Chapter 7 - Eleanor’s Secret
At nine the following morning, Michael found Scarlet sitting on the third step of the grand staircase.
She had found a clean, oversized white T-shirt in one of the guest dressers, which fell almost to her ankles like a nightgown. Her blond hair was wet, combed out straight and parted with meticulous precision. Beside her sat the linen napkin from the restaurant, still holding the two slices of dried bread she had saved for her mother.
"She’s still sleeping," Scarlet whispered as Michael approached from the kitchen holding two mugs of tea.
"Good. She needs to sleep." Michael handed her a mug with warm milk and a teaspoon of honey. "Take this."
Scarlet sniffed it cautiously before taking a sip. "Where are your children?"
"I don't have any," Michael said, leaning against the banister.
"Where is your wife?"
"She lives in New York. She decided she liked art galleries more than she liked me."
Scarlet considered this with grave seriousness. "Mama says people leave when things get too heavy to carry. Was she heavy?"
"No," Michael said, a faint smile touching his mouth. "I was."
A floorboard creaked above them. Eleanor appeared at the head of the stairs. She wore an old gray cashmere robe Sarah Chen had pulled from the hallway linen closet. Her face was still hollow, but the wild, cornered look in her eyes had softened into an exhausted bewilderment.
"Scarlet," Eleanor said softly. "Go check on Lily. She’s trying to figure out how the television works in the guest room."
Scarlet looked at Michael, then at her mother. Understanding that she was being dismissed for adult negotiations, she took her mug of milk, rose with quiet grace, and vanished up the carpeted stairs.
Eleanor descended slowly, one hand sliding along the polished banister, testing each step as if she expected the wood to give way beneath her. She stopped three steps above Michael, looking down at him.
"I know who you are," she said.
Michael raised an eyebrow. "Most people do after they use Google."
"I didn't need Google," she said, leaning against the wall. "My husband... David. Before he died three years ago, he was a systems architect for Vantage Cloud. He had your portrait in the company newsletter pinned to his cubicle wall. He used to say Michael Willoughby was the only executive in Silicon Valley who didn't talk like an algorithm."
Michael set his mug down on the console. "David Vance? The lead on the distributed network architecture for the Cal-Net contract?"
"Yes."
Michael stood still. David Vance had died of an acute aortic dissection at thirty-two, collapsed over his keyboard during a high-priority system migration. Michael had sent flowers. He had signed a form letter authorizing a standard corporate life insurance payout. He had never seen the man’s face.
"The insurance policy was supposed to pay three hundred thousand dollars," Eleanor said, her voice dropping into a flat, steady register of facts that had long ceased to hurt. "Vantage Cloud’s underwriter disputed the claim. They said it was a pre-existing congenital defect. They spent fourteen months in arbitration. My lawyer cost forty thousand dollars before he told me that fighting a five-billion-dollar corporation with three toddlers in tow was a mathematical impossibility."
Michael felt the room around him tilt slightly on its axis.
The machine he had built.
The machine that had purchased this limestone house, the Biella suits, the Mercedes, the seventy-dollar steaks at Lucent Sky.
"The arbitration," Michael said, his voice dangerously low. "Who was the lead counsel for the underwriter?"
"A firm called Kerman & Vance," Eleanor said. "No relation. They offered twenty-five thousand dollars as a nuisance settlement on the condition that I signed a non-disclosure agreement and surrendered all rights to David’s deferred stock options. I had to take it to pay his funeral expenses and the lease on our apartment."
"And when the lease ran out?"
"I worked at the library. When the city cut the budget, I worked retail. When retail automated their registers, I worked cleaning night offices in the financial district. But daycare for three six-year-olds costs more than thirty hours a week at minimum wage can earn you. We fell behind. The landlord didn't want three kids in a one-bedroom unit anyway. He called it a violation of occupancy standards."
She sat down on the stair, pulling the cashmere robe tight around her ankles.
May you like
"So you see, Mr. Willoughby," she whispered, looking directly into his blue-gray eyes, "I didn't come to your restaurant by accident. Scarlet didn't know who you were. But when she described the man with the gray suit and the watch with the silver face who was sitting alone by the terrace window... I knew. I sat in that broken car and I told her: *Go to the glass house. Look for the man who signed your father's condolences letter. Tell him we're hungry.*"
***
