Page Fourteen

The Gilt Room is on the forty-first floor, and it has exactly one table.

You didn't know restaurants did that. A maître d' in a gray suit walks you through a hallway lined with gold-leaf panels and opens a door onto a small room of windows, Manhattan glittering on three sides like somebody spilled a jewelry box down the avenues.

She's already there.

Of course she is. Cressida was always early. She used to sit in the cab of the tow truck twenty minutes before you finished a job, reading a paperback with her shoes off, pretending she wasn't waiting.

She isn't pretending anything now. She sits with her back straight and her hands folded on the white tablecloth, still in the white suit, and when you walk in she doesn't stand.

"You came," she says.

"You sent a hundred and fifty million dollars and a note. I figured I'd see what the note cost."

A waiter arrives with water. He's young, good-looking, used to movie stars. He looks at Cressida and pours your water onto the tablecloth.

"I'm so sorry," he says, to her, not you.

"It's fine," she says without looking at him, and he leaves like he's been dismissed by royalty, which, you suppose, he has.

You sit. The chair is heavier than it looks.

Up close she's worse. That's the only word you have. Worse. Three years should have done something to her, put a line somewhere, dulled something. Instead she looks like the photographs: dark eyes, pale skin that seems to hold the light, that red mouth. The bob is new. When you knew her, her hair was long and she pinned it up with a pencil from your workbench.

"You cut your hair," you say, because it's the first thing that comes out.

"You didn't cut yours."

"I've been busy."

"I know." She tilts her head toward the window, toward the city, toward some invisible ballroom full of people who watched you catch an egg. "I've read every filing you've made since the incorporation. The patent. The S-1. The safety reports on the Foundry. You moved into a steel foundry in the Strip District. You put the test bay where the furnace used to be."

"You've been checking on me."

"I've been doing due diligence." A pause. "And checking on you."

You don't know what to do with that, so you do nothing.

"Six months ago," she says, "my grandfather named me heir. You probably saw."

"Everybody saw."

"He had a stroke in February three years ago. He was in intensive care for most of a month. When he came home, he found out what my mother had done while he was unconscious, and he was very angry." Her voice stays perfectly level, like she's reading a balance sheet. "It took him a while to decide what to do with that anger. Eventually he gave me everything. Holt Capital is mine now. I run it."

"Congratulations."

"I didn't ask for congratulations."

"What do you want, Cressida?"

It's the first time you've said her name out loud in three years. She hears it. Something in her face flickers and is gone.

"I want in," she says. "Your company is going to be the most important thing to come out of Pittsburgh in a generation, and Greywater is trying to bleed you before you list. I can stop the bleeding."

"With a board seat and a leash on my patent."

"With money you need by Thursday."

"I don't need it from you."

"Then who?" She leans in, just slightly. "Kestrel ran. Tidewell ran. Your banker is very pretty and very worried. I watched her face while you answered the lawsuit question. She thinks you're going to postpone."

You set down your fork harder than you mean to.

"You don't get to do this," you say. "You don't get to walk into my roadshow three years later and talk to me like I'm a deal. I don't owe you dinner. I don't owe you anything. You sat in that courthouse and you signed the papers and you never once looked at me. Not once. I was six feet away and you looked at the wall like I was a stranger."

The room goes quiet.

Cressida sits back.

"I looked at you," she says. "Every second."

"Bull."

"You wore the gray shirt with the torn cuff because it was the only one ironed. You had grease under your thumbnail, the left one, from a transmission job. You held your wedding ring in your fist the whole time, and when it was over, you put it on the table and walked out." Her voice doesn't shake. It's worse than if it did. "I looked at you, Ethan. You were looking at the floor."

You can't breathe right.

Because it's true. You were looking at the floor. You couldn't look at her. If you'd looked, you'd have begged, and you had already begged, the night before, in the kitchen, and she had said I can't and nothing else.

"Why are you here?" you ask, and your voice comes out rough.

She reaches down beside her chair and brings up a slim leather folder. She opens it and slides a document across the table, past the untouched plates, until it's in front of you.

You know it immediately. The decree. In re the Marriage of Cressida Holt and Ethan Dunaway. Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas. You have a copy in the same drawer as her birthday card. Thirteen pages. You read it once and never again.

This one has fourteen.

"That page," Cressida says quietly, "was supposed to be in your copy too. My mother's lawyer took it out."

You turn to it.

It's short. Lawyer language, but short.

In consideration of Cressida Holt's execution of the foregoing dissolution, the Holt family and its affiliated entities agree: (1) to release and forgive in full the promissory note secured by the real property at 4410 Butler Street, Pittsburgh, presently held by Holt Industrial Holdings; (2) to withdraw with prejudice the civil complaint alleging fraud in the inducement of marriage against the Respondent; (3) to take no action, now or in the future, against the Respondent or any enterprise in which he holds an interest. Cressida Holt further agrees to have no contact with the Respondent.

Two signatures. Rosamund Holt. And the looping C.

Dated March 14, three years ago. The morning of the courthouse.

You read it twice. Then a third time, because the words won't stay still.

The note on the garage. Your father's garage. You remember the letter that came a month after the divorce, from the bank, saying the loan on 4410 Butler had been satisfied in full by an anonymous party. You thought it was a mistake. Then you thought it was your dad's old friends from the union hall, passing a hat. You never found out. You stopped asking because the building was free and clear, and a building that's free and clear is something a bank will lend against.

That loan bought the first servo motors. The first prototype. The first year of Rosh's salary.

The fraud suit you never knew existed.

"They bought the note on your building," Cressida says. "My mother was going to call it, take the garage, and sue you for marrying me for the trust. You'd have spent ten years in court. You'd have lost the shop. You'd never have built the hand." She touches the edge of the page with one fingertip, the nail painted the same red as her mouth. "So I signed."

The city glitters. Somewhere below, a siren winds down Park Avenue.

"You never told me," you say.

"I wasn't allowed to." She meets your eyes, and for the first time all night the ice cracks, and underneath it is something so raw you have to grip the table.

"I didn't leave you, Ethan. I paid for you."