“I’ve been over it and over it. She had to be someone he worked with. Or someone in the building, maybe someone who worked at another company, because he was at work the night before we went to New York—at least part of the time. Will Blass told me so.”
Will was Tom’s business partner. He’d hemmed and hawed when I’d asked him impulsively at the reception at our house after the funeral where Tom was the night before they launched SecretKeeper, their new privacy software. He’d pretended at first that he didn’t remember, but when I told him I knew Tom was seeing someone, he’d relented and told me Tom had been there until about midnight, if he could remember correctly, and then left for several hours. He didn’t know for sure that Tom was with another woman, though he’d suspected it. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know who it was.” I was almost certain that was a lie, but when I’d pressed, he said to leave it and walked away. I haven’t spoken to him since.
“Even if that’s true, that doesn’t mean she was there that day,” Linda says.
“The not knowing is driving me crazy.”
“Why?”
“Because how could I be so stupid? How could I not know what was going on in my own life?”
“Your husband was an accomplished liar and very, very careful. It’s not a failing of yours that you didn’t figure out he was cheating on you or who he was cheating on you with. As for the other woman, if she’s alive, she’s most likely suffering from loss herself.”
“Am I supposed to care about that?”
“No, but I expect the last thing she’d do is seek you out, so you’re probably never going to know what happened between them or who she is. You have to find a way to be okay with that.”
“So she gets away with it? With destroying my life?”
“This isn’t about her. It’s about you. About you finding a way to get past this. To get closure.”
“How can I get closure when I have to play a role all the time and listen to everyone talk about what a great guy Tom was? When I have to preserve this lie for my kids and our friends? It’s not fair. It’s not fair.”
“Will you be stamping your feet anytime soon?”
“No,” I say, pouting. I know I’m being childish, but it isn’t fair. It really isn’t.
“You can do whatever you want in here, Cecily. And I can agree with all those things. But unless you find a way to forgive yourself, and to forgive Tom, too, we are going to end up having a lifelong relationship because you’re going to be stuck in the same place you are today.”
“So what do I do? How do I get unstuck?”
“You do the work.”
“That sounds . . . tiring.”
“I never said it was going to be easy.”
After Linda, I pull myself together and make it to my Compensation Committee meeting early. There wasn’t any traffic for once, but also, perhaps things can change. It would be nice to think so, if even for a moment.
The Compensation Committee meets as needed to reconsider the cases the retired judge we’ve hired to make the initial determination rejects. Given the importance of our decisions, these meetings are always a challenge, and I know already that today’s meeting is going to be harder than most.
“Shall we discuss the Ring case?” Franny asks when we’ve assembled around the table. She speaks in a Midwestern twang, an accent she tries to cover up, though I’ve told her time and again she doesn’t need to. She’s wearing a gray wool blazer I helped her pick out a few weeks ago from the sale rack at J.Crew. It strikes me how different the Franny of today is from the one I met so many months ago. Better hair, better clothes, twenty pounds shed, but also, she has much more confidence and assurance. She’s found her purpose and her sense of place. She’s more at home here than I am. “Okay with you, Cecily?”
“Of course.”
We’re sitting at opposite ends of a long glass table in the second conference room in the Initiative’s offices. The others on the committee, two men whose wives died in the building, a twenty-three-year-old girl who lost her father and whose mother is long dead of cancer, and Tanya Simpson, the committee’s secretary, fill up the space between us.
“I know this will be difficult for some of you,” Franny says, meaning mostly me, I suppose, and her. “But it’s an important part of the process.”
I voted against Franny’s “process” when she proposed it six months ago, when we first gathered to set out the guidelines we wanted to follow. Her idea was that for a family to get compensation, they’d generally need a DNA match to something—nobody liked to use the words “flesh,” “blood,” “bone”—found in the wreckage that’s still being sifted through, even now. I understood why she proposed it, but I couldn’t bring myself to support a measure that would leave some people without the help I’d received. Especially because I’d gotten my check before the process was in place.
In the beginning, when the money was rolling in from the celebrity fund-raisers and they wanted a photo op to keep it coming, they’d turned to me, my family, put us on a dais, and handed us a big check with more zeros on it than I could believe. Donate today, and every family can have this future . . . But when the donations slowed down and the complaints started, the judge had been brought in and the committee was created above him to hear appeals and special cases. I owed it to all the people who didn’t get the opportunity I did to do my best to make sure that if their claim was denied, it was for a valid reason.
When the Rings’ claim was turned down because they couldn’t match Franny or the girls’ DNA to anything in the wreckage, I’d been the one to console Franny when she wept about what she’d done. It was a stupid rule, stupid. So stupid, she said over and over until I was worried she’d gone into some sort of autistic trance. I had to hand it to Franny, though, when she’d pulled herself together—a shot of whiskey had done it—she hadn’t given up on the idea that the decision could be reversed. And here we are today, with that possibility.
“What’s the new evidence?” Jenny, the twenty-three-year-old, asks. Her thin limbs concern me. I didn’t know her before, so it’s possible that she’s naturally this skinny, this almost-see-through. But she doesn’t have anyone looking out for her anymore, so I feel responsible, as if I should paint her back in, make sure she’s visible.
“It’s the mug,” Franny says, her voice wavering.
A few weeks ago, the search team found a coffee mug in pristine condition. It seemed impossible that the explosion and the fire and everything else hadn’t shattered it into a million pieces, but like the pottery that survived Pompeii, there it was, covered in dust but intact.
It wasn’t only its survival that was so arresting. Other whole things had been found—a desk, phones, paintings, many bodies, including Tom’s. It was the fact that it was a mug that obviously belonged to someone, one of those mugs kids make for their mothers at school, with WE HEART MOM on one side and her picture on the other. And on the rim, the thing that made it eligible for consideration: lipstick that had been left—presumably—by its last user. The media had become obsessed with this mug, debating its provenance, wondering what we were going to do with it, and while they weren’t allowed in this meeting, it wouldn’t be long before the results of it became known, analyzed, dissected.
Franny puts a white square box on the table. It looks like a cake box, something that generally houses something delicious, something perfectly frosted rather than tragic. None of us has seen the mug in person, only photographs, though it still was a blow when I caught sight of it on the nightly news. I remember when her children gave her this mug, almost two years ago, on Valentine’s Day.
Franny opens the box, then puts on a pair of surgeon’s gloves, snapping them into place with practiced ease.
“Is that necessary?” one of the men asks. Robert’s always been hostile to Franny and only slightly less so to me. He’s not used to being anything other than in charge is my take on the matter, so he has to lash out whenever he feels someone else’s authority. “It’s already been through testing.”