The List (15 page)

“Do you find many young people are interested in stationery?” Rupert asked Tilda.

“The ones who find my store,” she said. “I think, underneath it all, they’re looking for something more than paper. They’re searching for beautiful and permanent in a world built on disposable, on upgrades and new features and trends. They’re searching, I believe, for something that matches the depth of their emotions.”

“And they find it in paper,” her mother said. She’d been watching the conversation flit from one person to another like a badminton birdie in the air.

“I don’t know what they find,” Tilda said finally. “I facilitate connection, a way to reach out to another person as best they can. Perhaps the permanence is in sustaining the beauty of that moment, the tangible elegance of it all. It fades away, of course. But they’ve had that moment. Can we really hope for more?”

There was a moment of silence. Then Rupert raised his glass. “To a lifetime of moments,” Rupert said with a smile. “To Tilda and Daniel.”

“To Tilda and Daniel,” everyone echoed.

The candlelight flickered, casting shadows over the china and silver, the flowers, Daniel’s warm glance, Andrew’s hooded eyes, her mother’s forced smile.

—

Dessert was an airy chocolate mousse topped with raspberries. Afterward they moved from the dining room back to the reception room for an after-dinner drink. The conversation lagged eventually and people started to leave. Tilda said good-bye from the reception room, while her mother stood by the door and ushered them into the spring night. The chef was finishing cleaning up in the kitchen.

“Dinner was lovely. Thank you.”

“I’m so glad you thought so. You and your young man handled yourselves very well.”

“We do occasionally go to dinner parties in New York, Mum.”

“Andrew’s gift was quite nice,” she said. “Rather thoughtful.”

“It was exactly the kind of thing I’d expect from him,” Tilda said noncommittally. Inappropriate on every level except the obvious.

Her mother looked at her sharply. “Yes, what were you talking about over the drinks cabinet?”

“How much we’ve changed,” she said. “Do you want me to stay up with you?”

“No, darling,” her mother said. “Go on to bed. I’ll just look over tomorrow’s work, fix it in my mind.”

Her mother’s agent was the last to leave. On her way downstairs to retrieve the deed to the town house, Tilda paused at the top of the stairs when she heard her mother’s voice, midsentence, unusually petulant. “. . . but honestly, Rupert, I didn’t work as I have for the last twenty-five years so my daughter could marry a policeman and keep a shop!”

“Elizabeth, really, it’s hardly a corner shop in the local high street. Daniel seems very attentive to her. She’s done very well for herself.”

She turned and tiptoed back to the bedroom, closing the door as quietly as possible. Inside, Daniel was unbuttoning his shirt. “That was interesting,” he said noncommittally.

Tilda stifled a laugh that threatened to tip over into hysterical. “I apologize for Andrew.”

Daniel pulled off his shirt and draped it over the back of a chair, then went to work on his shoelaces. “I am aware,” he said, jerking free the knots, “of the English aristocracy’s role in the Irish famine.”

“As I said, I apologize. He was Mum’s research assistant when I was finishing school, and he’s a bit of a prat.”

“Does your mother always question your decisions like that?”

“She questions everyone like that. Rupert deserves a commendation from the queen for putting up with her for twenty years, although the second house in Spain built with his commissions from her book deals and speaking engagements probably eases the sting of her calls,” Tilda said.

“Your mother’s friend invited me to the Roman excavation under the Bloomberg headquarters tomorrow,” he said.

“Wonderful,” she said. Her vision swam for a moment, unmoored by candlelight and too much to drink. “I think it’s a closed site, so you’re very lucky. Come here,” she said, and reached for him.

He crossed the room and kissed her upturned mouth. “You haven’t forgotten about me, have you?” she asked as she slid her palms over muscle and bone.
Flesh of my flesh, blood inked on the paper of my bones.

She was, perhaps, a little drunk.

“You are unforgettable,” he replied, and hitched her skirt up to the tops of her thighs. “Still ready for me?”

She nodded. Her dress dropped to the floor along with her panties. Her nipples, still reddened and hot from their earlier play, stiffened when the cool air swirled around them. Daniel hoisted Tilda’s naked body against his, walked backward to the bed, and tumbled onto the duvet. She straddled him, jerking his belt buckle loose, unfastening his fly. He helped, releasing his shaft from his pants. His head thudded back against the bed as she sank down, but then he coiled and twisted and turned her under him.

