They were less than eight inches apart. He smelled like something clean and sharp—grass, maybe. Does he smell like cut grass?
“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry for your loss,” he said with genuine compassion.
Cat’s mouth dropped open with surprise. She meant to say “Thank you,” but she couldn’t get anything out. Her heartbeat sped up, a deafening wave of sound cycled through her eardrums, and her mouth fell open, but she said nothing. Seconds passed while they stared at each other in silence.
And then Molly knocked.
Hutton opened the door. Before Cat could compose herself, he’d already walked out the door and closed it behind him.
Bess was finishing up for the day. She had cataloged 184 bracelets—not too shabby—and tonight she was going to dinner with her friends. Lou had already left to pick up her daughters from school, and Molly was trapped on a long-distance phone call with a factory in Shanghai, tracking down electric-blue slub silk made from an ultramarine dye that had to be buried underground for months to reach its pigment potential. Bess grabbed her helmet, unplugged her phone, and walked over to Cat’s office.
“You ready?”
After a beat, Cat looked away from her laptop and nodded.
“Yes. Okay. I’m doing it. Closing computer.” She closed her laptop and grabbed her bag.
“I’m dying to know,” said Bess as Cat closed her door and they walked in the direction of the elevators. “Who was that guy? He looked really familiar, but I honestly couldn’t place him. Is he from Barneys?”
“No. I’ll tell you later,” Cat whispered as they passed a gaggle of permalancers. “Are you going to take the train with me?”
Bess shook her head. “Bike. I need the exercise.”
They stepped into the elevator and chatted idly about the bracelets Bess had been working on that day. Cat seemed closed off and distracted when she got off on the main floor.
“See you at Sigrid’s in a bit,” said Bess.
“Yeah…see you there,” Cat mumbled quietly as she walked away.
Bess set off down Thirty-Ninth Street before turning south, riding all the way to Canal where she hung another left and pumped her way up and over the Manhattan Bridge, all the while dodging the city’s crazy traffic, occasionally smacking the hood of a taxicab with the bottom of her fist.
Once she hit Grand Army Plaza, she let out the tension she was holding in her shoulders and turned off into the park to cruise downhill, riding countercurrent over to Lincoln Road. There were no cars allowed in the park during this time of day. The summer evening was hot, its steamy air settling around her like a duvet, but Bess didn’t mind: she was, as always, just happy to be moving forward. What was up with Cat? She was dying to find out about the handsome—and vaguely familiar—stranger who had sat in Cat’s office for almost an hour. Both women consciously tried not to get too personal at the office. They didn’t want to look unprofessional, or inadvertently share too much of their lives with their colleagues; Cooper was simply too competitive of an environment to take the risk.
Bess turned down Ocean and coasted for two blocks until she reached Sigrid’s five-story limestone, walking her bike inside the familiar gate at 170 Ocean Avenue and locking it to the fence with a heavy Kryptonite chain before bounding up the steps. She rang the bell, a round, filigreed pewter button, and waited.
Until about two years ago the neighborhood had been genuinely terrible. The surrounding blocks were littered with mansions whose once open-air porches were all bricked in, first to protect from the seventies riots, then for the eighties riots, and, finally, the nineties riots. The eastern section of Prospect Park that the Gunderson family town house overlooked had been riddled with crime for years. But like the rest of Brooklyn, the neighborhood had changed, importing young, self-consciously hip, mostly white professionals seemingly overnight, shipped in from Ohio or Minnesota or Colorado via Sarah Lawrence or Colgate or Swarthmore. The B and Q trains were now fully stocked with WNYC tote bags and Warby Parker eyeglasses, and the prewar apartment inventory, always gorgeous, had been renovated by eagle-eyed landlords. Something was in the air, and this neighborhood felt safe, even if the police blotter said otherwise.
Sigrid answered the door in her usual attire: a white silk tank tucked into black high-waisted cigarette pants and little red pull-on sneakers from France. A joint was balanced between her clean, bare fingernails; her only makeup was a large swoop of black liquid liner. The four dots tattooed across the cheekbone under her left eye moved up in a half-moon when she smiled. Her brown hair was tied back and teased at the crown in a fifties’ ponytail. Sigrid’s toothy grin was the friendliest thing Bess knew.
“Bessie, helloooo, you’re here!” she trilled, gracefully exhaling pot smoke out the door as Bess stepped through it.
In the tenth grade, while Sigrid was boarding at Sawyer’s, her musician parents and two younger sisters had died in a train accident on the Hudson Line. There were no survivors, and Sigrid Gunderson was left all alone in a matter of moments.
A friend of the family, a painter named Matt Keyes, was named as her legal guardian. Matt gave up his rent-controlled studio in SoHo and moved into the downstairs garden-level apartment and watch over Sigrid. The mortgage had been paid off—and then some—by the Gundersons’ life insurance policies and a settlement from Metro North, leaving Sigrid with money left over to cover Sawyer’s, college, and maybe graduate school someday, but she wasn’t rich by New York standards. Some would have sold the house during the insane highs that the real-estate market brought, even to this part of Brooklyn, but Sigrid was a city girl with nowhere else to go. She knew what this house could be: it could give her a life if she put some life back into it. The house had become Sigrid’s livelihood and lifelong project.
Throughout the remaining summers of high school and college, Sigrid finished the renovations her parents had started in 1990 when they’d first bought the giant town house. Matt remained in the basement to watch over her and her friends. Hillary had been Sigrid’s Big—the older girl responsible for mentoring her, a Sawyer tradition over a hundred years old—and she’d moved in after graduating from college, helping Sigrid to figure out right away how to turn the place into a boardinghouse for Sawyer girls. They worked on different rooms between waitressing shifts and acting auditions and Hillary’s job at RAGE, repairing floorboards and sourcing antique fixtures, and slowly the house had become perfect.