whispers in the Boardroom

Chapter 6

Elena's POV

The next day I packed my bags and got ready to head back home.

Since my father's death I hadn't been back much. I told myself it was the schedule the demands of the job, the travel, the endless calendar of things that needed managing. And that was true. But it wasn't the whole truth.

The whole truth was that going home meant walking into a house where he wasn't anymore. And I hadn't quite figured out how to do that without it costing me something I couldn't afford to spend on a weekday.

I packed carefully. I was only going for the weekend so everything fit into one bag which I appreciated, because decisions about what to leave behind were the kind I was good at.

I couldn't show up empty handed. My mother would never say anything about it directly but she would notice, and Gloria Vance's silent noticing was somehow worse than any words.

I found a small shop near Penn Station. Browsed longer than I needed to. Settled on a tea set delicate, floral, the kind of thing she would call unnecessary and keep in the good cabinet. I had it wrapped.

Back at the apartment I did the final walk through. Lights off. Stove off. Windows locked. I stood in the kitchen for longer than necessary, doing the mental inventory I always did before leaving, and noticed I was also doing a different kind.

Checking on myself. Taking my own temperature.

I wasn't excited. I wasn't dreading it exactly either. I was somewhere in the complicated middle ground of things that matter too much to be simple.

I grabbed my bags.

Walked out.

Locked the door.

And went home anyway.

Julian's POV

The office felt strange without her.

I noticed it within the first hour which was earlier than I would have liked, because noticing it meant acknowledging something I wasn't entirely prepared to sit with before nine a.m. on a Saturday.

It wasn't just the practical things. Though the practical things were bad enough.

The stand-in assistant pulled from the executive pool, name I'd already forgotten twice had managed to mis filed two documents, brought me tea when I drink coffee, and sent a contract to the wrong address, all within ninety minutes of arriving. She moved through the office with the particular energy of someone trying very hard and achieving the opposite of what they intended.

She was not fast.

She was not reliable.

And if I was being honest with myself which I was trying to be, more lately, with mixed results she was not Elena.

Elena who anticipated things before they happened. Elena who walked into a room and read it completely before she did anything else. Elena who was sharp and steady and if I was being completely honest, which apparently I was incredibly distracting in ways I had spent fourteen months filing under not relevant and that had recently become impossible to file under anything at all.

I was mid thought when I heard the crash Several cups, by the sound of it. From somewhere outside my office, followed by the kind of silence that meant someone was deciding whether to apologize or simply disappear.

I stood and appeared in the doorway.

The assistant was crouched on the floor surrounded by ceramic pieces, looking up at me with the expression of someone who had already begun mentally drafting their resignation.

I looked at her. She looked at me.

I was I will admit not at my most patient.

"Marcus."??

His voice came from behind me. I turned. My brother was walking down the corridor toward my office with his hands in his pockets and the expression he had been wearing since childhood when he was about to make himself at home somewhere without being invited.

He glanced at the assistant. Then at me. Then back at the assistant.

"Go get a dustpan," he told her, not unkindly. "Take your time."

She disappeared with considerable relief.

Marcus walked past me into my office.

"Rough morning?" he said, settling into the chair across my desk.

I sat down and said nothing, which he correctly interpreted as yes.

"She'll be back Sunday," he said.

"I'm aware of when she'll be back."

"Just noting." He leaned back. "You look like a man counting hours while pretending not to count hours."

I gave him a look that under normal circumstances would have ended the conversation. Marcus has never responded normally to that look.

Before I could say anything his assistant appeared in the doorway carrying - I looked twice - several boxes of food. Pizza. What appeared to be an entire second meal in containers. Enough for considerably more than two people.

She set it on the conference table at the side of my office, arranged it with quiet efficiency, and left.

I looked at the food.

I looked at Marcus.

"What is this?"

He was already opening a box. "Lunch."

"It's ten forty five."

