His Grandfather's Command

Chapter Five — Elias

The meeting with Elias happened in Theodore's office while I sat there.

"Elias." Theodore's voice when his grandson picked up was warm and unhurried and gave absolutely nothing away. "Come up to my office please." A pause. "Yes, now." Another pause, longer. "Because I asked you to. Bring coffee if you want something to do with your hands." He hung up.

He looked at me.

"Four minutes," he said. "He walks fast when he's annoyed."

"Is he annoyed?"

"He's always mildly annoyed. It's his baseline." Theodore folded his hands. "Don't let it put you off. It's not personal."

"You're very reassuring," I said.

"I'm really not," he said pleasantly. "But I find that honesty prepares people better than reassurance does."

Then the door opened.

I had seen the photograph.

I want to establish that clearly I had seen the photograph Noah had found, had looked at it for long enough to form an impression, had told myself I was prepared for the reality of the person in it.

Elias Vandermeer walked into his grandfather's office and the room rearranged itself.

That is the only way I can describe it. Not dramatically, nothing so obvious as that. More like the way a space shifts when something significant enters it. He was tall, broader than the photograph had suggested, dark haired, wearing a tailored grey suit. Dark eyes that moved across the office in one sweep desk, window, credenza, me and then stopped.

On me.

The assessment was fast and total and entirely without warmth.

I looked back at him steadily.

I had promised Theodore I wouldn't shrink.

"Grandfather," he said. His voice was deep and even and gave nothing away. He still hadn't looked away from me. "You didn't mention we had a guest."

"Didn't I?" Theodore said, with the serenity of a man who absolutely had not.

Elias moved into the room. He didn't sit. He went to the window, not aggressively, just the movement of someone who needed a moment to recalibrate, and stood with his hands in his pockets looking out at the city and then turned back to face us with an expression that had reorganized itself into something more neutral.

"Who are you?" he asked me.

Not rudely. Just directly. The question of a man who had limited patience for preamble.

"Aria Lennox," I said.

He processed the name. Found nothing in it, or if he did he didn't show it. He looked at Theodore. "Should I know that name?"

"You will," Theodore said. "Sit down, Elias."

"I'll stand."

"You'll sit." Theodore's voice didn't rise. It didn't need to. There was something in it not authority exactly, something older than authority, something that came from decades of knowing a person completely, that landed differently than a raised voice would have.

Elias sat.

In the chair beside me. Close enough that I was immediately, involuntarily aware of him. He smelled like cedarwood. Like his grandfather, but younger. Sharper.

I looked at my hands.

"Elias," Theodore said. "I need to tell you something and I need you to listen to all of it before you respond."

A pause. "That's not a promising opening."

"No," Theodore agreed. "It isn't." He settled back in his chair. "Do you remember the conversation we had in August. The one about the future of the company. About succession and stability and the things I've been asking you to consider for three years."

Elias's jaw tightened imperceptibly. "I remember."

"You told me you had no interest in revisiting the topic of marriage. You said …" Theodore paused, and I could tell from the slight precision of what followed that he was quoting directly …"that you'd rather dissolve the company than spend another year being introduced to women who wanted the name more than the man."

The silence that followed had history in it. Layered and specific.

"I remember what I said," Elias said quietly.

"Yes." Theodore folded his hands. "I heard you. I want you to know that, I heard you, and I took it seriously, and what I did next I did because of it rather than in spite of it." He paused. "Three weeks ago I had dinner at a restaurant called Calloway's on Fifth Avenue.........." Theodore told him everything, even the background check......"She is perceptive and honest and direct and she has a quality, the same quality I've been looking for on your behalf for three years."

Something shifted in Elias's posture. Almost nothing, a slight adjustment, a quality of attention that hadn't been there a moment

The office was very quiet.

I was looking at the bookshelf again. Reading nothing.

"On Tuesday evening," Theodore said, "I sat down with her and I told her who I was and I told her what I wanted and I gave her my card and I told her she had absolutely no obligation to call." He looked at his grandson steadily. "She called on Monday. She came here today with six questions she'd prepared in advance, in order of priority, and she told me directly, looking me in the eye that she would not walk into this family carrying a secret about how she arrived here, and that you needed to know the full truth before she agreed to anything."

The quality of Elias's stillness had changed.

He wasn't looking at the window now. He was looking at his grandfather. And then, slowly, he turned and looked at me.

I met his eyes.

They were darker up close than in the photograph. There was something in them I hadn't expected. Something more unsettled than either. Like a man who had walked into a room expecting to find one thing and had found the floor plan had changed.

"You knew he was going to tell me all of this," he said in a deep throaty voice that did something to my brain.

"I asked him to," I said.

"Why?"

"Because I don't start things with secrets."

