Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
I let it sit between us a moment. I gather the photographs back into a neat stack, square the edges against the desk, and close the leather cover over them with one unhurried motion, and only when my hand is resting on the shut folder do I let myself speak.
“Bills.”
He’s been standing in the doorway since the conversation turned, because reading a room before I’ve finished thinking it is exactly what I pay him for. “Sir.”
“Please escort Mr. Glasgow out of the building.” I keep my eyes on Raymond the whole time. “And let security know he’s no longer welcome anywhere in The Res. Any door, any day. If he turns up at one, I want a call before he’s finished being refused.”
For the first time, the smile slips clean off his face. “Flint—”
“Mr. Glasgow was just leaving,” I tell Bills.
Raymond rises, buttons his jacket with hands that aren’t quite as smooth as they were ten minutes ago, and finds enough of himself to try once more from the door. “You can throw me out of your building. You can’t throw the truth out along with me.” He nods at the folder under my palm. “Keep those, by the way. I had copies made.”
Then Bills walks him out, and the heavy door settles into its frame with a sound like a vault closing, and I am alone with a folder of photographs and the particular ringing silence of a room that was built to be looked up to.
I don’t open the folder again. I don’t need to; the prints are already developing themselves on the inside of my eyelids, and they’ll go on developing there for a long time.
This is the part I’m supposed to be good at. Not the feeling. The deciding. I have spent my entire life learning to strip a situation down past whatever everyone in the room wants it to be and see only what’s actually left standing when the wanting has been cleared away, and the discipline doesn’t fail me even now. So I do the thing I do. I take it apart.
Raymond wants me gone. That much is true, and it was true long before any photograph existed; he’d have manufactured his reason out of thin air if a real one hadn’t come to hand. The board’s contempt is real too, older than my marriage, older than my money, as old as the first time one of them heard the name of the neighborhood I was born in and watched something close behind his eyes. None of that is news to me. A man doesn’t climb to where I’ve climbed without learning to hear you don’t belong here spoken fluently in a dozen polite dialects.
So I could dismiss the folder. I should, by every rule I have ever lived by. Consider the source, weigh the motive, discard the rest accordingly.
Except that I reach for my phone instead, and I call Chip.
I assigned him to her myself, in the first month of the marriage, a quiet competent former patrol officer whose entire job is to drive my wife wherever she wants to go and to keep the world at a courteous distance while she’s there. He picks up on the second ring.
“Mr. Flint.”
“Where is Mrs. Flint this afternoon?”
A pause. Not a long one. Just a beat longer than the question should have cost him. “The memorial cemetery, sir. She visits her father most weeks.”
“Is she alone?”
The pause is longer this time, and in the length of it I hear the answer before he gives it to me, the way you hear a glass start to tip past its balance at the edge of a table a full second before it ever meets the floor.
“No, sir. Mr. Barrymore’s with her. He was already there when we pulled up.”
I thank him. I’m told afterward that I thanked him quite calmly. I set the phone down on the closed folder, on the grey coat and the upturned laughing face I can’t see through the leather but no longer need to, and I sit in the room Richard built to be looked up to, forty floors above a city that apparently knew before I did, and I learn that there is a kind of cold that comes from somewhere inside a man and works its way out.
I don’t go home.
There’s a room behind the third bookshelf on the east wall, the one that swings out on a hinge Richard had concealed so cleverly I didn’t find it for a full week after the office became mine. It was his trophy room once, and the trophies are still in here, two decades of silver and crystal lined up on the shelves catching what little comes in off the city at night, a championship cup the size of a wine barrel down at the end. I’ve made the rest of it a bedroom, a narrow bed and a chair and not much else, because in the years before my marriage I worked nights far more often than I didn’t, and there was never anyone at home waiting for me to do otherwise.