“You’ll get one.”
The casualness of the exchange was, Alexandra realized, the careful thing. Both of them were speaking at the same volume of the ambience, and neither moved the conversation faster than what the other could carry.
“On Friday, you told me you couldn’t continue with the acquisition. I’ve been trying to understand what you meant bycan’t.” Alexandra paused, and the wind took the edge off her voice. “Whether the deal stopped making sense or whether I did. I need to know whether you walked away because of me.”
There. She had said it. The relief of having said it was not, as she had expected, immediate. What came in its place was the more vulnerable feeling of having stripped herself bare and put herself out there while waiting for an answer. It was a position Alexandra had spent decades arranging her life to avoid being in. But now, she held the feeling without flinching.
Simone didn’t answer right away, and she looked out at the water. Alexandra followed her gaze, just in time to see the cormorants lifting off the rock together and fly low across thechoppy water north, toward the point. She watched them go, and she waited for Simone to choose her words.
“Alexandra,” Simone said.
“Yes?”
“I want to answer you properly. Will you walk with me?” She held out her hand.
Alexandra looked at it for a moment—at her pinkened knuckles from the cold, at the delicate line of Simone’s wrist where her coat sleeve had ridden up—and then reached out and took it.
“Yes.”
22
Chapter 22: Simone
They walked back into the trees, and Simone let Alexandra hold her hand. The grade tilted up toward the second-growth section, the one that ran a quarter-mile through Douglas fir trees before the trail broke into headland again. Simone had run this stretch in the dark, in the rain, and during the early mornings in October when the moss was so green it looked wet, even when it wasn’t. In all that time, she had always been alone. The strangeness of having Alexandra beside her, holding her hand without commentary, was a thing that Simone couldn’t wrap her mind around.
Alexandra’s hand was warm. That was the first thing Simone noticed, and it seemed like such a simple observation that it embarrassed her a little. Alexandra’s palm was drier and warmer than the air, and her long, delicate fingers had threaded through Simone’s easily. Simone was fifty-one years old, and she had been with women in more cities than she could list quickly. Yet she could not remember the last time someone had simply held her hand like this, if there had even been a first time.
The trail washertrail. She intuitively knew the give of it, the places where the gravel thinned, the root that came up across the path forty paces in. Her body intimately knew exactly where to go, but the rest of her was somewhere a half-step behind, watching what was happening but not fully caught up.
They walked together without talking for a while. Alexandra didn’t push her for an answer, something Simone was grateful for. She had a way of going quiet and giving space that wasn’t waiting for a turn to speak.
The light through the firs was the soft, even green that came when the canopy filtered an already-thin February sun. There was a smell in the air that Simone had come to associate with this trail—wet bark, salt from the water, and the iron notes of mossy stone—and the scent flooded her senses now. Except this time, her private moment was being shared.
The words Simone wanted and needed to say weren't far away. They were just difficult to start.
“You asked me a question,” Simone said.
“I did.”
“I’m trying to figure out where to begin.”
Alexandra slowed half a step, just enough that Simone could match the new pace without thinking about it. “Take your time.”
Simone’s mouth was dry. She swallowed against it, and the swallow was rougher than it should have been. She took a steadying breath, then three more. The trail had risen through a soft bend, and there was a place coming up where the path widened around a fallen alder that someone had left to decompose where it had dropped. Simone had passed it sixty or seventy times. She walked toward it now and tried to find the edge of a sentence she could lean in to.
“I came to Phoenix Ridge to take your company.”
She said it. The words went out into the cold air, and she heard them land. Alexandra’s hand stayed in hers, and they keptwalking. The only way she would find out if Alexandra would stay was to keep going and find out.
“You know that,” Simone said. “I’m saying it because I need to be the one to say it out loud, not have it stay something we both knew but never addressed.”
“All right.”
Alexandra’s voice was even, and Simone didn’t try to hear what may exist underneath. The fallen alder was on her left as she passed it, and then the trail straightened.
“The work was good,” Simone continued. “I built the strategy for almost a year, and I would have won.”
“I know,” Alexandra said, her voice firm but not cold.