"Brunch then." He handed me a slice with the confidence of a man who had never once doubted a decision he'd made. "Sit down Julian. Eat something. You're unbearable when you haven't eaten and you're already halfway there."

I sat down.

The pizza was good. I didn't tell him that.

We ate in the way we had learned to eat together as children in the gaps between the performance of being Crofts, when no one was watching and we were briefly just two people who happened to share a last name and a complicated history.

Marcus was quiet for longer than usual.

"Adrienne and I signed the preliminary paperwork," he said finally. Without preamble. Just there, in the room, between the pizza boxes and the grey Saturday light.

I put down my slice.

"When?"

"Thursday." He looked at the table. "It was very civilized. Very Croft." A short, humourless exhale. "We sat across from each other in a room full of lawyers and divided everything we'd built and neither of us cried. I keep thinking that should feel like a victory."

"Marcus"

"I'm not asking for condolences." He looked up. "I'm just saying it out loud. I've been saying things out loud lately. It helps more than I expected."

I understood that. More than I would have, a few months ago.

"Does mother know?" I asked.

"Not yet." He picked up his slice again. "You know how she'll be. She'll want to manage it. Turn it into something presentable." He paused. "I'm not ready for it to be presentable yet."

I nodded.

We ate in silence for a moment. Outside, Manhattan moved past the windows at its usual indifferent pace.

"Do you remember," Marcus said slowly, "the summer you broke Father's car?"

I looked at him. "I was sixteen."

"Seventeen. You borrowed it without asking and put a dent in the rear panel the size of my head." He smiled not the performance smile, the real one. "You had it repaired and replaced before he noticed. You must have spent three months of allowance."

"He noticed," I said.

Marcus looked at me. "What?"

"He noticed. He just never said anything." I looked at the city. "I found a note about it. After he died. In the dictionary." A pause. "He'd written Julian fixed the car. Didn't ask for help. Didn't admit he needed it. My son. Both a pride and a concern."

Marcus was quiet.

"We never got to make mistakes," I said. Not bitterly. Just as a fact about the world we had grown up in. "Not real ones. Not the kind you leave out in the open where people can see them."

"No," Marcus agreed softly. "We didn't."

The food sat between us, cooling slightly.

"Adrienne and I made mistakes," Marcus said. "We just made them privately. In the approved manner." He looked at me steadily. "Don't do that Julian. Whatever you're building with Elena don't do it the Croft way. Don't make it so clean and controlled that it stops being real."

I looked at my brother.

He looked back at me.

"Eat your pizza," he said. "And call her later."

Elena's POV

My mother was having a bad day.

I knew it the moment the cab pulled up and I saw Mara on the porch instead of Danielle. Mara had the look she got when she had been managing something alone for too long tired around the eyes, shoulders slightly too straight, the particular expression of the person who stayed.

"She's inside," Mara said, hugging me briefly, tightly. "Don't take it personally whatever she says in the first ten minutes."

"That bad?"

Mara exhaled. "She hasn't left the house in four days. She keeps rearranging the kitchen. She moved the plates three times this week." She looked at me. "This is how she's been, El. For eight months. Some weeks are better. This week isn't better."

I held onto that information carefully, the way you hold something fragile, and went inside.

Danielle was at the kitchen table. Not cooking, not reading just sitting, hands folded, looking at the window over the sink with the expression of someone watching something that wasn't there anymore.

She looked up when I came in.

"You're thin," she said.

"Hello Mum."

"I'm stating a fact." But her eyes moved over my face in the hungry, restless way that meant she had missed me and would not say so directly. "Sit down. I'll make tea."

"I'll make it," I said. "Sit."

She let me. Which told me more than anything else how the week had been.

I moved around her kitchen the way I had moved around it my whole life everything in the same places it had always been, the same chipped mug on the second shelf, the same loose handle on the cabinet by the stove. I made tea and set it in front of her and sat across from her and just looked at my mother.

Really looked at her.

