Ten Days To Say I Do

Chapter 8

Elena didn't tell Jay about the twelfth floor.

She meant to. She typed it out twice in the taxi that night, once as a joke and once as a real question, and deleted both. If she said it out loud, then it was real, and then she'd have to ask why a photo of him was sitting in a folder with her name on it. And she wasn't ready for whatever he'd say.

So she told him about the peonies instead.

"Eight hundred," Jay said. He was walking her up the steps to Diane's front door with his hands in his pockets, looking like a man on his way to the dentist. "I looked it up. That's more than a funeral."

"Don't say funeral. She'll hear you."

"She can hear a man whisper from the garage."

Duchess was already screaming at the door. When Diane opened it, the dog shot out between her ankles, found Jay's shoe, and stood there growling at it like it owed her money.

"She's warming up to you," Diane said.

"Is that what this is?"

"Oh, absolutely. Last man she liked, she only bit once."

Dinner was lasagna, which was a mercy, because Elena could eat it and not think. Diane had a binder. An actual three-ring binder with tabs, and one of the tabs said CAKE. She flipped through it between bites and kept asking things nobody could answer. Did Jay's side want a plus-one policy? Did he have a big family? Should she put them near the dance floor or away from it?

"My side's small," Jay said.

"How small?"

"Me."

Diane put her fork down. "Oh, honey."

"It's fine. Really."

"It is not fine. We'll fill that side of the hall. I'll find you cousins." She looked as though she meant it. Elena, across the table, felt something go uncomfortable in her chest, because Diane was being kind to a man who didn't exist, and somehow that was worse than Victor being cruel.

Victor wasn't there. His chair sat empty at the end, and nobody mentioned it. Elena didn't like that either. She found herself looking at the empty chair every minute or so, the way you keep checking a door you know is unlocked.

Around nine, Diane went to look for the good napkins, and Jay got up to help with the dishes. Elena stayed where she was for a second and watched him go. He carried the plates the way he did everything, easily, not showing off. Like a man who'd never had to think about whether his hands were in the right place.

Her phone buzzed on the tablecloth. Priya.

Weird thing. Dunlap got called upstairs this afternoon. Came back white as paper and shut his office door. HR was in there for an hour. Do you know anything?

Elena read it twice, and her stomach turned over slowly.

She wrote back, No idea. Then she added, What do you mean, HR? and stared at the screen. The dots appeared and disappeared and appeared again.

Don't know. Karen says he cried. KAREN SAYS. Don't trust Karen.

Elena put the phone face down.

Twelve minutes upstairs. Her name in the folder. Dunlap with his tie not quite reaching his belt, crying in his own office, and Ruth saying you'll understand why on Monday.

She pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead. She hadn't told them to do anything. She'd only said it was her work. That wasn't the same as getting someone in trouble. Was it?

"Hey."

Jay was in the doorway, a dish towel over one shoulder. He'd rolled his sleeves up and there was suds on his wrist.

"You went somewhere," he said.

"I'm fine."

"That's what I say when I'm not fine."

She looked at him and almost told him. It sat right behind her teeth. Instead she said, "Dunlap's in trouble at work, apparently. I think I might have caused it."

"Did you do something wrong?"

"No."

"Then you didn't cause it." He said it like it was simple arithmetic. "He did whatever he did. You just stopped covering it up."

She looked at him sharply. "How do you know he was covering anything?"

For a half second, Jay's face didn't move at all.

"You told me about the reports," he said. "At the shop. The weekends, the funeral. You were pretty angry."

Had she? She thought back. She had said something, in passing, on one of the boxed-noodle nights. She couldn't remember the exact words, and he'd remembered every one.

"Right," she said. "Yeah. I did."

"So." He shrugged and went back to the sink. "He sounds like a guy who had it coming."

It was a perfectly normal thing to say. Nothing was wrong with it. But Elena sat there with her hands in her lap and a feeling she couldn't name, the one you get when you're sure you left the stove on and you haven't.

She went into the hall to find her coat. That was when she heard the front door.

It wasn't a loud noise. A key turning, a bit of cold air. Victor stepped in, shaking rain off his shoulders, and stopped when he saw her.

"Cousin."

"I thought you weren't coming."

"I was working." He hung up his coat slowly. He looked tired, but not in a way that made her feel anything for him. "Where's your fiancé?"

"In the kitchen. Helping."

"Of course he is." Victor smiled, but only with his mouth. "Such a helpful man. He's so helpful, in fact, that I wanted to see something."

He took out his phone and held it up so she could read the screen.

It was a photo of a photo. A printed page, creased once down the middle, held by someone's thumb. She had to squint. A company brochure, maybe, or an annual report. Rows of smiling faces in suits, lined up in front of a glass building, the kind of picture nobody ever looks at.

One of the faces had been circled in red pen.

Elena's lungs forgot their job.

It was younger. The hair was shorter, the suit was nicer, and the smile was so polite it looked painful. But she'd have known that jaw anywhere. She'd have known it in the dark.

Underneath, in tiny print, were two lines. She could only make out the end of the second one.

Sterling, Julian. Chairman's Office.

"I wonder," Victor said softly, taking the phone back, "what a boring consultant is doing in the Sterling family brochure."

From the kitchen came the sound of running water, and a man humming something quietly, and a plate being set down in the drying rack.

Elena couldn't move. Her mind was reaching for an explanation and coming back empty.

And then the humming stopped, because Jay had heard the front door.

Which meant he had been standing in that kitchen listening for how long?