His Grandfather's Command

Chapter Four — The Builiding

I called the number on Monday.

The phoned was answered in two rings, the person on the other line was professional and in two minutes, a meeting had been arranged at my convenience.

"...Wednesday works," I said. "Afternoon."

"Mr. Vandermeer also asked me to tell you, and I'm quoting directly here,that there is absolutely no pressure and you are welcome to bring someone with you if that would make you more comfortable."

I thought about Noah. About the printouts and the imaginary family meeting.

"I'll come alone," I said. "Thank you."

I hung up and stood in my kitchen in my pajamas at nine in the morning and told myself this was just information gathering.

Wednesday arrived the way significant days always do, looking exactly like every other day until you're already in the middle of it.

I wore the nicest thing I owned that wasn't a work uniform, which was a dark green wrap dress I'd bought for a college presentation three years ago and had worn to every occasion requiring effort since. It was good. It was fine. It was absolutely not the kind of thing a person wore to a forty floor building on the upper east side but it was mine and it was clean.

I did my hair properly, curled into waves. Small things mattered.

The building appeared at the end of the block and I stopped walking for approximately three seconds before I made myself continue.

It was worse than the photographs.

Not worse, that was the wrong word. More. It was more than the photographs. Glass and steel climbing forty floors into a sky that was doing its best September impression, all pale blue and self-satisfied.The lobby was visible through the glass frontage even from the street, all marble and height and carefully positioned light.

I stood on the pavement outside and breathed.

A man in a suit passed me on the left without looking up from his phone. A woman in heels that made my feet hurt in sympathy moved through the revolving door with the ease of someone who had never once stood on a pavement wondering if she belonged on the other side of it.

I thought about what Theodore had said.

You have been making yourself as small as possible for a very long time.

I pushed through the revolving door.

The lobby was exactly as intimidating as I'd expected and I was annoyed at it for that.

Marble floors that reflected everything, the light, the people, my own uncertain face looking back at me from below as I walked across them. A ceiling that went up further than any ceiling in a lobby had reasonable cause to. Plants that were large and architectural and definitely not plastic.

I was slightly underdressed.

I approached anyway.

"Aria Lennox," I said. "I have a two o'clock with Theodore Vandermeer."

The woman, young, immaculate, a headset that she wore like jewellery checked something on her screen and looked up with a smile that was not unkind. "Of course, Miss Lennox. Mr. Vandermeer is on his way down to meet you personally. He asked that you wait in the east lounge, just through there" she gestured to a seating area tucked behind a partition of frosted glass and more architectural plants, "and he'll be with you shortly. Can I get you anything while you wait? Coffee, water, tea?"

"Water would be great, thank you."

I found a seat in the east lounge, low chairs, a glass table, natural light from windows that looked out onto a side courtyard and sat down and put my bag in my lap. A different person brought the water. Everyone here moved with the same quality, efficient, unhurried, like a building full of people who knew exactly where they were going and had never once had reason to reconsider.

I was reconsidering in real time.

This was a mistake, said a quiet voice in my head that sounded approximately like common sense. You are a waitress from a one bedroom apartment and this is a fourteen billion dollar company and the card in your coat pocket belongs in a different person's story.

I drank my water.

The elevator across the lobby opened and Theodore came out.

He looked exactly as he had on Tuesday, unhurried, composed, the cane and the silver hair and the cedarwood authority of a man who existed at his own pace regardless of the pace of everything around him. He saw me through the frosted glass partition and his expression was that quiet, private warmth, like recognizing something he was glad to see again.

He crossed the lobby and I stood because it seemed like the right thing to do and he shook my hand with both of his and said "Aria. Thank you for coming. How was your journey?"

"Fine, thank you." I managed a smile that was more genuine than I expected. "The building is .." I searched for the right word. "Large."

He laughed. A real one, the same warm unhurried sound as Tuesday. "It is rather, yes. I've always thought it was slightly too much but Elias made the final decision on the renovation and he does nothing by halves." He gestured toward the elevator. "Shall we go up? I thought we could talk properly in my office it's considerably less grand than the rest of it, I promise you."

I followed him to the elevator.

"Is he here?" I asked. "Elias."

"He is," Theodore said. "On the thirty second floor. We're going to thirty eight." He glanced at me. "You won't see him today unless you want to. I thought it better to answer your questions before any introductions."

"That's …" I exhaled. "Yes. That's better. Thank you."

Theodore smiled. "I told you. I find stages work best with Elias."

I looked at the photographs for a moment longer than I intended to.

