Page 32

"Mom, I don't—"

"Rosemary." There's a pause on the line, the particular silence of a woman who has worked the front desk of an elementary school for thirty years. "Your father would have asked before he judged. He asked everyone. It was his worst quality." Another pause. "Go and ask."

I put the phone down on the sill. Behind me Charlotte's already got her backpack on and her pumpkin under her arm and the foil package in her hands, carefully re-wrapped, the last roll sitting inside it like a letter.

"This is for Roman," she says. "Tell him it's extras."

"Charlotte—"

"Just tell him." She pushes it into my hands, stands on her toes and kisses my cheek, quick, rough, a little sticky, and goes out to the car at a trot and doesn't look back.

The Green is stripped to the grass when I drive past it. Someone's already taken down the lanterns, the hay bales are stacked on the flatbed, and the gazebo is just a gazebo again, white and bare in the dusk.

The streetlights come on one by one as I go. At the river I turn onto the road and see the mill rise out of the mist, long and dark, dead silent on a Sunday except for one lit window high on the top floor.

I stop the car in the lot. I sit with the engine off and the foil package in my lap and my hands shaking, and I'm not sure I can do this.

I'm not going to forgive him, I want that clear. I'm going because if he's about to send those names at six o'clock, I'd rather be hurt where I can fight back. I'm going because if he isn't, I need to see it with my own eyes.

The side door's unlocked.

I climb the forty-two stairs, and for once I can hear every one of them in the empty building. At the top I stop, my hand on the cold brass doorknob, and I hear his voice through the wood.

It isn't the one he used on Friday. There's no polish in it. It's plain and level, with the faint hoarseness of a man who's been talking for a long time to people who don't want to listen.

"—and the plan I'm presenting this evening isn't mine."

A man's voice answers, gruff and impatient, with the edge of someone watching the clock. "Let me be sure I understand, Caldwell. You're asking us to approve a plan that a plant manager sketched on a purchase order."

"An operations manager. Yes."

"On what basis do I trust her numbers?"

"On the basis that she's been right about every number in that building since Friday morning, including the ones that proved me wrong."

"That's convenient."

"It isn't convenient, Mr. Hallett. It's humbling, which is a different thing."

I stand in the dark outside the door with my heart hammering. I could push it open. I don't. Something holds me still.

"Then explain to me," says Hallett, "why on Friday you briefed this board on a plan to cut thirty-eight positions, and on Sunday you've reversed it entirely. What changed?"

There's a silence. It's so long that I think, absurdly, that he's going to say something smooth. Then he says very quietly:

"I stopped counting heads and started looking at faces, Mr. Hallett. And because you'll hear it from someone eventually, and I'd rather it was me: I made a bet."

I stop breathing.

"On Friday morning, ten minutes after Ms. Brewer told a roomful of her colleagues I was wrong, I told Margaret I'd have her on my side by Sunday. Five hundred dollars. I thought it would be easy. I've never lost a company." His voice doesn't waver. "Ms. Brewer never came around. She took my plan apart in one evening and drew a better one. I lost. I'd like the board to know that it's the most useful thing that has ever happened to me, professionally, and I would like it on the record."

"Roman," says a woman's voice, dry and crisp and unmistakably Margaret's. "This isn't necessary."

"It's necessary to me."

I push open the door.

The conference room's lights are low. At the far end of the long table a wall-mounted screen glows with five small squares, five faces, and Roman sits at the head of the table in his shirtsleeves with his hair in disarray, his jacket on the back of the chair, his laptop open in front of him. He's got his back half-turned to me, and behind him on the wall, enormous, lit like a stained-glass window, is my floor plan.