“You would have noticed eventually,” Emma said quietly from the pillows. “You always noticed, Marco. You were the only one who ever asked me what I was still doing there.”
Marco’s jaw set. He took off his glasses and cleaned them on his tie, standing in the milk-colored light, and when he put them back on his eyes were red and he did not apologize for it.
“I’m not resigning,” he said. “Not because I’ve earned anything. Because I want to be in the room when you rebuild whatever this is, and because somebody ought to be keeping notes around here who reads them.”
“Sit down, Marco,” Dominic said. “The coffee’s terrible. Lily stole mine.”
It was the first time anyone had heard him say anything close to a joke in eleven hours, and Lily let out a sound that was half laugh and half sob, and she pressed her forehead to the edge of the mattress and cried with her shoulders shaking and her hand over Emma’s hair, and nobody told her to stop.
Two days later the U.S. Attorney’s office unsealed the indictment, and by the end of the week the nonprofit’s accounts were frozen and the plaque beside the tower’s brass doors — VICTOR SLOANE, FOUNDING PARTNER, ERECTED MMXI — came down with two workmen and a ladder while a crowd of forty people stood on the sidewalk in the cold and watched and said nothing, and nobody asked them to move along.
Ray the doorman came up to the ICU on the third evening with a paper bag of soup and stood in the doorway looking at the floor.
“I held that door for his men,” he said. “They went right past me with her arm between them and I stood there and I held the door. And I didn’t hold it for her this morning when she came in. I want you to know I’ve thought about nothing else.”
“You held the right door that night, Ray,” Emma said. “You were the only one who ran into the street.”
“I could’ve run sooner.”
“So could everyone.” She took the soup. “Bring the good bread next time. This hospital bread tastes like cardboard.”
Ortiz, the older of the two armed men from the entrance, put in his papers on the fourth day and told Dominic why in the lobby, quietly, without excuses: he had been told the party list was final and the girl wasn’t on it, and he had decided a list was a list. Dominic listened to the whole thing and then said, “The list was wrong, and I wrote it. Don’t put that on yourself. Put it on me, where it belongs, and go home and kiss your wife.” Ortiz stood there a second longer than he needed to, nodded once, and left.
On the fifth morning they brought Emma’s things in a plastic bag — her phone, her badge, her keys, her watch — and there was one thing that did not belong to her, folded in the bottom under the watch.
It was the yellow sticky note from her desk. *Handle when you can. D.M.*
Lily saw Emma’s face change and went still. “You took that.”
“It was four words,” Emma said. “It was the first thing he ever wrote that was only for me, and I thought — if I’m going to be the person who never makes him ask twice, then I should at least keep the asking.”
She did not say it like a confession. She said it like a fact she had been carrying down a long hallway, and Dominic, standing by the window with his coat over his arm, had to put his hand flat against the glass for a moment because the room had gone very bright.
Two weeks after New Year’s, they let her go home.
Her apartment was small and warm and smelled like Lily’s candles, and there was a new coat hanging on the back of the door — real wool, dark green, the right length — with a tag still on it and no card, and Lily looked at it and looked at Emma and opened her mouth, and Emma said, “Don’t.”
“He bought you a coat.”
“He bought me a coat because he watched me refuse the company card for one, and because it’s his entire vocabulary, Lily. He has four words and a credit card and he is trying very hard.”
“He could try with words.”
“He’s working on it.”
That night, after Lily had gone to bed and the radiator had ticked itself into silence, there was a knock at the door — not a commanding knock, a careful one, the kind a man practices — and Emma opened it to find Dominic Moretti in the hallway of her building with a cardboard box in both hands, wearing no coat, as if he had walked down the street and forgotten he owned one.
“I need you to sit down,” he said.
“You need to come inside, it’s eleven degrees out there.”
He came inside. He set the box on the kitchen table between the salt shaker and Lily’s stack of unpaid bills, and he stood behind his own box with his hands at his sides, and Emma had never once seen Victor Sloane look as nervous as Dominic Moretti looked in that yellow kitchen.
She lifted the lid.
Inside were sticky notes. Hundreds of them, in his sharp black handwriting, in order, edges aligned, the oldest ones gone soft and pale at the corners.
*Contracts — read the second clause. D.M.*