She was smaller than she used to be. Not physically Danielle Vance would never allow herself to shrink physically but in some other way. Like something that had held her upright from the inside had gone quiet.

"Mara says you've been staying in," I said.

"Mara talks too much."

"Mara's worried."

"Mara should focus on her children." But there was no real heat in it. Danielle wrapped her hands around her mug and looked at the table. "I'm fine Elena."

"I know you are." I kept my voice even. "I also know that fine isn't the same as okay. And I know that you have been carrying this alone for eight months because that is what you do and that is what we do in this family" I stopped. Steadied myself. "And I think Dad would hate that."

Danielle looked up sharply.

I held her gaze.

"He would," I said quietly. "You know he would. He would sit right where I'm sitting and he would say Danielle, you are the most stubborn woman God ever made and then he would make you laugh until you cried and then he would say go talk to someone, love. Let someone help."

The kitchen was very still.

Danielle's jaw worked slightly.

"I don't need a therapist," she said.

"I'm not sure that's true."

"Elena"

"I'm not asking you to fix anything overnight." I reached across the table and covered her hands with mine both of them, the way she used to hold mine when I was small and frightened of things I couldn't name. "I'm asking you to try. One session. Just to see." I paused. "For me. If not for yourself."

Gloria looked at our hands.

For a long moment she said nothing.

Then quietly, almost inaudibly "He's everywhere in this house."

"I know."

"Every morning I come downstairs and for one second just one I forget." Her voice was completely steady, which somehow made it worse. "And then I remember. And I have to" she stopped. "I have to do it all over again."

I held her hands and didn't say anything. Because there was nothing to say that would fix it, and Danielle didn't need fixing. She needed someone to sit with her in it.

So I sat.

The weekend opened up after that.

Not dramatically. Not the way things resolve in films, with a single conversation that unlocks everything. More quietly than that. More honestly.

Mara brought the children over on Saturday afternoon and the house filled up with noise and small people who had no awareness of grief because they were four and six and entirely focused on whether there were biscuits. My mother moved differently with them around - lighter, more present, the particular animation that grandchildren produce in people who have more love than current circumstances are asking them to spend.

I watched her chase my nephew around the garden and felt something loosen in my chest.

We cooked together on Saturday evening. Danielle at the stove, me beside her, Mara at the table pretending to help while mostly providing commentary. The rice and peas came out perfectly, as they always did, and we ate crowded around the kitchen table with the kids and the noise and the ordinary, irreplaceable warmth of a family that was bruised but still there.

After the children were in bed and Mara had fallen asleep on the sofa, Danielle and I sat in the garden in the dark with our tea.

"I'll think about it," she said. Out of nowhere. No preamble.

I looked at her.

"The therapy." She said it like the word required effort. "I'll think about it. That's all I'm promising."

"That's enough," I said.

She looked at the garden the overgrown edges, the flowerbed I'd been working on, the spot where my father's favourite rose bush had gone wild without him to manage it.

"He loved that rose bush," she said softly.

"I know."

"Impossible about it. Used to talk to it." A small sound not quite a laugh, but close. The first one I'd heard from her all weekend. "Forty years and I never told him how ridiculous he looked."

"He knew," I said. "He just didn't care."

"No." Her voice was warm with it. "He never did."

We sat in the dark garden for a long time after that, not saying much, letting the night be what it was.

And I thought this. This is what I came back for. Not to fix anything. Not to manage the grief into something neater. Just to be here. In this garden, with this woman, in the house that still smelled like him.

My phone lit up on the armrest.

How's the garden.

I smiled at the screen.

Overgrown, I typed. Beautiful.

His response came quickly.

Cool

Then Good weekend?

I looked at my mother beside me, her hands around her mug, her eyes on the rose bush, something quietly shifting in her face that looked, just slightly, like the beginning of okay.

Yes, I typed back. Really good.

I put the phone face down on the armrest.

And stayed in the garden a little longer.