Chapter 4
1342 Words
The email arrived on a Thursday.
Elena saw it at 7:42 a.m., before her first coffee, before the building had fully woken up. The sender line stopped her cold.
*Daniela Vance.*
Her mother.
She hadn't opened it by the time Julian walked past her desk twenty minutes later. He glanced at her screen not intrusively, just the way he noticed everything and slowed.
"You're staring at your inbox."
"I'm reading."
"You haven't scrolled in four minutes." He set a coffee on her desk. It had become a quiet habit over the past two weeks, since the storm, since the terrace. Small things. Careful things. "What is it?"
"Nothing." She closed the tab. "The Harlow contracts came in. I'll have them on your desk by nine."
He looked at her for a moment longer than necessary, then walked into his office without pushing.
She appreciated that about him. Most of the time.
---
She called her sister at lunch, from the small courtyard behind the building where nobody from Croft International ever went.
Mara picked up on the second ring, which meant it was bad.
"She's selling the house," Mara said, skipping hello entirely. "She called me last night. Said she's already spoken to an agent."
Elena closed her eyes. "She can't sell the house."
"She owns the house, Elena. She can do whatever she wants with it."
"Dad's been gone eight months."
"I know how long Dad's been gone."
The silence between them had the particular texture of two people who loved each other and had completely different ways of falling apart. Mara cried at the funeral. Elena organized it. Mara called their mother every Sunday. Elena sent money and kept her distance and told herself that was its own kind of love.
"She needs the money?" Elena asked.
"She says no. She says she can't sleep there anymore." A pause. "I believe her."
Elena sat with that. The house in Claremont with the yellow kitchen and the garden her father had kept with unreasonable dedication. The squeaking third step. The way it smelled like wood polish and old books.
"I'll call her," Elena said.
"She won't pick up for you."
"She'll pick up."
"Elena." Mara's voice dropped. "You don't have to fix this one. Some things just"
"I'll call her," Elena said again, quietly. And then, before Mara could say anything else "How are the kids?"
The subject change was transparent. Mara let it go anyway, because that was what they did.
---
Julian's afternoon cleared unexpectedly when the Singapore call was rescheduled.
He used the hour to do something he rarely allowed himself nothing. He sat in his office, the city spread out below him, and called his brother.
Marcus picked up sounding distracted and slightly out of breath, which was his default state.
"Tell me you're not calling about the gala," Marcus said.
"What gala?"
"Mother's charity thing. March fifteenth. She's been calling everyone individually to make sure no one has an excuse."
Julian had forgotten about the gala. He made a note to have Elena he stopped himself. He'd add it to his own calendar. That was a reasonable thing a person could do.
"I'm not calling about the gala," he said. "I'm calling because you missed the board meeting Tuesday."
"I had a situation."
"You always have a situation, Marcus."
A pause. Then, dropping the performance slightly — "Adrienne and I are separating."
Julian was quiet.
Marcus and Adrienne had been married for six years. Long enough that Julian had stopped noticing the seams. Long enough that he had assumed, without examining it, that it was solid.
"I'm sorry," Julian said. He meant it.
"It's been coming." Marcus's voice had the flat quality of someone who had already done the hard grieving and arrived at something numb on the other side. "We tried. You know. You do the trying and then one day you look up and you've both been alone in the same room for two years and you just" he exhaled. "You just stop pretending."
Julian looked out at the city.
*Two years alone in the same room.*
He thought, unexpectedly, of Elena. Of twenty six months sitting forty feet apart and the distance he had maintained so carefully and the night the storm made that distance impossible to justify.
"Does Mother know?" he asked.
"God, no. You know how she is. She'll want to convene some kind of summit." A short, humourless laugh. "I'll tell her after the gala."
"Come to the office tomorrow," Julian said. "We'll have lunch. Actual lunch, not the thing where we order food and talk about business."
Silence on the other end. Marcus wasn't used to that version of his brother.
Neither, Julian reflected, was he.
"Yeah," Marcus said, after a moment. "Okay."
---
Elena was still at her desk at six when Julian appeared in his doorway, jacket on, ready to leave.
"Come on," he said.
She looked up. "I have the restructuring notes to finish"
"They'll be there tomorrow." He said it lightly, but his eyes were doing the thing they did now the thing where he actually looked at her, not through her. "You've been here since seven."
"So have you."
"I own the company." He tilted his head slightly. "Did you call her?"
Elena stilled. "Call who?"
"Whoever sent the email this morning." He held up a hand before she could deflect. "You don't have to tell me. I just" a pause, something careful in his expression, "you've been somewhere else today. I noticed."
She looked at him for a long moment.
This was the part that undid her, more than the kisses on the terrace, more than the slow careful warmth of the past two weeks. This. The noticing. The quiet, steady attention of a man who saw her even when she was trying not to be seen.
"My mother's selling my childhood home," she said. "Eight months after my father died."
Julian didn't offer a platitude. Didn't reach for the polished condolences she'd gotten from everyone else. He just absorbed it, the way he absorbed difficult information fully, without flinching.
"I'm sorry," he said. Simply.
"She won't talk to me." Elena looked down at her desk. "I'm the oldest. I was supposed to I don't know. Hold things together. And instead I moved to the city and built a career and sent money home like that was the same thing as showing up." She stopped. "I don't know why I'm telling you this."
"Because I asked," he said. "And because you've been carrying it alone all day."
She looked up at him.
Julian crossed to her desk and leaned against the edge of it, arms folded, close enough to be present without crowding her. It was a posture she recognized the one he used when he was listening rather than managing.
"My brother's marriage is ending," he said quietly. "He told me today. Six years and apparently they've been strangers for most of it." A beat. "My family is" he seemed to search for the word, "performative. We show up to the right things. We don't tend to show up for each other."
"Julian"
"I'm not saying it for sympathy." His eyes found hers, direct and steady. "I'm saying it because you looked at me like you were the only person in the world who had a complicated family, and you're not."
A surprised breath of a laugh escaped her.
He offered his hand.
"Dinner," he said. "Somewhere no one knows us. You can tell me about the yellow kitchen."
She looked at his hand. "The yellow kitchen?"
"You went somewhere specific when you were staring at that email." A quiet, careful smile. "I'd like to know where."
Elena gathered her things slowly, turned off her monitor, and stood.
"It had a window over the sink," she said, almost to herself. "My dad used to stand there in the mornings. Every single morning, same spot, watching the garden."
Julian held the door.
"Tell me the rest at dinner," he said.
And she did.
- Writer