It lasted less than a minute. She was so primed each thrust tightened the knots inside her until she snapped, and gasped into his shoulder. He came almost immediately, burying himself deep, his release soundless.

“I love you,” he murmured into her throat.

“Love you, too,” she whispered back.

Nothing felt real. City sounds were different in New York, or in Tokyo, and the unfamiliar room and bed only emphasized that even stillness was different the world over. She lay under him, wondering if her soul would be waiting for her back in New York, or if it were hovering over Cornwall, wondering why she’d left, where she was.

—

Daniel hoisted their rolling suitcases into the overhead bin while she unpacked her leather tote. Cashmere wrap for warmth, noise-canceling headphones, tablet loaded with her latest financials to review in case she couldn’t sleep, travel pillow, earplugs, and eye mask because she really should sleep. Barring a mechanical problem, the flight would depart on time.

“How often did you make this trip?”

“Before I started talks with Quality? Once a year when I was in school. Two or three times now that I’m out, but I usually see Mum during one of those trips. She’s very busy.”

“You see your mother once a year.”

“Perhaps twice if her teaching and speaking schedule allows.” The seat-back pocket wouldn’t hold both her iPad and her headphones case. Frustrated, she bundled her wrap on her lap and unzipped the headphones case. “I could afford one ticket home a year, which I needed to get home for the summer hols. I’d go to Cornwall. It was easier for Mum to come see both of us at once, rather than me trailing after her. After that, I was opening and running the shop.”

Daniel took the case from her and tucked it in his seat-back pocket behind his bookmarked copy of
Parade’s End
. “Your mother paid off the mortgage on a town house in the West Village for you but she wouldn’t buy plane tickets home.”

He wasn’t asking. Daniel’s professorial blazer, Oxford, and jeans weren’t a fashion statement but an expression of his core personality. Her cop with the soul of a professor, entirely too smart to miss nuances of finances in relationships. Whatever romantic images he’d created of Tilda’s boarding school life took on less-nostalgic tones after the dinner party. “She was angry with me for going to school in America,” Tilda said matter-of-factly.

A truth, one of many surrounding her abrupt decision to accept NYU’s full scholarship. She looked out the window at the rain-smeared tarmac. The baggage handlers shrouded in reflective jackets unloaded bags from a cart onto the conveyor belt, the luggage disappearing into the belly of the 767; if only one could stow away one’s personal baggage so easily. “Quite angry, in fact. I didn’t see her for nearly eighteen months.”

“NYU’s a pretty good school,” Daniel said, his eyebrows raised.

“I had a place at Balliol. Mum arranged my tutorials herself.”

Daniel looked at her. “You didn’t exactly give up a spot at Oxford to go to play the drums in a punk rock band,” he said gently. “I’m just trying to place you. Cornwall makes sense. Cornwall is the geophysical representation of you. Your mother makes sense with the boarding school, but not with Cornwall.”

“Mum didn’t fit there,” she said. “Simple as that. She loathes Cornwall. She can build an academic career, buy a house in Chelsea, travel all over the world lecturing at the G8 summit or the Milken Institute, but no matter how successful she becomes, she’s still from the same place. The class system is alive and well in England, if a bit less obvious than it used to be. Scratch Mum’s surface and what you find is that shabby little village and that even shabbier little house, and she’s ashamed of it.”

“You’re not.”

She remembered watching the sea, unable to tear her eyes from the way it wrinkled and glittered under a cloud-scudded sky, staying awake to watch the moon arc across the waves. “Nan’s from there. I’m from there. How could I possibly be ashamed of where I’m from?”

“Nan looked after you while your mother finished school,” he said. “Then you went to St Andrews.”

“Mum said the village school wasn’t providing a proper education. More like they couldn’t keep me in the building. She wants the best and settles for nothing until she has it. It’s ruthless, but I admire that in her.”

“Single-minded,” he said. “Can your mother afford to give us the town house?”

“On her salary as a professor? No. On what she makes consulting with the world’s largest corporations to increase their environmental awareness and responsibility? She might be able to buy the block.”

“Isn’t that a conflict of interest?”

“Mum is as honest as she is ruthless,” Tilda said with a little smile. “A few years ago she discovered a massive pollution cover-up at one of the companies that hired her. She returned their fees, every penny, plus interest, then published a series of articles in the
Guardian
exposing the cover-up. Rather than losing business, she raised her rates, and her exclusivity. Bringing in Elizabeth Davies gets you an Oxford don, a plan of attack, and social capital you can’t buy any other way. Her reputation is too hard won to compromise it, or let anyone else tarnish it.”

