She’d had lunch in the Yard a few times with Brian. It was just a few blocks from his office and he’d met her there their first summer together, sometimes with burgers from Charlie’s Kitchen or pizza from Pinocchio’s. His office was about as unassuming as they came, six rooms on the third floor of a nondescript three-story brick building on Winthrop Street that looked as if it belonged in an old mill town like Brockton or Waltham far more than in the backyard of one of the most elite universities in the world. A small gold plate outside the main door identified it as Delacroix Timber Ltd. She’d been there three times, maybe four, and outside of Brian and his junior partner, Caleb, she couldn’t name the other employees or recall much about them except that they were young and cute, males and females, with the avid eyes of the ambitious. Interns mostly, Brian had told her, hoping to prove their mettle and get promoted to a paying position on the mother ship in Vancouver.
Brian Delacroix’s break from his family had always been a personal one, he explained to Rachel, never a professional one. He liked the lumber business. He was good at it. When his uncle, who’d run the U.S. operation from offices on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, dropped dead of a stroke while walking his dog through Central Park one night, Brian—never a source of disappointment to his family, just one of confusion—stepped into the role. After a year, he found Manhattan to be too much—“You can’t turn it off,” he’d say—and moved the operation to Cambridge.
She looked at the clock in the upper right corner of her laptop: 4:02 P.M. There’d still be someone at the office. Caleb, at the very least, who worked like a madman. Rachel could pop over, tell Caleb Brian had left something behind in his office and asked her to retrieve it. Once there, she could hop on his computer or take a peek through the credit card statements in his files. Make sure everything added up.
Was it a crime to suddenly and wholly mistrust your husband? She wondered this as she tried to hail a cab on Commonwealth.
It wasn’t a crime or even a sin, but it didn’t speak to a rock-solid foundation in their marriage, either. How could she mistrust him this fast, after she’d been singing his praises just this afternoon to Melissa? Their marriage, unlike those of so many of their friends, was strong.
Wasn’t it?
What was a strong marriage? What was a good marriage? She knew terrible people who had wonderful marriages, glued together somehow in their terribleness. And she knew fine, fine people who’d stood before God and all their friends to profess their undying love to each other only to toss that love on a slag heap a few years later. In the end, no matter how good they were—or thought they were—usually all that remained of the love they’d so publicly professed was vitriol, regret, and a kind of awed dismay at how dark the roads they’d ventured down became by the end.
A marriage, her mother often said, was only as strong as your next fight.
Rachel didn’t believe that. Or didn’t want to. Not when it came to her and Brian. When it came to her and Sebastian, that had definitely been true, but she and Sebastian were a disaster from the start. She and Brian were anything but.
Yet in the absence of a logical reason why she would stumble across a man who looked like her husband and was dressed identically slipping out of the back of a building in Boston when her husband was supposed to be on a flight to London, she had to go with the only rational answer—that the man exiting the Hancock early this afternoon had been Brian. Which meant he wasn’t in London. Which meant he was lying.
She flagged down a cab.
15
WET
I don’t want him to be lying, she thought as the cab crossed the BU bridge and rounded the rotary to turn onto Memorial Drive. I don’t want to believe any of this. I want to feel exactly as I did this weekend—in love and in trust.
But what is my alternative? Pretend I didn’t see him?
This wouldn’t be the first time you saw something that wasn’t there.
Those times were different.
How?
They just were.
The cabdriver never said a word during the drive. She glanced at his hack license. Sanjay Seth. He looked sullen in the photo, one step short of scowling. She didn’t know this man and yet she allowed him to transport her, just as she allowed strangers to prepare her food and go through her trash and give her a body scan and fly a plane. And she hoped they didn’t fly that plane into a mountain or poison her food just because they were having a bad day. Or, in the case of this cab, she hoped he wouldn’t accelerate and drive her to a remote spot at the back of a failed industrial park and climb in the backseat, telling her just what he thought of women who didn’t say “Please.” The last time she’d taken a cab, this line of thinking had compelled her to abort the ride, but this time she pressed her fists into the sides of her thighs and kept them there. She maintained a steady inhale and exhale that was neither too deep nor too shallow and looked out the window at the rain and told herself she’d get through this just like she got through the subway ride and the mall.
When they neared Harvard Square, she asked Sanjay Seth to pull over at the corner of JFK and Winthrop because Winthrop was a one-way heading in the wrong direction. She didn’t feel like waiting while the cab slogged through 4:50 traffic for another five or ten minutes to come around the block just so he could get her a hundred feet closer.
As she approached the building, Caleb Perloff exited it. He tugged on the door to make sure it had locked behind him, his raincoat and Sox ball cap as wet as everyone else’s in the city, and then turned to see her standing on the sidewalk below him.
She could tell by the look on his face that he couldn’t put the two together—Rachel here on the other side of the river in Cambridge, outside their offices, when Brian was overseas.
She felt ridiculous. What possible explanation could she have for standing here? She’d had the cab ride over to think about it and she hadn’t managed to come up with one viable reason she’d need access to her husband’s office.
“So this is where it all happens,” she tried.
Caleb shot her that wry smile of his. “This is the spot.” He craned his head to look up at the building and then back at her. “Did you know that the price of timber went down one-tenth of one cent yesterday in Andhra Pradesh?”
“I did not, no.”
“But on the other side of the world, in Mato Grasso—”
“That’s where again?”
“Brazil.” He rolled the r as he came down the steps toward her. “In Mato Grasso, the price rose half a cent. And all signs point to it continuing to rise over the next month.”
“But in India?”
“We get that tenth of a cent discount.” He shrugged. “But it’s also kinda volatile right now. And shipping costs are higher. So who do we make a deal with?”
“That’s a dilemma,” she admitted.
“And what about all the timber we export?”
“Another wrinkle.”
“Can’t just let it rot.”
“Couldn’t do that.”
“Let the bugs get to it. The rain.”
“Heavens. The rain.”
He held his hand up to it, a soft drizzle at the moment. “Actually, it’s been dry in BC this past month. Odd. Dry there, wet here. Usually works the other way.” He cocked his head at her.
She cocked hers at him.