He held my gaze for a moment. Something moved through his expression too fast to catch, too deliberate to be accidental.

Then he looked back at Theodore.

"You ran a background check on her," he said. His voice was even. "While she was …"

"Serving my table. Yes." Theodore was unrepentant. "I make no apologies for thoroughness."

"That's…." Elias stopped. I watched him choose between several responses and discard them. "That is an invasive thing to have done."

"It is," Theodore agreed. "I'd do it again."

Elias stood.

He moved to the window again, looking out at the forty floor view of a city that was doing nothing helpful. His hands were in his pockets. His shoulders were very straight.

"You want me to marry her," he said to the window.

"I want you to meet her," Theodore said. "Properly. Without agenda. You've been in the same room for six minutes and you've barely looked at each other."

"I've looked at her."

"You've assessed her. That's different."

A pause.

Elias turned from the window. He looked at me with an expression that was making a visible effort to be neutral and not entirely succeeding.

"Miss Lennox," he said.

"Mr. Vandermeer," I said.

"This isn't…." He stopped. Started again. "I want to be honest with you."

"I'd appreciate that."

"I'm not …." He seemed to be selecting each word with unusual care. "I'm not easy to live with. I'm not easy to know. I work long hours and I have a family that is " He glanced at Theodore. "Complicated. And the last woman my grandfather approved of tried to sell our quarterly projections to a competitor."

"I don't know enough about quarterly projections to sell them to anyone," I said.

Something flickered in his eyes. Not quite a smile.

"That's not exactly reassuring," he said.

"I wasn't trying to reassure you. You said you wanted honesty."

The flicker again. Quicker this time.

He looked at his grandfather.

"One dinner," he said. "I'll have one dinner and I'm not making any decisions based on …" He gestured ..."this"

"Nobody is asking you to," Theodore said serenely.

"And the contract…."

"Will be presented when both parties are ready. Not before."

Elias looked at me again.

I looked back at him.

He was trying to read me, I realized. The same way I read rooms, quickly, instinctively, looking for the information that mattered beneath the information on the surface. "Friday," he said. "Seven o'clock. There's a restaurant on Park that my assistant will send you the details for." He paused. "Dress code is smart."

I looked down at my green wrap dress that had been to every occasion requiring effort since college.

"I'll manage," I said.

He nodded once. Brief and businesslike. Then he looked at Theodore with an expression that said, very clearly, we will be discussing this further, and Theodore looked back with an expression that said, I look forward to it, and Elias moved toward the door with the energy of a man returning to things he understood.

He paused at the door.

Didn't turn around.

"Miss Lennox," he said.

"Yes?"

A beat.

"I'm sorry about your parents," he said quietly.

Then he was gone.

The door closed behind him and the room settled back into its afternoon quiet and Theodore picked up his tea and drank it with the expression of a man watching something he'd planted finally break through the soil.

I sat very still for a moment.

"He looked up my background too," I said. "Didn't he. Before he came up here."

Theodore smiled into his cup. "The moment I called him," he said. "He was reading it when he walked in."

I thought about the assessment in those dark eyes when they'd first landed on me. The speed of it. The completeness.

"And?" I said.

"And he came up," Theodore said simply. "When Elias decides something isn't worth his time he sends his assistant. He came himself." He set his cup down. "In thirty years I have learned to pay attention to what my grandson does rather than what he says."

I looked at the door he'd walked out of.

"Friday," I said.

"Friday," Theodore confirmed.

I picked up my bag. Stood. Smoothed my dress.

"Theodore," I said.

He looked up.

"Thank you," I said. "For the tea. And for .." I paused. "For talking to her about me. Margaret." I felt slightly ridiculous saying it and said it anyway. "I hope I'm what you told her I was."

The old man's expression did something complicated and quiet and entirely genuine.

"My dear," he said softly. "You're more."

The elevator opened onto the marble lobby.

I walked across the floor that reflected everything.

Through the revolving door.

Out onto the street where the city was in motion. I stood on the pavement and I breathed.

Then I took out my phone and called Noah. I briefed him about the meeting outcome and dinner on,F riday, in true Noah fashion, he asked if I was okay, I told him I was, and I meant it.

I looked up at the forty floor building behind me. At the glass and the steel and the September sky reflected in it. At the city going about its business entirely indifferent to the fact that something had just shifted in the life of one small person standing on the pavement outside.

Then I started walking toward the subway and the city moved around me and somewhere thirty two floors above my head Elias Vandermeer was presumably back at whatever he'd been doing before his grandfather had summoned him, and I thought about the way he'd paused at the door, and the thing he'd said.

Don't shrink, Theodore had said.

I walked to the subway with my shoulders back and my green dress and my six questions answered and the beginning of something I didn't have a name for yet living quietly in my chest.

I didn't shrink.