He huffed in amusement, rolled onto his back, and covered his eyes with his arm. “You’re your mother’s daughter, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” she said, after a moment. “I suppose I am.” She forced herself to stop fidgeting with the fringe on her wrap.

“Not to be rude, but how old is your mother?”

“Forty-five. She was seventeen when she had me.”

Daniel didn’t say anything else, just looked at her with that wise, knowing gaze that scared her more than any ledge. She cleared her throat, loosened her seat belt. “I think I’ll work for a bit.”

“Sure,” he said.

It took another thirty minutes to load the remaining passengers and bags. In that time Tilda read through her emails, reminded her assistant of the three personal appointments remaining in the week, skimmed the Styles sections in the London
Times
. When the button dinged and the flight attendant asked them to shut off anything with a switch, she felt calmer. After a short delay as they waited in line to take off, the jet lumbered along the runway and lifted into the air.

In the air, she was fine.

“I’m going to have a sleep,” she said.

Daniel turned on the overhead reading light. She arranged her mask, earplugs, and pillow. In the darkness his hand found hers and squeezed, then held hers while she envisioned the clean precision of black ink on white stationery, drafting her letter to Nan in her head.

February

A
s silently as he could in the predawn darkness, Daniel opened the cabinet by the sink and took down a glass, then ran it full of lukewarm tap water and drank. The Can Lake 50 ultramarathon he signed up to run took place in early October in Canandaigua; with a fifty-mile race on the horizon, if he slacked off his training now, he’d push too much too close to the race. Angie had pledged to run the 50K portion and was doing parallel training in Huntington. Normally they met on weekends for long runs, relying on her husband to meet them at waypoints with the energy drinks and bars they needed to get through the final miles.

On a day like today, gray and cold with clouds like a hangover, it was difficult to imagine the weather on race day. In the Finger Lakes district of upstate New York, it would be cooler, low humidity, and likely sunshine would highlight the fall foliage. But the weather suited Daniel’s mood. Today they were getting in a run before going to a funeral.

The front door to his parents’ house opened, and Angie stepped onto the braided rug and gently closed the door.

“Daniel, I really can’t believe she’s not going to make it to the funeral.”

In deference to their parents, still sleeping upstairs after the emotional wake the night before, Angie’s voice was low, but the tone came through loud and clear. Daniel slid his phone in the pocket of his running pants and zipped the pocket. Angie hadn’t turned on the hall light, but Daniel didn’t need to see her face to tell she was pissed off. In black tights and a fleece top zipped to under her chin, arms crossed, shoulders set, ponytail high on her head, she was the spitting image of her teenage self, wearing her field hockey uniform and furious with Mom for not letting her drive herself to the tournament.

At the wake last night he’d known he was going to pay for Tilda’s absence when Angie got him alone.

“She’s got a conference call.”

“It’s our uncle. Mom’s brother. She’s not coming?” Angie added.

“Quality wants to explore international venues as well as London. This is huge for her. There’s a conference call scheduled with London and Tokyo at the same time as the funeral,” Daniel said, and zipped up his fleece. “There’s no point in her coming all the way out here when she’ll have to prepare for the call, then miss the funeral to take it.”

“There’s the lunch afterward,” Angie said.

“She’ll probably miss that as well. These calls take a couple of hours, and there’s usually a call to Colin afterward, to dissect who said what and who didn’t say what.”

“Daniel. That’s bullshit and you know it.” His sister rarely swore. Definitely pissed off. “You’re a cop and you make the funerals, the birthday parties, holidays. It’s Uncle Kiernan. He used to take us roller-skating, he helped us build the treehouse. He lived two streets away. Family comes first. Period.”

“Angie, she met Uncle K once, at Christmas, when she met thirty other members of the family. We’ve been married for six weeks, and she’s beyond busy.”

Tilda had flown back to London to meet with the acquisitions team at Quality, and impressed the hell out of them. No surprise there. That meeting led to two more business trips, one to Dubai to talk to financiers, and another to Tokyo to research spaces and trends. The Asian market suited Tilda’s business ethos down to the ground. But the travel had thrown off Tilda’s body clock again. She was having a hard time sleeping at night, and staying awake during the day. Early in the morning when he went for a run he often found her in her study, either at her desk, going over proposals, or asleep on the chaise. When he got home late at night, he’d find her there again, working or asleep.

