Okay, she said in a tone that meant she'd filed it away but wasn't done with it. She wasn't done with it. Over the next 2 weeks, as the arm healed slowly and the investigation into Luther Quaid and Regg Hollander and the corporate network behind them expanded into the kind of multi- agency case that generates press coverage and pulled Octavia into a different kind of storm. Depositions, board meetings, a financial press that couldn't get enough of the story of the billionaire trapped in her own estate. Brin didn't ask about her again directly, but she listened.
She was a dedicated listener brin in the way that quiet children often are absorbing peripheral information with the patience of someone who understand information that adults give one in more than they intend to when they think they're not being observed. She heard Cade on the phone with his attorney about the potential workers comp implications of the shoulder injury. She heard him on the phone with Renata talking about the case in the shorthand way he used when he was trying to minimize Ein's information in her direction, which never worked the way he thought it did. She saw the photograph in a news article on Renata's tablet, Octavia, leaving a federal building in a dark coat with attorneys on either side, and she looked at it for a long moment and then put the tablet down without comment. Cade went back to the estate 2 weeks after the blizzard when the road was fully clear and his arm had enough function to work with and finished the heating system.
Octavia wasn't there she was in the city. Her assistant had told him expected back Thursday. He worked two full days and left an invoice and a completed job report on the kitchen counter. The invoice was paid within 4 hours of him leaving. Nothing else happened for another week.
Then Octavia called. He was in his truck in a hardware store parking lot when the number came up on his phone a private number, but she'd texted him 2 days after the rescue to give it to him saying something about him having earned the right to reach her directly. He answered, "The case against Luther and Hollander has enough to move forward," she said. " No preamble. She didn't do preamble.
My legal team is confident. It's going to take time, but the outcome should be what it needs to be." " Good," he said. I also had an audit done of my internal communications infrastructure. Found the leak, closed it, a pause.
The 11 people who had that level of access are now nine. Neither departure was voluntary. Also good. A pause. Slightly longer than a transitional pause.
I'd like to come to Hollow Ridge, she said. Saturday, if that works. I have something to return to you. He looked out the windshield at the hardware store parking lot. A couple of teenagers were trying to fit a large piece of lumber into a car that was clearly not going to accommodate it.
He watched them try three different angles. " What do you need to return?" he asked. " Your tool bag. You left a secondary case in the mechanical room."
Another pause. " I'm aware I could have a driver bring it. I'm choosing not to." He said, "Saturday works. She arrived at 9:00 in the morning in a car that was expensive, but not ostentatiously.
So, a dark blue SUV that she drove herself, no driver, no assistant. She parked in the street in front of his house and got out in jeans and a dark gray coat, the tool bag in one hand, and stood on the sidewalk looking at the house with an expression he couldn't read from the window. He met her at the door. She held out the tool bag. He took it.
You could have had someone bring this. I said that already. I know. She looked at him. He looked at her.
The particular awkwardness of two people who had been through something together and were now standing on ordinary ground trying to remember how ordinary ground worked. " Come in," he said. She came in. The house was exactly what it was, a three-bedroom on a quiet street in a mountain town. Well-maintained because Cade fixed things for a living and couldn't ignore a problem in his own space, but modest in the way that places are when the budget goes entirely to function and nothing is left over for display.
The kitchen was the center of the house, the way it was in houses where someone actually cooked. There were drawings on the refrigerator bins, various stages of artistic development, held up by magnets from every museum and attraction they had visited in the past 3 years. Octavia looked at the refrigerator drawings without making a point of looking at them. " Coffee?" he asked.
He made coffee. She sat at the kitchen island, not the expensive kind. just the kind with a butcher block top he'd installed himself 3 years ago and wrapped her hands around the mug the way she had that night in the estate and he sat across from her. They talked for 40 minutes, not about the case, not about the blizzard or not primarily. They talked the way two people talk when they've already done the hard version of knowing each other and are now doing the easier version.
She asked about the shoulder. He said it was functional. She asked about the business. He told her about a Victorian restoration downtown that was going to be 6 months of work. And she asked questions that were actually informed because she had experience with commercial real estate and historic building codes.
And he found himself answering in more detail than he usually gave clients because she was actually keeping up. She was, he realized again, genuinely interesting to talk to. not interesting in the way that powerful people sometimes were where the interest was a performance where they asked questions they didn't care about the answers to. She was interested because she was interested. She'd built an empire by actually paying attention to things and that didn't switch off when the things were small.
They were still talking when the front door opened and Brin came in. She'd been at a friend's house two streets over, and she came in the way she always did backpack, dropped by the door, shoes kicked off, already talking before she'd fully cleared the threshold. Dad Mia says, "There's a new trail opened on the North Face. Can we go this weekend?" She went with her dad and said, "It's actually good for her."