“Not this far back from the water. I’m going to take some samples away with me, but I’d also like to get down under there and get access to the S beams. Are you okay if I get someone in here to take up the floor?”
“Theconcretefloor?”
“Yeah, we’ll blast it, check everything out, and then repour it.”
“Thewholefloor?”
“Just the part near the beams to start with.”
“Oh my god,” said Hailey, reeling at the image of a construction crew with sledgehammers descending on her house. “I donotneed this right now. I really don’t, I—wait, could this be dangerous? I mean, are we safe to stay here?”
“I think for now—”
“Oh God,” Hailey said again. “I just don’t believe this. How can this be happening? The house is brand-new!” She could hear the whining in her voice but had no way of stopping it.
“Ain’t that always the way,” Ben said. “But you’re in luck, timing-wise. I can get my boys in Monday, and we’ll get it over with quick as we can.”
“And Simeon pays for it?”
“I don’t handle that part,” he said, backing away from her. “You’ll have to work it out with him.”
“But generally speaking, is this something insurance should cover, either Simeon’s or ours?”
“I would guess so, but I couldn’t say for sure. Depends on the cause, really. Simeon said you’re a lawyer?”
“Did he?” Would that have been in passing conversation, or in the context of a lawsuit? Judging by the way this guy was watching her now, it had to be the latter. “Yes, I’m a divorce lawyer.”
“I see.” He headed for the stairs. “Well, Divorce Lawyer Girl, your kids will want to play somewhere else next week probably. There’s gonna be a lot of dust down here.”
Mack’s Audi was pulling in just as the Concrete Guy’s Lexus was pulling out. Mack had been at Tech for a meeting, and he headed straight for the fridge and gulped down a beer. From the other side of the counter, Hailey took in his sharp cheekbones and the way his pants drooped at the back and around his waist. He was disappearing in front of her; soon he would be nothing but black circles and ashen skin.
“They want me to come back,” he said when the beer must have been almost empty, and even though this is what Hailey had wanted, she didn’t see how this person in front of her could possibly cope with a job, even a cushy one like his.
“They basically want to forget that anything happened. The dean called it ‘this unfortunate incident.’ ” There was not a trace of life in Mack’s voice.
“We could sue them, you know.”
He did not acknowledge this, but Hailey kept trying, mostly to fill the silence: “For not protecting you better. We could sue them for not investigating before they hung you out to dry.”
Mack set the beer can down and leaned on the counter, cocked his head sideways, and began to bob his chin up and down, something between a tic and a nod. “What difference does it make?”
“What do you mean? Do youwantto go back to work?”
“I don’t care really at all,” said Mack, with a flatness that scared Hailey deep in her bones. She recognized at once the state he was in; she had been there herself a couple of times in her life. The first was when she—Hailey Byers, valedictorian of her high school class, summa cum laude graduate of Duke University, acer of the LSAT, and editor of theNYU Law Review—had (whisper it) failed the Ohio bar. Not by one silly little point, nor by the many, many points that would have signified a missed section, a small stroke, or some other such disaster, but by a margin that plainly demonstrated that this girl didn’t know her stuff. Hailey was not descended from lawyers, she did not look like a lawyer, she did not feel grown-up enough to be a lawyer, and here was the numerical proof: the universe had caught her playing dress-up and it had put her back in her place, which turned out to be mostly in bed, staring at the wall. The Hailey Byers who never cracked under pressure had disintegrated in an instant, and no one around her had any idea what to do about it. Not her parents, not her sister, not the partners at the prestigious Cleveland law firm that had already hired her.
No one except for Mack.
It wasn’t any grand gesture on his part. He mostly let Hailey mope, stared at the wall with her, told her stories about his new job teaching poetry and creative writing to teenage scientists who just wanted to know what the right answer was! He brought her Dr Peppers when she slept too long, played her Jimi Hendrix to put some fight back in her. All he wanted, he said, was to be with her. In any mental state she happened to be in that day.
And eventually it worked, as Mack had seemed sure it would, as he must’ve known from his own great disappointments, even though he never talked about them. When the numbness was over, when Hailey had faced her demons, retaken the bar, and passed, Mack had even admitted that he loved her more for having failed, that doing so had made her infinitely more interesting than she had been before. Hailey had briefly considered leaving him for that comment, but she decided to marry him instead.
The second time that Mack had saved her from oblivion wasn’t anything nearly as frivolous. It had been when Mabel was born, which was also when Mabel had almost died. Without having to be told, Mack had shifted his watch, and while Hailey’s body recovered, it wasMabelwho got the poetry and the Hendrix, the student stories and the hole-by-hole commentary on the golf round that had won Mack his scholarship. Even when the nurses urged Mack to lay off the Dr Pepper, to go home and get some rest, he had never left their tiny daughter’s side. What’s more, whereas in those early days Hailey had been numb and mostly preoccupied by negotiations with God, Mack had been laser-focused on Mabel. Whenever Hailey joined the two of them in the NICU after they’d been alone for a while, it was as if Mack had been building a human out of the tiniest of beings:She likes Salinger, he’d say.Her teenage years are gonna be rough.Mabel’s limbs were long (even though they weren’t) and good for golf; her attitude toward the babies that cried too much and the resident who clicked his pen was poor at times.She has musical sensibilities, Mack explained.She doesn’t like all this discordant noise.
What Mack had really done was to lead by example:She’s our person, and it’s okay to start loving her.And so Hailey had, even though it was the most frightening thing she had ever done.
“I don’t seem to care about anything,” Mack was saying now. “I just sat there today in the dean’s office; you know? I couldn’t think of anything to say to the department head. And then I went to the hospital—”
“What?Why?Why would you do that?”
