tomorrow. I can’t take more time out. We’re very busy right now, and I’ve got to keep on billing the hours.’
Fifteen years. Was that a long time or a short time? Does it change a person? It felt like a short time to him. He didn’t feel radically different from the person he had been fifteen years before. He was the same person, thinking the same way, capable of the same things. He had acquired a thick gloss of experience during those years, he was older, more burnished, but he was the same person. He felt she had to be different. Had to be, surely. Her fifteen years had been a greater leap, through bigger transitions. High school, college, law school, marriage, divorce, the partnership track, hours to bill. So now he felt he was in uncharted waters, unsure of how to relate to her, because he was dealing with three separate things, all competing in his head: the reality of her as a kid, fifteen years ago, and then the way he had imagined she would turn out, and then the way she really had turned out. He knew all about two of those things, but not the third. He knew the kid. He knew the adult he’d invented inside his head. But he didn’t know the reality, and it was making him unsure, because suddenly he wanted to avoid making any stupid mistakes with her.
‘You’ll have to go by yourself,’ she said. ‘Is that OK?’
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘But that’s not the issue here. You need to take care.’
She nodded. Pulled her hands up inside her sleeves, and hugged herself. He didn’t know why.
‘I’ll be OK, I guess,’ she said.
‘Where’s your office?’
‘Wall Street and Lower Broadway.’
‘That’s where you live, right? Lower Broadway?’
She nodded. ‘Thirteen blocks. I usually walk.’ ‘Not tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I’ll drive you.’ She looked surprised. ‘You will?’ ‘Damn right I will,’ he said. ‘Thirteen blocks on foot? Forget about it, Jodie. You’ll be safe enough at home, but they could grab you on the street. What about your office? Is it secure?’
She nodded again. ‘Nobody gets in, not without an appointment and ID.’
‘OK,’ he said. ‘So I’ll be in your apartment all night, and I’ll drive you door to door in the morning. Then I’ll come back up here and see these Hobie people, and you can stay right there in the office until I come get you out again, OK?’
She was silent. He tracked back and reviewed what he’d said.
‘I mean, you got a spare room, right?’ ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘There’s a spare room.’ ‘So is that OK?’ She nodded, quietly.
‘So what now?’ he asked her. She turned sideways on her seat. The blast of air from the centre vents caught her hair and blew it over her face. She smoothed it back behind her ear and her eyes flicked him up and down. Then she smiled. ‘We should go shopping,’ she said. ‘Shopping? What for? What do you need?’ ‘Not what I need,’ she said. ‘What you need.’ He looked at her, worried. ‘What do I need?’ ‘Clothes,’ she said. ‘You can’t go visiting with those old folks looking like a cross between a beach bum and the wild man of Borneo, can you?’
Then she leaned sideways and touched the mark on his shirt with her fingertip.
‘And we should find a pharmacy. You need something to put on that burn.’
‘What the hell are you doing?’ the finance director screamed.
He was in Chester Stone’s office doorway, two floors above his own, gripping the frame with both hands, panting with exertion and fury. He hadn’t waited for the elevator. He had raced up the fire stairs. Stone was staring at him, blankly.
‘You idiot,’ he screamed. ‘I told you not to do this.’
‘Do what?’ Stone said back.
‘Put stock in the market,’ the finance guy yelled. ‘I told you not to do that.’
‘I didn’t,’ Stone said. ‘There’s no stock in the market.’
‘There damn well is,’ the guy said. ‘A great big slice, sitting there doing absolutely nothing at all. You got people shying away from it like it’s radioactive or something.’