Then he said, "I'll speak with Cleo."
"You should," I said.
Two days later, I was reassigned to a residential renovation project in Burnaby, 40 minutes from the main office on a clear day, longer when the Massey backed up. The file had nothing to do with False Creek, nothing to do with sustainable design or community engagement or anything Cleo Langford was attached to.
Rupert stopped by my new desk with a coffee and didn't say anything for a moment. Then quietly, "The Burnaby job isn't bad, Hugh."
"I know," I said.
"It's just not this one."
"I know that, too."
The truth had been on my side the entire time, but Ashton had made sure it arrived at Morris's office stripped down to its skeleton, and a fact without context is just an accusation wearing a clean shirt. What happened in Morris's office that afternoon? I wasn't there for it, but Rupert told me later that he'd been getting a coffee from the machine down the hall when Cleo came through the main doors, took the elevator to the executive floor, and closed Morris's office door behind her without stopping to speak to anyone.
The tone carried through the glass for about 12 minutes—not raised, not pleading, controlled and precise and unwavering, the voice of someone who had spent 2 years being spoken about and decided and arranged and had chosen today to be the one doing the speaking.
When she came out, her eyes were red, her posture was perfect, back straight, chin level.
She didn't look for me on the way out. She didn't need to.
3 weeks into my Burnaby exile, an interoffice envelope arrived at my desk.
Inside was a hotel key card, room 714.
On the back in her handwriting, four words: I kept the receipt.
I set the key card on my desk and looked at it for a long time without picking it up. She came to my apartment on a Wednesday evening in January with takeout from a Vietnamese place on Commercial Drive. And I opened the door and stood back and let her in without saying anything because I didn't have anything clever to offer and she wouldn't have wanted it anyway.
We ate banh mi and lemongrass soup on my couch—a second-hand sectional I'd bought from a woman in Kitsilano who was moving to Montreal because my kitchen table was buried under Burnaby's site plans and a stack of building permits I hadn't filed yet. Cleo tucked her feet up under her and ate with her jacket still on for the first 20 minutes like she wasn't entirely sure yet whether she was staying.
Then she set her bowl on the coffee table and said there was something she needed to tell me.
I put my fork down.
"I looked you up," she said. "The morning after the gala, I woke up and found the receipt on the nightstand. Hugh Callender, Langford Development. I Googled your name, found your LinkedIn, found your project history." A pause. "I recognized you. Rupert had pointed you out at a company event last summer. Said something about the new guy from Ontario who was too serious for his own good."
She stopped. "I thought about it more than a few times after that."
She wasn't looking at me when she said this. She was watching a fixed point on the wall.
"I went to the gala that night to get out of my own head," she continued, "but I also knew you'd probably be there. I want you to know that. I wasn't running a plan. I had no idea I'd end up needing someone to cover a hotel room on my behalf, which is genuinely embarrassing to think about, but I wasn't there by accident." She finally looked at me. "I noticed you first."
I sat with that for a long moment. The most disorienting night of my recent life had not been entirely random. She had come looking for something, and through a chain of events neither of us had planned or could have predicted, she had ended up asleep in a hotel room at the Fairmont while I took a cab home to the Drive alone.
And now she was on my couch telling me the truth because she thought I deserved to have it.
"If we do this," I said carefully, "your father could make things very difficult."
She looked at me without blinking. "If he does that, it says more about him than it does about you."
I didn't kiss her that night. We washed the bowls side by side at my narrow kitchen sink, elbows almost touching, and she left a little after 10:00. At the door she stopped and looked back with a small, deliberate smile.
"I'm leaving my jacket," she said, nodding toward the hook by the door where she'd draped her coat, on purpose.