Chapter 9 - What It Cost
The apartment was small and warm and had a window that faced a courtyard full of laundry lines.
Mara found work at a hotel three blocks away, in the housekeeping department, supervising a staff of nine. The pay was less than what Adrien had paid her. The hours were worse. The apartment was the size of the Vale guest suite’s bathroom. But the door had one lock, and the window faced the courtyard, and nobody stood outside it at night.
Sophie adjusted the way children do, quickly and completely. She started at a preschool with a green fence and a teacher named Miss Ruby. She made a friend called Desmond. She stopped asking about the big house, and then one day in March she started asking again.
“Is Mr. Grumpy still working?”
“He is.”
“Is his arm better?”
“I believe so.”
“Did he fix the plug?”
“I don’t know, baby.”
Sophie considered this for a moment, then returned to her coloring. “He should take a nap.”
—
The trial began in April.
Mara did not attend. She followed it in the newspaper and on the news, and she learned things she had not known. She learned that Hale had been planning the Northport takeover for three years. That the car bomb that killed Celia and Evelyn was not a rival gang, but a man Hale had hired to make Adrien withdraw from a contract. That Adrien had spent every year since searching for proof, and had found it only when a three-year-old walked into his office and touched a music box.
She read that detail in a newspaper and had to put the paper down.
Adrien testified for two hours. He did not look at the cameras. He answered the questions in the same flat, controlled voice she remembered, and when the prosecutor asked him to describe the morning he learned his daughter was dead, he was silent for a long moment and then said, “No.”
The court reporter wrote it down. The room, according to one account, went completely still.
“I can’t,” Adrien said. “Ask me something else.”
The prosecutor asked something else.
Mara read that article twice, and then she folded it carefully and put it in a drawer.
—
Hale was convicted in June on all counts. The sentence came down in July: forty years, with no possibility of parole. Owen Rusk received five years and was released in eighteen months for cooperation and health. Victor Sloane got twelve. Lena Ortiz got probation and a job at a bakery in the city, where, Mara learned later, she made very good bread and never spoke to reporters.
Sophie turned four in August. The party was in the courtyard, with a chocolate cake and six children and a piñata that broke on the third swing and sent candy into the laundry lines.
Mara took photographs. In one of them, Sophie is laughing with frosting on her nose, and behind her, out of focus, there is a man standing at the courtyard gate with his hands in his pockets.
She did not see him at the time. She found the photograph a week later and stared at it for a very long time.
—
The second time she saw him was in September, at the hotel.
She was on the fourth floor, inspecting a room, when the elevator opened at the end of the corridor and Adrien Vale stepped out.
He looked different. That was her first thought. Not the suit, though it was simpler than anything she had ever seen him wear — no tie, a dark jacket, the collar of a white shirt open at the throat. Not the arm, though the sling was gone and he moved it carefully, as people do when a joint has healed wrong. It was his face. Something had gone out of it. Something tired and locked. He looked like a man who had set down a very heavy thing and was still learning how to stand up straight.
He stopped when he saw her.
“Mr. Vale.”
“Mara.”
They stood at opposite ends of a hotel corridor, and neither of them moved.
“You’re staying here?” she asked.
“No.”
“Then why are you on the fourth floor?”
Adrien looked at the doors, as though only now noticing where he was. “I was looking for the manager.”
“I’m the manager. Of housekeeping.”
“Yes,” he said. “I know.”
The silence that followed was not uncomfortable. It was the opposite. It was full of everything neither of them had said in six months.
“I’m sorry,” Adrien said. “For coming here. I told myself I wouldn’t.”
“You came anyway.”
“I have developed a habit of doing the thing I told myself I wouldn’t.” He paused. “It’s new. I don’t recommend it.”
Mara laughed. It surprised her. It surprised him too, she thought, because something in his face eased by a fraction.
“Do you want to see her?” she asked.
Adrien’s expression changed. “Yes.”
“She’s at preschool until three.”
“I can wait.”
“You don’t wait,” Mara said. “You arrange.”
“I’m learning.”
—
He waited.
He sat on a bench in the courtyard for an hour and forty minutes, with his hands folded and his eyes on the gate, and when Sophie came running through it at three-fifteen with her backpack swinging, she stopped so fast that Desmond ran into her.
“Mr. Grumpy.”
“Hello, Sophie.”
“You’re not at your house.”
“No.”
“Did you bring the plug?”
Adrien considered this. “I brought something else.”
He reached into his jacket and took out a small, cloth-wrapped object. He set it on the bench and unwrapped it carefully.
The silver music box caught the afternoon light.
Mara’s breath stopped.
“It was in her room,” Adrien said, without looking at her. “I cleared the room last month. It’s the first time I’ve been inside it in five years. I thought —” He stopped. Started again. “I thought it should be somewhere it would be played.”
Sophie climbed onto the bench beside him and reached for the lid. Then she stopped, and looked up at him, and asked, very seriously, “May I?”
Adrien looked at her. Then he looked at Mara over the top of her daughter’s head.
“She’s asking permission,” Mara said.
“I noticed.”
“She’s four now. She’s learned things.”
“So I see.”
He turned the little key beneath the box. The melody started, thin and delicate in the courtyard air, and the tiny ballerina turned in her circle beneath the tarnished mirror.
Sophie watched her with her mouth open.
“She’s dancing,” she said.
“She is.”
“Is she sad?”
Adrien was quiet for a moment. “I don’t think so anymore.”
Mara sat down on the other end of the bench. Neither of them spoke while the music played itself out. When it stopped, Sophie asked for it again, and Adrien wound it again, and this time Mara watched his hands instead of the box.
When it finished the second time, he closed the lid.
“I’d like to see you,” he said. “Both of you. Not as an employer. Not as a man with a house and a security team and a great many problems. As —” He stopped. “I don’t have the right word.”
Mara looked at him. At the bruise that had faded, and the arm that had healed wrong, and the face that had set down something heavy.
“Try,” she said.
“I’d like to come to dinner,” Adrien said. “On a Sunday. With a bottle of wine that costs less than your rent. And I would like to be someone who is allowed to stay for the second cup of coffee.”
Mara felt her eyes sting.
“Sunday,” she said.
“Sunday.”
“And you’re bringing the wine.”
“I am bringing the wine.”
“And you’re not going to send a car.”
“I am going to take the bus,” Adrien said. “I have been practicing.”
Sophie looked between them. “Is he staying for dinner?”
“He’s staying for dinner.”
“Every Sunday?”
May you like
Mara looked at Adrien. Adrien looked back at her.
“We’ll see,” Mara said.