He’d thought a favorable reaction from Quality would ease her fears, and her workload. Instead, the opposite happened. After the New Year’s trip to England, Tilda doubled down on work.

Angie hauled open the front door. “But you’re here, more often than not. You might be late, but you’re here, or you call.”

“There are six different financiers and buyers on four continents weighing in on this deal,” Daniel said. “This is a once in a lifetime opportunity that could make or break Tilda’s career.” He cut her off when she opened her mouth. “If you want to yell at me, do it while we’re running.”

They set off down the path to the driveway, then into the street, running in the direction of oncoming traffic. It was too early for much activity on residential streets; they’d avoid the main roads and highways heading into the city for the day. Daniel forced himself to slow his pace. His left knee clicked until the muscles loosened. Beside him his sister jogged grimly along, jaw set, ponytail swinging in time to her stride but with a sharper snap than usual.

“I still don’t get—”

Angie cut herself off, obviously biting her tongue. Some of his nervous energy released by the brisk pace, he said, “Get it off your chest, sis.”

“You’re infatuated. I haven’t seen you like this since high school. Even when you were in uniform and we couldn’t go to the bars without girls throwing themselves at you, you never got like this. You watch her like she’s going to disappear.”

That thought hit a little too close to home. “I love her. I can’t explain that. You either love someone or you don’t. I love her. I’m married to her.”

“I’m just . . . I’m just worried. I admire her drive, the business she’s built for herself, and I have no doubt that if she wants to be a global sensation that she’ll be a global sensation. But you eloped with her after you’d known her for six months. That’s not like you. You have to admit she’s not like any woman you’ve dated before.”

He didn’t respond. Angie had opinions about the way things should be done. Always had. Always would. But those opinions were based on staying loyal to and taking care of the people in a close-knit family. Angie only wanted what was best for him. The problem was that sometimes the things that were best for you weren’t the things that made you feel complete. When he was with Tilda, he felt whole.

“I love her.” Three words, single syllables. They should say everything he needed to say and yet to someone on the outside they were meaningless.

“I just don’t see how she’ll make you happy.”

Maybe he didn’t want to be made happy. Maybe he didn’t want someone to slot him into the neat, orderly rows of How Things Are Done. Maybe he wanted someone who not only sat on ledges or slipped over cliffs, but also dared him to go over with her. “Not your problem, Angie.”

“She’s going to be a ton of work. High maintenance.”

He was running eight miles in a sharp February wind because he liked the hard things, the harder the better, the more complicated and puzzling, the better. Challenges fed him. When they’d done the crosswords or Sudoku puzzles, he approached them with sheer delight, while Angie beat them into submission. “She’s actually no maintenance at all. With Tilda, what you see is what you get.”

They ran on in silence. Daniel pointed out a sheet of black ice, formed when the snow at the corner of a driveway melted in the sunshine, then froze after dark, then led the way down the path and along the trail. It was cooler down here. Darker.

“It just seems like . . . if you’d known each other a little longer . . . whatever
fling
,” she said, making big gestures with her hands as she ran, “would have burned itself out.”

“Opposites attract,” he said, more flippantly than he meant, because the question struck a nerve.

“You’re not going to manage her the right way,” Angie went on. “You’re analytical, rational, cerebral.”

“I don’t plan to manage her at all.”

“Do you understand her? Really understand her?”

“Does any man really understand a woman?” he said. “I’m not sure I understand you, and I’ve known you thirty years.”

“My point exactly. The whole ink and stationery is like something out of Edith Wharton. It’s artificial, somehow. She’s artificial,” Angie said, her forceful exhales giving the words more emphasis than she meant. Or so Daniel hoped.

He laughed at the idea of Tilda as artificial. She burned too brightly to be fake. Fake didn’t stand up to the kind of fire Tilda generated. “She’s not artificial. She’s anything but.”

“You know what I mean. She’s created.”

He snapped a look at his sister, then avoided a pothole. “I actually don’t know what you mean.”

“The perfect sheath dresses in any color darker than hunter green, the Louis Vuitton, the cashmere, the capsule wardrobe.”

Tilda’s wardrobe was tiny, consisting of a few pieces of the highest quality, worn over and over until they had to be replaced. She made her own money and spent her own money, as did he. In her mind, classic applied to everything from shoes to clothes to stationery. But Angie’s comment made something click into place inside him. In his time on the financial crimes task force, he’d learned that the things that were simple and classic often came with the highest price tag, as if simplicity and timelessness were the best disguise of all. “She doesn’t chase fashion,” Daniel said, struggling to find the right way to describe his wife when all he could come up with was,
She’s Tilda.

