I shook hands. I smiled for photographs. And then I got in my car and I just started driving. And I didn't stop until she gestured at the general situation around them. Until the tire decided for you, he said.
Until the tire decided for me, he drove. The rain eased a little. Not much, but the visibility improved. He checked Lucas in the rear view. Still asleep.
Still fine. The last thing I said to him was that he should have been more proud of me. She said it like she was confessing something to an empty room, like she'd forgotten he was there. He told me I was working too hard and not living enough. I told him I'd built everything he never had the courage to build and that if he couldn't respect that.
She stopped, shook her head slightly. I told him not to call me until he could, he didn't. I didn't either. And then then then the quiet came back, but it was different this time, heavier. He felt the weight of it and let it sit there without trying to push it away.
I'm sorry, he said, because he was. You don't know me, she said. You said so yourself. Doesn't change it being true. She turned her face to look at him, and he could feel her looking even though he kept his eyes on the road.
Why aren't you saying something comforting and useless? She asked. Like what? Like he knows you loved him. Or time heals everything.
Or because I don't know if he did and time doesn't heal everything, Daniel said. Some things just become something you carry differently. Another long silence. That's more honest than I expected, she said. I don't have the energy to be anything else at midnight, he said.
This time she almost laughed more fully. Not a real laugh, but there was a breath something with warmth in it. Ashford Heights was exactly what he'd pictured. Long private driveways, houses set back from the road behind oak trees and iron gates. The addresses were on small posts at the entrance to each drive, tasteful and small, and deeply discreet.
The way wealth tends to be when it's been there long enough to stop announcing itself. Victoria's address led to a gate with a keypad. She gave him the code four digits and the gate swung inward without a sound. He drove up a long curved driveway and stopped in front of a house that was more like a statement. Stone exterior, tall, dark windows, not a light on anywhere.
It was the kind of house that could swallow a person whole. He put the car in park. She made no immediate move to get out. She was sitting very still looking at the front door. Big house, Daniel said not unkindly.
Too big, she said. It's what you buy when you've achieved something. When you need people to know you've achieved something, she paused. My father used to say that about wealthy people when I was a child. I thought he just didn't understand ambition.
Her voice did something complicated on the last word. I think he understood it perfectly. Lucas stirred in the back seat. He made a small sound halfword, half nothing. And Daniel reached back and touched his knee once without looking.
Easy, bud. Almost home. The boy settled. Victoria watched this. She watched Daniel's hand, the automatic sureness of it.
The ease, the way his son responded to his touch, even in sleep, and something in her face went very quiet. "He's lucky," she said. "I'm the lucky one," Daniel said and meant it. She looked at him. "Do you ever think about giving up?"
She asked. And the question was too sudden, too unguarded, the alcohol thinning the wall she'd been maintaining for the last 40 minutes. Not I don't mean, she stopped, reorganized. I mean, two jobs alone. All of it.
Do you ever just think about whether it's worth it? Yes. He looked through the windshield at the stone house with all the dark windows. Every time I look at him, Daniel said. And then I think yes, she absorbed that.
Simple as that, she said. And it wasn't quite a question. Simple as that, he said. Doesn't make it easy, but yeah. She nodded slowly.
Then she reached into her wet designer purse and found nothing. No business card, no card at all, just the wreckage of a long and terrible night. Mascara stained and waterlogged. I don't have anything to give you, she said, and for the first time all night, she sounded genuinely uncertain. I didn't do it for anything.
I know. She looked at him with those complicated eyes. That's what I mean. She reached for the door handle. Victoria.
He said her name. First name. Not Ms. Whitmore. Not the CEO's name. The way the office said it, like a formal title, just her name.
He reached into the zippered pocket of his jacket and held out her car key and the tow receipt. "Don't forget these." She took them. Her fingers were cold. "Thank you," she said.
"Daniel." He held very still for a second. He hadn't told her his last name. He'd only given his first, but she'd said it back with the certainty of someone who knew it. She got out of the car before he could say anything.
He watched her walk up the front steps, punch a code into the door pad, and disappear inside. The door closed behind her without a sound. He sat there for a moment in the dark rain, still falling softly on the windshield in the back seat. Lucas had gone fully still again, deep in sleep, completely trusting. Daniel put the car in reverse.
He told himself it was nothing a random act of help on a bad night, the kind of thing decent people did for strangers. He told himself he'd go home, sleep 3 hours, and show up to work at 8, and mop a floor on the 34th floor, and the whole thing would be nothing more than a weird midnight story he'd never tell because there was no one to tell it to. He told himself that. He almost believed it. He was halfway down the long curved driveway when the light came on in the front room, a single warm rectangle in all those dark windows.
And for just a second through the rain, he could see her silhouette standing inside, not moving, not going anywhere, just standing there like she was trying to figure out what to do next. He turned out onto the road and drove home through the dark, his sleeping son breathing slowly in the back, the receipt and her key no longer in his pocket, and something he couldn't name entirely sitting in his chest where the adrenaline had been. He got home at 1:17. He carried Lucas up the stairs. The boy was heavy now, not the toddler he'd once carried like it was nothing.
And Daniel's back registered the complaint and laid him in his bed and pulled the covers up and stood there for a moment in the dark. His son's room was simple, a desk with a library book on it. A poster of a classic Mustang on the wall. Lucas had picked it himself announced with great authority that it was the coolest car ever made, and Daniel hadn't had the heart to tell him that he largely agreed. A drawing taped above the desk crayon on notebook paper, their old twocar garage with little stick figures out front, and Lucas's handwriting underneath our garage.