“The building you work in.” He paused. “The address your company has on its letterhead. The office where you’re meeting your investors next week.” Another pause, shorter. “That building belongs to me as well.”
The elevator arrived with a soft chime. The doors opened.
Alexander stepped aside to let Emily enter first, because that was what he always did, and she stepped in and turned to face the corridor, and she saw Ethan in the conference room doorway—jacket slightly disheveled now, the careful assembly of him coming undone at the edges—and she felt nothing for him that was not ordinary human compassion. The compassion you feel for anyone you watch lose something they thought was permanent.
Then the elevator doors closed, and he was gone.
In the elevator, descending, Emily stood beside her father and watched the numbers count down on the panel above the doors. They did not speak. It was not the hollow silence of the guest bedroom, or the stale silence of the conference room. It was a real silence—inhabited, warm, the silence of two people who have known each other long enough to rest in the same quiet without it meaning anything other than rest.
They were in the lobby before she said anything.
“Were you there the whole time?”
“I arrived before you did,” he said. “I wasn’t sure you’d go through with asking me to stay back.”
“I almost didn’t.”
“I know.”
She looked at him. He was a man in his mid-sixties now, the same age she associated with the particular combination of silver at his temples and the vertical lines around his eyes that had appeared when she was a teenager and had deepened in the years since, and he looked exactly as he always had, which was like someone who had decided a long time ago what he was and had not wavered from it since.
“Thank you,” she said. “For not saying anything until I was done.”
“You didn’t need me to say anything until you were done,” he said simply.
Outside, the rain had softened to a fine mist that hung in the air like something undecided. They stood under the building’s overhang, and Alexander’s car was already at the curb—his driver had seen them come out through the lobby glass—and they walked to it together through the mist, and the door was held for Emily, and she got in, and her father got in beside her, and the car pulled into the traffic of the city and moved forward.