Eric had been parked outside Sterling Keep Holdings for forty-three minutes. He had told himself, upon arrival, that he was only going to sit for ten.
The bourbon was at home, the cigarettes were in his coat pocket, untouched. Small wins.
His phone had been pressed to his ear for the last eleven of those forty-three minutes, and he had learned, in that time, precisely nothing.
"—so what we're doing now is layering the access channels," Samuel was saying, in the tone of a man reading aloud from a brochure he'd written himself. "Establishing organic proximity, letting the subject acclimate to presence."
Eric closed his eyes. "Wood."
"Yes."
"Is any of that English?"
"It's professional vocabulary."
"It's a refund in the making." He opened his eyes again, stared at the revolving door of the building across the street. "Last week you told me you were establishing rapport. This week you're building access channels. Next week I assume you'll be synergizing the paradigm."
"Mr. Vance, the work is proceeding. These situations require patience."
"I've been patient for five years. What I'm paying you for is the part that isn't patient."
"And you'll get it. The subject is…"
Eric saw her.
The revolving door on the far side of the street turned, and Estelle stepped out onto the sidewalk, and whatever Samuel was saying became, in Eric's ear, a soft mechanical buzzing no more meaningful than traffic.
She was wearing black. A dress, fitted, knee-length, the kind of cut that didn't announce itself and didn't need to.
Her hair was down. She was on her phone, half-laughing at something the person on the other end had said, and the laugh traveled across four lanes of traffic and struck him in the chest.
Five years and a pregnancy, and yet she looked sharper. Taller, somehow, in the way a person grew taller when they stopped shrinking. Her posture had changed. Her face had changed. Her laugh had changed.
She looked better. Unfairly, aggressively, prosecutorially better.
"—Vance? Are you still there?"
"I'll call you back."
"I was—"
Eric ended the call. Dropped the phone in his jacket. Opened the car door and stepped out onto the street.
He didn't plan what he was going to say. He had been rehearsing it in various forms for five years and none of those drafts survived the sight of her laughing on a sidewalk.
He waited for a gap in traffic. Crossed.
"Estelle."
She didn't turn. She did, however, immediately end her phone call and tuck the phone into her bag. Her pace picked up. Not a run. Running would have been undignified, and Estelle, he was learning, no longer did undignified.
This was a walk. A very committed walk, the walk of a woman who had heard a voice she had no intention of engaging with and was willing to cover ground to avoid it.
"Estelle, stop."
She didn't stop. She glanced once over her shoulder—a single cool look, identification and dismissal in one gesture—and kept walking.
His legs were longer. He caught up within half a block.
"Will you just…"
"No."
"I haven't said anything yet."
"And I'd like to preserve that."
He fell into step beside her. She didn't look at him. Her heels struck the pavement in an even, unhurried rhythm that suggested, to anyone watching, that he was a stranger she had chosen not to notice.
"I've been trying to reach you," he said.
"I know."
"Your assistant has my calls blocked."
"I know."
"I've sent flowers to your office."
"I know. They went to the NICU at St. Luke's. They were beautiful, thank you."
He almost laughed. He didn't. The sound got caught somewhere behind his teeth and stayed there.
"Estelle. Five minutes."
"No."
"Two minutes."
"No."
"One."
She stopped walking, but didn't turn fully. She turned her head a quarter-angle, enough that he could see the line of her cheekbone and the downward curve of her mouth, and nothing else of her.
"You had years, Eric. You decided how you used them."
She started walking again.
He matched her, helpless. "There are things I couldn't say then! Things I couldn't put into a phone call or a letter or a…"
"A five-year silence. I noticed."
"It wasn't silence by choice."
"Everything is by choice." Her voice was low, even, controlled, no heat. That was almost worse than heat would have been. Heat meant something remained. This was the tone of a woman reading a quarterly report.
He tried a different angle—reckless, desperate.
"How is Matthew?"
She stopped. This time she turned fully.
The change in her face was not dramatic—she was too disciplined for dramatic—but it was total. Every soft edge vanished.
Whatever private amusement had survived the first block of pursuit drained out of her eyes, and what replaced it was a cold, focused, surgical attention.
"Say that name again, Eric."
"Estelle…"
"Say it."
He didn't.
"That name." Her voice dropped. "Is not on my company filings. It is not on a school registry that has a public-facing website. It is not on a birth certificate that anyone can pull. That name, Eric, is a private name."
He heard what she was saying. He also heard what she wasn't. She was telling him, in the politest possible register, that she knew he'd been looking.
He opened his mouth. Closed it.
"Who told you the name?" she said.
"I—"
"Who told you the name, Eric?"
"Nobody told me."
Her eyes were already on his face, and whatever she saw there confirmed something she hadn't wanted confirmed. "You hired someone."
"Estelle."
"You hired someone to investigate my son."
"Our son."
The words left his mouth before his brain had drafted them. Reflex. Instinct. The only answer his chest had ever held.
She looked at him.
For one long second, she looked at him without speaking, and in that second, something flickered across her expression that wasn't armor and wasn't fury. It was quieter. Sadder. The faintest shadow of a question.
And in that second, the question landed in him, too.
Is he?
He had not let himself ask it cleanly before. He had framed the question around evidence, around DNA, around a paternity report he was paying a professional to deliver.
He had not held it as a plain, internal thing: Is that boy mine.
Standing on a sidewalk watching Estelle not answer, he heard it plainly for the first time. And didn't like what he heard.
She saw it, of course she saw it. Estelle had always seen him.
Her mouth curved. Not a smile. "There it is," she said softly.
"What?"
"You don't even know, Eric. You stand here and you use the word our and you don't even know."
"I didn't mean…"
"I know exactly what you meant." She adjusted the strap of her bag on her shoulder. Calm. Composed. "Hire whoever you like. Dig as deep as you want. I spent five years building a life that doesn't have a door you can knock on."
"I'm trying to…"
"I know what you're trying to do. I knew it when you said his name."
She stepped back once. Her voice was even.
"You lost the right to a seat at this table five years ago, Eric. You lost it quietly, in a living room, while I stood in a doorway with a tea tray. And no amount of private investigators or sidewalk ambushes is going to renegotiate that."
"Estelle, please, just…"
"Don't call me again, don't have people follow me. And do not, under any circumstance, say my son's name out loud in public again."
She turned and walked without looking back.
Eric stood on the sidewalk and watched her go, and understood with the clarity of a man watching a door close from the wrong side, that he had just driven her further than five years of silence ever had.