago, before my first big speech, Kaelia had stepped in front of me and fixed my tie without asking. “Breathe, Vance,” she’d said. “They’re just people who want to be told it’ll be okay.” Tonight I fixed it myself. Crooked, probably. Nobody said.

Briony’s hand slid into the crook of my arm before I’d cleared the last step. She smelled of white tea and hairspray, the way she always did at events. “You didn’t look at the cards once.”

“I didn’t need them.”

“I know. That’s what made it perfect.” She squeezed, quick and professional, and steered me toward the first cluster of people waiting to be impressed.

That was Briony’s gift. She knew where I should be standing four minutes before I did. Eighteen months ago she was my head of communications, then one night after a bad board meeting she was in my kitchen, and then she was on my arm. I never decided. It happened the way weather happens. I was grateful, and I told myself gratitude was a decent place to start.

The next hour was handshakes. A man from the pension fund called the tower a triumph. A woman I’d never met said she’d followed my career since I was “that boy with the hospital wing.” I said thank you, thank you, you’re too kind. My face did it all by itself while the rest of me stood somewhere behind it, waiting for something I couldn’t name.

Then Aldous Reyes, who sat on the board of my father’s company back when my father still had company, took my free hand in both of his hands and said, warm as bathwater, “And how is Kaelia? I haven’t seen her in years. You must give her my love.”

Briony’s fingers went tight on my sleeve. Not much. Just enough that I felt every one of them.

Three years. Three years in March, and there were still people who didn’t know. Or who knew and wanted to watch me say it.

“She’s away,” I said. “I’ll tell her.”

“Do. Lovely girl. Hands like a sculptor’s.” He patted me and moved on, and I stood there holding hands like a sculptor’s like something dropped into my palm that was too hot to put down.

Kaelia talked with her hands. She’d explain a painting to me at midnight, fingers shaping the air, paint under her nails that never fully came out. I used to watch her hands more than I listened. God, I would listen now. I’d listen to every word.

“You okay?” Briony said, low, smiling at someone over my shoulder.

“Fine.”

“You went somewhere.”

“I’m here.”

She let it go. She always let it go, and that was the kindest and the loneliest thing about her.

At ten-forty my phone buzzed against my ribs. Uncle Cormac. Watched the stream. Your father would have wept, then complained about the canapés. Sunday, one o’clock. I’m doing the lamb. I read it twice. He’s the only person alive who can make me feel nine years old in a good way.

I put the phone away and shook four hundred more hands.

The car home was quiet. Briony sat with her shoes off and her head against the window while the city went by in long gold smears. When we turned onto my street she didn’t reach for her bag.

“I could stay,” she said.

“I’m tired.”

“I’m not asking you to be anything. I just don’t want to go home to an empty flat after a night like this.”

I looked at her. She was trying to say it lightly and not quite managing. Under the lipstick and the polish she was thirty-four and worn out too, and I knew exactly what she wanted from me, and I knew I didn’t have it to give.

“Not tonight,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re always sorry.” She said it without heat, which was worse. “One day you’re going to have to let somebody into that house, Lachlan.”

“Goodnight, Briony.”

She put her shoes back on, kissed my cheek, and gave the driver her address. I watched the taillights until they turned the corner.

The house was dark when I let myself in. Seven bedrooms and I use two. The housekeeper leaves one lamp burning in the hall, and it throws a small yellow circle on the floor that I’ve learned to step around, as if it were a hole.

Upstairs I took off the jacket, the tie, the cufflinks, and laid them down in the order I always do. Then I stood at the foot of the bed.

It’s a big bed. I sleep on the right. The left side is made up every morning, corners tight, pillow squared, and every night I look at it before I get in, and I have never once managed to say why I don’t just let it go. I’ve kept her grey cardigan, too. It hangs on the back of the chair, and I pretend it’s there by accident.

“I gave the speech,” I said.

The room did what it always does. Nothing.

“Nine minutes. They stood up.” I sat on the edge, on my side, and loosened my collar. “Aldous Reyes told me you had hands like a sculptor’s. You hated him. You said he looked at paintings the way some men look at waitresses.”

I laughed once, quietly, and it came out wrong.

“I’ve got the tower. The board. The name. Everything my father wanted for me. And I stand up there saying legacy and vision and the whole time I’m thinking, she’d have found this funny. She’d have caught my eye from the front row and made me lose my place.”

My voice did something then that I didn’t like. I stopped.

People assume when a wife leaves there’s a reason. A fight. A name, a lie, a slammed door. I’ve had three years to find one and I can’t. I came home from a late meeting on a Tuesday and her side was cold and the wardrobe was half empty. There was a note on the pillow. Four sentences. I know them like the scar on my knee, and not one of them told me why.

“Where did you go?” I asked for the pillow. “Is there a window where you are? Are you warm?”

Nothing. Of course nothing. I lay back with my shoes still on and looked at the ceiling, and it occurred to me that the loudest sound in my whole life was a woman not answering.

At eleven fifty-two the phone rang. Marcus Hale, my CFO, who hadn’t called me after nine in six years, except the week the markets fell.

“Marcus.”

“Sorry about the hour. Are you sitting down?”

“I’m lying down. Say it.”

“Somebody is buying our debt.” He sounded like he’d been pacing for an hour. “The bonds, the secondary notes, the private credit lines from the restructuring. Small purchases, quiet, spread across three entities I can’t trace. Fourteen percent in eleven days.”

I sat up. “Who’s selling to them?”

“Everyone. Banks that don’t care who’s on the other end. That’s what bothers me. It isn’t a raid, Lachlan. Raiders are loud. This is patient. Somebody who wants to own the paper without anyone seeing a face.”

“Who’d want to?”

“I don’t know. But whoever it is has done this before, and they’re not stopping.”

I looked at the left side of the bed. For one stupid second I thought of her, and then I shoved the thought back down to the place where it lives.

“Find out,” I said.

“I’m trying. Get some sleep.”

He hung up. I didn’t sleep.

I went downstairs in my socks, stepped around the circle of lamplight, and stood in the dark kitchen with my hands flat on the cold counter. Someone out there was taking my life apart, one quiet piece at a time, and they were being polite about it.

I should have been afraid. I waited for the fear, and it didn’t come.

What came instead was something I hadn’t felt in three years. I was awake. Properly, painfully awake, like a man who’d been hit and was only now noticing he had a pulse.