The Ten Percent Settlement

Chapter 5:Lunch

Getting Eleanor Sinclair to agree to lunch took four days, a favor from Preston, and, according to Preston, more patience than Adrian had shown for anything in years. "She said, and I'm quoting her exactly," Preston told him over the phone, "'if he wants to thank me, he can do it somewhere with a menu, not a hotel lobby.' I don't know what that means, but she said yes." The restaurant she picked wasn't the kind of place that photographed well, no marble, no view, a small room with good light and a menu that didn't list prices, which told Adrian more about her than the family name had.

She was already seated when he arrived, dark hair pulled back, no makeup that announced itself, reading something on her phone that she put away the second he sat down. "You found me," she said. "I'm almost impressed. Most people give up after the hotel says no."

"I don't give up easily."

"Clearly." She studied him for a moment, the same practical assessment she'd given him at the bar, like she was checking whether the man in front of her matched the mess she remembered from that night. "You look better. Less like you were about to fall off a stool."

"I don't remember much of that night, if I'm honest. I remember you telling me not to drive."

"You told me your name was Adrian and nothing else. I had to get the rest from the front desk when I paid." She tilted her head slightly. "Hale. That's not a name I recognized, for what it's worth. I looked you up afterward, out of curiosity, and there wasn't much there."

That was, Adrian thought, exactly how he'd built it to look. A hundred million was enough to be worth Googling and not enough to be worth much scrutiny beyond that. "There isn't much to find. I keep a low profile."

"Most people who say that are lying." She said it without accusation, just an observation, the same tone she'd probably use to point out weather. "Are you lying?"

"No," he said, and felt the lie sit easier than he expected. "I run a company. It's smaller than people assume. Smaller than it used to be, after this year."

Something in her face shifted, not suspicion, something closer to attention. "The divorce."

"The divorce." He turned his water glass slowly on the table, watching the light move through it rather than looking at her. "I'm not going to pretend it isn't costing me. It is. More than I expected, honestly. Between the settlement and the mess it made of a few deals I had in motion, it's been a difficult year for the business."

It wasn't entirely a lie. The mess was real, the mole was real, Marcus's slow siege on his overseas holdings was real. He was simply letting her believe the number attached to all of it was smaller than it was, and letting her fill in the rest herself.

"I'm sorry," she said, and it sounded genuine, which surprised him. "For what it's worth, that's not why I helped you that night. I didn't know anything about you then except that you looked like a man who'd had something taken from him and didn't know what to do with his hands about it."

"That's an accurate description."

"Do you want to talk about it, or do you want me to keep guessing?"

He hadn't planned to talk about it. He'd planned lunch, a thank-you, something brief and contained. But there was something about the way she asked, without performance, without the particular hunger he'd learned to recognize in people who wanted access to his life for what it could get them, that made the words easier to find than he expected.

"I caught her with someone," he said. "In our bedroom. Someone I've known professionally for years, someone I'd call an enemy if I were being honest about it." He kept his voice even, the way he'd kept it in the lawyer's office, though this felt different, harder to hold steady. "I don't think it was the first time. I asked her, and she didn't say no, which was its own kind of answer."

"How long were you married?"

"Six years."

Eleanor was quiet for a moment, turning her fork slightly against the tablecloth, not eating. "Do you know why?"

"Why she did it?"

"Why you're more angry about her lying than about her leaving." She said it carefully, watching his face for how he'd take it. "You've talked about this for five minutes and you haven't once said you miss her. You've talked about being deceived. That's a different kind of hurt."

He hadn't expected to be read that precisely by a woman he'd known for less than a week, counting the night he barely remembered. "I don't think I do miss her. Not really. I think I miss believing I understood the person I was married to."

"That's fair." She let that settle before continuing, no rush to fill the silence, which was its own kind of unfamiliar. "For what it's worth, I don't think that makes you cold. I think it makes you honest, which most people aren't, about which part of a betrayal actually costs them the most."

They talked for another hour, longer than either of them had probably planned, about smaller things eventually, the restaurant, a trip she'd taken that spring, nothing about money or family or the businesses either of them ran, and Adrian found himself relaxing in a way he hadn't in weeks, not since before he'd walked into his own bedroom four hours early. It was only near the end, as she was signaling for the check before he could reach for it, that she said something that stuck with him longer than he expected. "I don't usually do this," she said. "Sit with a stranger's bad week. I'm not sure why I made an exception for you." She said it almost to herself, like she was working out the answer as she spoke. "Maybe because most people who ask me for anything already know who I am before they ask. You didn't."

"I know who you are now."

"You know my name. That's not the same thing." She said it lightly, but there was something underneath it, a door she'd opened a c***k and was already starting to close again. "There's a lot about my family most people don't bother asking about, because the name answers all the questions they actually care about."

Adrian wanted to ask what she meant. He didn't get the chance. She was already standing, already pulling on her coat with the same unhurried composure she'd carried since the moment he'd sat down, and the conversation closed as neatly as she'd opened it, leaving him with the distinct impression that he'd been shown exactly as much of Eleanor Sinclair as she'd decided to show him, and not one word more.