And the fact that she didn't remove them when he walked in was either a measure of how deeply she was concentrating or he thought possibly a measure of how non-threatening she considered his presence to be. He chose to believe it was the former. I apologize for interrupting. I found an error in the quarterly analysis. She didn't look up immediately.
What kind of error? Not a question. She said the way she said most things flat. Direct the inflection of someone who doesn't waste syllables on phrases that are purely social. Transposition in the appendix 3 projections.
The figure that should read 14.7 reads 17.4. I've prepared a corrected version. Now she looked up. She had gray eyes. He'd always known this in the abstract way you know things about a person you see every day but never really look at.
He noticed it specifically now in the particular quality of the late afternoon light coming through her office windows because her expression when she looked at him was something he hadn't seen on her face before. It wasn't surprise exactly. It was something more careful than that. Something evaluating. How did you catch that?
I processed the source document when it was first filed. The number was different. You remembered the number. I remember numbers. A silence.
She took off her glasses. There it was. Finally, the gesture he'd seen hundreds of times and set them on the desk and looked at him for a moment that ran about 3 seconds longer than any look she'd directed at him in 3 years. Leave the corrected version. Thank you.
He set it on her desk and turned to leave. Cole, he stopped. How long have you been in this position? 3 years? 2 months.
Do you have any interest in moving into analysis? He turned back around. She was already looking at the corrected document. I've had an interest, he said carefully. I haven't had an opportunity.
I'll look into it. He stood there for a beat. Not certain whether she meant it or whether it was the kind of thing people said in the moment and forgot by morning. Thank you, he said. She nodded without looking up.
He left. He didn't go straight home. He should have. He had groceries to pick up and Maya's soccer bag to repair the zipper had been sticking for two weeks and a call to his mother-in-law that he'd been meaning to return for 4 days. Instead, he found himself standing on the sidewalk outside the Apex Meridian building at 5:24 on a Friday afternoon with the resignation letter still in his jacket pocket.
He hadn't submitted it, hadn't been able to make himself submit it after the conversation with Victoria, which was probably nothing, which was probably exactly the kind of thing that would evaporate by Monday, and he couldn't make himself go directly to the subway. He walked three blocks north and turned into the Copper Oak. He'd been coming here for about 2 years in the intermittent way of a man who needed somewhere to sit that wasn't his apartment, but didn't need company to do it. The bar was small and dark in a comfortable way, not in a shabby way. It had old wood and good lighting, and a bartender named Dennis, who knew that Adrien drank bourbon neat, didn't want to talk about sports and always tipped 20%.
There were six other people in the bar at 5:30 on a Friday. Adrien sat at the end of the bar where the wood curved around and he could see the whole room and he put his jacket over the stool beside him and ordered a drink and took the resignation letter out of his pocket. He set it on the bar. He looked at it. He thought about three years of mornings of getting Maya ready and getting himself ready and getting on the subway with both of them, dropping her at school, continuing on to the building, walking through the lobby with his badge, riding up to the executive floor, and moving through the day with precision and silence and complete invisibility.
He thought about what Victoria had said. I'll look into it. He thought about whether he believed her. He was on his second bourbon and hadn't reached a conclusion when the door of the copper oak opened and Victoria Sterling walked in. He almost didn't recognize her.
That was his first honest thought, and it shamed him a little, not because it was disrespectful, but because of what it revealed about how thoroughly he'd categorized her. In the office, she was the CEO, a function, a title with a woman attached to it. He'd known the CEO's coffee order and the CEO's schedule and the CEO's preferred room temperature. The woman who walked into the Copper Oak on a Friday evening in November was not the CEO. She'd changed out of her work clothes, or she'd changed her jacket, at least traded the structured blazer for something softer, and her hair, which she always wore pinned precisely, was partially down in a way that suggested she'd started to take it down and then stopped.
Or put it back partially like she'd made a decision and then reconsidered it halfway through. She was carrying a small bag and she had her phone in her hand with her thumb moving across the screen and then she stopped walking, looked up and took in the bar with the expression of someone who had been here before, which surprised him. She found a seat at the bar three stools away from him. He watched her in his peripheral vision for about 30 seconds, operating on the reasonable assumption that she hadn't noticed him and that the appropriate response was to let her have her drink in peace. Because walking up to the CEO of your company at a bar on a Friday night was not a thing that ended well for anyone.