"You're a person, Nate," Celia said. "You're allowed to have wanted it. You just don't get to build anything on it."
VI.
She came in at 7:15 the next morning, intending to be first, and he was already there.
He was standing at the north window of the boardroom with a paper cup of coffee, jacket off. The overhead lights were off, and the room was full of the cold blue light that comes before the sun clears the buildings to the east. He turned when she opened the door and said, "Ms. Corrigan. Good morning. Please," and gestured at the table, and she understood that he had known she would come early and had come earlier, and that it was not a game. It was a courtesy. He was telling her, without a word, that she did not have to win the room today.
She had Douglas's folder in her hand and a speech in her head, written at three in the morning and revised on the train. It was a good speech, in the way she was good at speeches: honest, specific, not too long. She sat at the side of the table, well away from the head. He sat across from her. The head chair stood empty at the end between them like a third person.
"Mr. Turner," she said, "before anything else, I want to apologize for what I said yesterday. There's no excuse for it. I made an assumption about you because you're Black, and—"
He let her finish. He listened with his whole face, without interrupting and without nodding along to help her, and she found that being listened to that way was much harder than being cut off. When she was done there was a long silence, and she realized she was waiting for something — thank you, or I appreciate that, or it's all right — some coin to drop so the machine could dispense whatever came next.
"Thank you," he said. "I believe you mean it." He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn. "I'm not going to tell you it's all right. It isn't, and you'd know I was lying, and then we'd both be lying. That's a bad way to start."
She nodded.
"Mr. Brandt sent me a copy of that at five-forty yesterday," he said, glancing at the folder. "Before you'd seen it, I think."
She hadn't known. She felt the last of something she had felt for Douglas Brandt for twenty-two years go quietly out, like a pilot light.