Part 13:
Yes. That’s the part of this I don’t like. Delia sat down on the edge of the desk. She took her reading glasses off their chain and held them, not putting them on, just holding them. Ryan? Yeah. That is going to happen whether you help us or not. The only thing your work changes is how soon it happens and how cleanly.
If it happens in 2 months instead of 6, the ring unwinds with about half as many other lives broken in the process. If it happens through a careful legal process instead of a messy federal indictment, the kid will have a chance to keep his education because Sharp’s ex-wife has a settlement that our lawyers can structure to include his remaining tuition.
If you walk away, none of that happens. The kid still loses his dad. He just loses him louder. Okay? I’m not telling you to feel good about it. I’m telling you to keep working. Okay? She stood up. She started to leave. Then she paused at the door. “For what it’s worth,” she said, “the fact that it bothers you is why she picked you.
” Who? You know who. She left. Ryan sat at his desk and he looked at the photograph of Linda Marrow and at the photograph of Everett Sharp and at the photograph of Carl Voss. He looked at them for a long time. Then he picked up the mouse and he went back to work. Ted. He did not see Celeste again for 10 days.
He had thought the first few days that she might come into the building, that he might turn a corner and see her. She did not. Delia mentioned her twice, both times in passing, as in, “Miss Arden wants the midweek update by Wednesday,” and “Miss Arden asked if you were settling in. I said you were.” That was it.
He did not ask about her. He told himself he did not need to. He was being paid to do a job. The job was the job. He was not being paid to think about the woman who had hired him. He thought about her anyway, not in any way that meant anything, he told himself, just in the way that a man thinks about a person who has done something unexpected for him.
He thought about the way she had said most things are arithmetic and then, when he’d asked which things weren’t, had said, “I will have to get back to you on that one.” He thought about her gray eyes in the SUV. He thought about the moment at the bus stop when she’d said, “You have a good face,” and about how she had said it not like a compliment, but like a diagnosis.
On the Monday of the third week, she came to see him. He was alone in the windowless room. It was just past 4:00 in the afternoon. The office outside had the quiet hum it had when people were finishing their days, typing a little slower, stretching their shoulders, getting ready to go home. Ryan had been staring at a spreadsheet for maybe 40 minutes, looking at it without reading it, and he was about to close the file and call it.
The door opened behind him. He didn’t turn around. He assumed it was Delia. I’ll have the marrow summary for you in the morning. That is good to hear. He turned in the chair. Celeste was in the doorway. She had on a black sweater and black jeans and boots. Not the boots of a person who spent her day in an office, but the boots of a person who had been walking outside.
Her hair was pulled back. Her face was a little red from the cold. Ms. Arden? Celeste, please. Okay. Are you almost done? I can be. Then finish. I’ll wait. She came into the room and stood behind him looking at the whiteboard while he saved the file and closed the spreadsheet and shut down the monitors. Nobody had ever stood behind him while he worked before.
He was aware of her silence in a way that made him work more slowly than he usually did because he kept thinking he was about to make a small mistake. You’ve added a lot to that board, she said still looking at it. Delia did most of it. I doubt that. Delia’s handwriting is worse than that. Half of that’s yours.
I guess. You have tidy handwriting, Ryan. My mother was a school teacher. That tracks. He stood up. He turned off the desk lamp. The room was lit now only by the overhead fluorescents and the small glow of the monitors going to sleep. Walk with me, she said. Out of the building? Yes. It’s cold. I know. Put your jacket on.
He put his jacket on. He followed her out of the windowless room through the main floor where people were getting up and going home and nobody made a point of looking at them and nobody made a point of not looking at them and out the front door. It was dark already. 5:15 in late October and the sky was a kind of navy blue that felt almost purple with one star already in it hanging over the pines.