"My wife," Theodore said, settling into his chair. "Margaret. She passed eleven years ago."

"I'm sorry," I said. And meant it.

"She would have liked you," he said simply. "She had the same quality, the noticing. She said it was the most important thing a person could have. More than intelligence, more than talent." He folded his hands. "She was right about most things."

I sat across from him and put my bag on the floor and decided I was done being intimidated by the building or the books or the photographs or the number of zeros in a figure I'd looked up four times.

"I have questions," I said.

"I expected you would." He gestured expansively. "Please."

I'd written them down. In my notes app, on the subway but I didn't take my phone out. I had them memorized.

"The contract," I said. "Duration, expectations, what it actually requires of me day to day. I want specifics not summaries."

"Of course."

"Accommodation, where exactly, what the living situation looks like, what degree of privacy I'd have."

"Reasonable question. Yes."

"My job. I'd need to know whether I'm expected to leave Calloway's immediately or whether there's a transition period."

Theodore nodded. "We can discuss timing."

"Noah." I held his gaze. "My brother. Whatever this is, he's not kept out of it. I'm not agreeing to anything that requires me to disappear from his life or manage what he knows."

"I wouldn't ask that of you," he said quietly.

"And Elias." I paused. "I want to know what he actually knows before I walk into a room with him. Not a managed version. The truth of where he is with this."

Theodore was quiet for a moment.

"The truth," he said carefully, "is that Elias knows I intend to introduce him to someone. He has agreed, reluctantly." He paused. "He does not know it was arranged this way. He does not know I sought you out specifically. He believes this is a…. a more conventional introduction."

I looked at him.

"So he thinks you found me through normal channels," I said. "Not that you ran a background check on his future wife while she was clearing table nine."

Theodore had the grace to look mildly abashed. "That is….broadly accurate, yes."

"And when does he find out the truth?"

"When the time is right."

"Theodore." I said his name directly, and something about that, the lack of mister, made him look at me with a sharpness that wasn't displeasure. More like recognition. "I'm not walking into that family carrying a secret about how I got there. If this happens, it happens honestly. He needs to know everything before I agree to anything."

The office was quiet around us.

Then he smiled.

Slowly. Fully. The smile of a man who had just had something confirmed that he'd suspected all along.

"I told Margaret you'd say that," he said softly. Almost to himself.

I blinked. "You…. she's been gone eleven years."

"I talk to her regardless." He said it without embarrassment, without performance. Just a simple fact of how he moved through the world. "I told her about you on Saturday morning. I told her what you said, what you looked like, the way you sat down across from me like you'd decided the worst had already happened and you might as well find out what came next." His voice was warm and unhurried and slightly. "I told her I thought I'd finally found her."

Something in my chest went very quiet. I didn't know what to say.

For once, for genuinely the first time in longer than I could remember I just sat there with the quiet thing in my chest and looked at this old man who talked to his dead wife on Saturday mornings and thought I reminded him of her, I just felt...

Seen.

The way you feel when someone looks at you and finds the actual you rather than the version you've been carefully presenting for so long. I cleared my throat.

"I still have four more questions," I said.

Theodore reached for the small bell on the corner of his desk that I now understood was for tea.

"Then we'd better get comfortable," he said warmly. "I'll have them bring a fresh pot."

We talked for two hours.

He answered everything, the contract terms, the living situation, the timeline, the family dynamics laid out with a candour I hadn't expected and appreciated more than I could say. He told me about Elias with the particular combination of pride and worry. He told me about Vivienne in careful language that nonetheless communicated everything I needed to know. He told me about the company, about what he hoped for it, and his fears for it.

He told me about Margaret.

I told him about my parents.

Not everything, not the specific weight of the eighteen months since, not the panic attacks or the radiator or the particular sound of Noah's key in my lock at midnight. But enough. The shape of them. Who my father had been, quiet and steady and funny. Who my mother had been, all warmth and directness and the kind of love that didn't soften hard truths but delivered them gently anyway.

Theodore listened with his full attention. The kind that made you feel like the most important thing in the room.

At the end of it he was quiet for a moment and then he said "Your father sounds like a man I would have liked very much."

"He would have liked you too," I said. And then, because honesty was apparently the thing I was doing today: "He would have also thought you were completely out of your mind."

Theodore laughed. The full warm version, the one that made him look briefly younger. "No doubt," he said. "Most reasonable people do."

I smiled. Before leaving, a meeting between Elias and myself was already arranged. It was going to be difficult, I knew that. I made a silent promise to myself, I won't shrink.