FIND ME AGAIN

CHAPTER FIVE — WHAT REMAINS

ADAMS

She had been gone for eleven minutes before I moved.

I knew because the clock on my desk was visible from where I was sitting and I had not looked away from it since the door closed behind her. Not because I was watching the time. Because the clock was the only thing in my office that was behaving normally and I needed something that was behaving normally.

Everything else had stopped making sense at approximately five fourteen.

I picked up my pen.

I set it down.

I stood and walked to the window and stood there with my hands in my pockets looking at the city the way I looked at it every evening when the building emptied and the noise dropped and it was just me and New York and the specific quality of quiet that existed on the forty second floor after hours. I had always found it steadying. The scale of the city. The reminder that whatever was happening inside this building was one small thing inside an enormous indifferent world that would continue regardless.

It was not steadying tonight.

Linna.

I had not said her name out loud in ten years. Had not let myself think it with any deliberateness, had filed it in the same place I filed everything that was not useful to me, deep and inaccessible and surrounded by the kind of internal architecture that does not happen by accident. You build it brick by brick over years with intention and effort and the daily discipline of choosing forward over backward every single time the choice presents itself.

Ten years of that.

And then she walked into my office and looked up and ten years became eleven minutes became nothing at all.

I pressed my palm flat against the cold glass of the window.

The city looked back at me with complete indifference.

I had been seventeen the first time I understood that what I felt for her was not what you felt for a friend. We had been sitting on the back steps of the estate on a September evening, the kind of evening that is technically still summer but smells like the beginning of something else, and she had been reading out loud from a newspaper the way she sometimes did when she found something that made her angry, her voice getting sharper as she went, and I had been watching her hands move as she talked and I had thought with sudden and complete clarity that I was in serious trouble.

I had not told her that evening.

I had sat with it for three weeks, which for me was an eternity, before I said anything. I was not generally a person who sat with things. I was a person who identified what was true and acted accordingly. But this felt different. This felt like something that could not be undone once it was said and I needed to be certain before I said it because Linna was not someone I could afford to lose.

She had already lost too much.

I turned away from the window.

Her file was still on my desk where I had left it this morning, slightly apart from the other two, the way it had been sitting at the edges of my awareness all day before the edges became the centre and the centre became her standing in my office saying it is Lin now in a voice that was steadier than it had any right to be.

I sat back down.

I did not open the file. I had read it enough times to know what was in it and what was not in it and the things that were not in it were the things that were currently making it impossible for me to pick up my pen and return to the forty other things that required my attention.

The things that were not in it were the ten years between then and now.

What she had done in them. What she had built. What had happened to what she built and whether she had seen it coming or whether it had taken her the way losing things sometimes takes you, suddenly and completely and without the dignity of warning.

Whether she had thought about me.

I caught that thought and examined it with the detachment of a man looking at something that had appeared in his hand without his permission and was not sure yet whether to put it down or keep holding it.

Whether she had thought about me.

I put it down.

I was not interested in that. I was not interested in anything that pointed in that direction because that direction led somewhere I had made a permanent and binding decision not to go and one evening of unexpected collision was not sufficient cause to revisit a permanent and binding decision no matter how she had looked standing in the middle of my office with her notebook and her chin up and her eyes holding mine without flinching.

I was not interested.

I was lying to myself.

I was aware that I was lying to myself and I was doing it anyway because sometimes the lie is the only functional option available and I was above all else a functional person.

I pulled the Henderson contract toward me.

Legal had flagged two clauses and I had not given them my comments yet and the eleven o clock call was tomorrow morning and I was going to read this contract and give my comments and go home and sleep and tomorrow I was going to walk into this building and be the person I had spent ten years building because that person did not sit in his office at seven in the evening being undone by someone he had not seen in a decade.

I read the first clause.

I read it again.

I set the contract down.

She had asked for more money.

That was the part that had lived in me the longest, the part that had calcified over the years into something I could not have removed even if I had tried, which I had not tried because removing it would have required examining it and examining it would have meant going back to that evening and I had made a decision about that evening at eighteen years old that I had honoured every day since.

She had sat across from my family and looked at what they were offering and asked for more.

I had been told that. Not by my family. By someone who had no reason to lie about it and every reason to tell me because they thought I deserved to know. I had taken that information and added it to everything else and built my understanding of what happened on the foundation of it and I had never once in ten years had cause to question whether the foundation was solid.

I was questioning it now.

Not because she had said anything in this office tonight that gave me reason to. She had said almost nothing. She had said it is Lin now and I need the job and fair enough and Adams at the door before she left, quiet and final, the way you say a name when you are not sure it still belongs to you to say.

I was questioning it because of the way she had looked at me in the first unguarded second before her face arranged itself into something controlled. Because I had spent seventeen years knowing her face before I spent ten years trying to forget it and I knew the difference between a person who felt nothing and a person who felt everything and was using everything they had to make sure you could not tell.

She was using everything she had.

That was not the face of a woman who had chosen correctly and moved on.

I did not know what it was the face of.

I picked up my pen.

I put it down.

I looked at the clock.

Seven twenty three.

I stood, straightened my jacket, gathered the Henderson contract to take home, and turned off the desk lamp. The office went dark except for the light coming through the window, the gold and grey of the city at night, the same city it had always been, indifferent and enormous and continuing without pause.

I walked to the door.

I stopped with my hand on the frame and looked back at the room. At the desk and the chair across from it where she had sat with her notebook in her lap and her spine straight and her eyes on mine and said I need the job like it was the simplest true thing she had ever said.

I need the job.

I know.

I turned off the light and left.

In the elevator going down I stood with the Henderson contract under my arm and looked at the floor and thought about September evenings and newspapers and the specific moment when something that has always been one thing becomes something else entirely without asking your permission.

The elevator opened on the ground floor.

I walked through the lobby and out into the city.

November was three weeks away.

I noticed that and did not examine why I noticed it and kept walking.