“She reminds me of a girl I knew in college. On the surface, everything looked perfect, the right clothes, no obvious accent, but no one knew anything about where she was from, where she went to school, who she’d been before she came to Bard. Eventually someone started digging and it turned out she was from some tiny coal town in West Virginia, all but grew up in a shack with no indoor plumbing, until her high school guidance counselor took an interest. She created herself out of nothing.”

“Tilda isn’t from a coal town in West Virginia,” Daniel said. “She went to boarding school. Her mother lives in Oxford. She is exactly what she appears to be, an expat Brit living in New York for the last decade with a passion for clean lines and elegance.”

“So maybe no one’s dug deep enough to find her secrets,” his sister said. “She’s got them. I guarantee it.”

“Fine, Long Island Medium, what do you think her secret is?”

“I don’t know,” his sister said on a hard exhale.

They’d picked up the pace in the middle of the run, going hard for a mile or two before scaling back to head for home. The pace pushed Angie to her limits, but she’d always used him as her bellwether for accomplishments and success. Separated by eleven months, Angie knew that if she could keep up with him in school or in athletics, then she could keep up with almost anyone. This kind of testing characterized their relationship from a very early age. He didn’t worry about the arguing. No, he worried more when Angie shut down.

“She’s covering something,” Angie continued when they scaled back. “Whatever it is will be hidden in plain sight. Right in front of your nose.”

Like your carping at me to cover your grief over losing Uncle K?

They ran to the end of the road, jogged to the end of the street, and walked along the block to the driveway. He reached out and pulled her close, then pressed a kiss into the fleece headband protecting her ears and forehead from the bitter cold. “I’m going to miss him, too,” he said, and felt the shudder ripple through her shoulders.

This was what it meant to be part of a family, understanding that fights didn’t mean that you loved each other any less. In fact, fights often meant that you both loved the other person, and trusted that they would hear the love through the argument. Angie fought with him because she loved him and she trusted him, and she knew that no matter what, family came first. He hadn’t gone through the usual routine of introducing a woman to his family, letting them get to know each other, proposing marriage, and then throwing a big wedding. But he had done what was right for him. Eventually his family would accept that.

Angie’s face was flushed, and sweat darkened the hair at her temples and nape as she climbed into the Tahoe to drive home and get ready for the funeral. Daniel showered and dressed, and met up with his parents in the kitchen. His mother’s eyes were red but dry. Uncle Kiernan’s death was expected; he’d battled lung cancer for two years. But losing a sibling hurt no matter how much time you had to prepare for it.

“What train is Tilda coming on?” his father asked. “I’ll ask Jerry to pick her up at the station on his way to the church.”

“She’s not coming,” Daniel said. “She’s got a conference call today.”

“Oh,” his mother said quietly.

The soft sound pierced him. “I’m sorry, Mom,” he said, and drew Tilda’s condolence card from his inner breast pocket. He set it on the counter next to his mother’s cup of coffee. “She sends her regrets. She said she’d try to call later. There are too many moving parts to these calls to reschedule them easily.”

“I understand,” his mother said. Her fingers trembled as she turned the card from end to end. “We knew this was coming. We just didn’t know when, and she only met Kiernan once.”

The only way Tilda would become part of his family was by coming to these kinds of family events. Weddings, funerals, soccer games. They’d eloped after knowing each other for mere months. It would get better, when the deal was done.

When the deal’s done her travel schedule will get more brutal,
a little voice reminded him. Lately she’d rarely been on the same continent as him, much less the same time zone. Just when she recovered from one stint of jet lag, she set off again. If this kept up much longer, she wouldn’t know
where
she was, much less
who
she was.

“I’ll drive, Dad,” he said.

Without a word his father dropped the keys to the Land Rover in Daniel’s outstretched hand. His father jealously retained driving privileges, but got in the backseat with his mother and wrapped his arm around her. She sobbed the whole way to the church, quiet choking sounds of grief that broke Daniel’s heart. He dropped his parents off under the portico, parked the car, then took a couple of minutes to pull himself together before going into the church.

In the vestibule Jessie patted his arm imperiously. “Uncle Daniel, where’s Aunt Tilda?”

“She couldn’t make it, peanut,” he said. “Business.”