The other reason was that he wanted to stand in that room once as the person it was set up for, and in nine months he had not been able to decide whether that was a good reason or a petty one.
So he came early and stood at the window, and for twenty-six minutes he looked at the copper and the spires and the nickels and dimes, and thought about his mother at seven in the morning with her cloth. He found that he was not triumphant. He was mostly sad, and under the sadness was something steadier that he couldn't name. He put his hand on the back of the chair at the head of the table. He did not sit. Not yet.
Then the door opened and a red-haired woman in a bright blue suit told him that Kyra was waiting in reception.
He knew exactly which Kyra. He knew exactly where she was sitting. And he knew, in the same instant, exactly which drawer the woman had opened and put him in.
He had heard versions of it all his life. At the valet stand outside a hotel in Chicago, a man handing him keys. At a conference in Scottsdale, a woman asking him where the restrooms were because he happened to be standing near a door. At his own firm's holiday party, in the early years, the husband of an associate asking which car service he was with. He kept a private taxonomy of it, the way a birder keeps a taxonomy of sparrows. There was the startled kind and the hostile kind and the over-friendly kind. There was the kind that apologized so much you ended up comforting them. This was the brisk kind. The efficient kind. It was not the worst. In some ways it was the most familiar, because it came from people who had never once imagined themselves as people who would do it.
He noticed the wedding band, plain gold. He noticed the pearl studs, small and good. He noticed the eye-close — the half-second in which she shut him out entirely, as if he were glare off a windshield. That was the part that went in. Not the words. The eye-close.
He could have told her who he was. That was the obvious move, and he had made it before. I'm Nathaniel Turner. I'm the new chairman. Watch the color leave a face. But he had learned that when you announce yourself in a moment like that, you make the moment about the announcement, and the other person gets to be embarrassed about the wrong thing. They get to be embarrassed that they didn't know who you were, instead of about who they had decided you were.
So he said, "I'm not a client," which was true, and let her decide what to do with it, and she decided.
He pulled out the chair. That was not for her. Or not only for her. It was for the boy on the couch with the pretzels, and for the woman with the cloth, and for a decision he'd been carrying for nine months and twenty-six minutes: that he would sit down in that chair, and he would not apologize for it, and he would not make anyone pay for it more than they owed.
"You will be," he said, and he meant it more than one way, and he wasn't sure yet which.
Then Douglas came in, eager as a retriever, and Nathaniel sat, and folded his hands, and felt — he would tell Celia this later, in the dark — his heart going so hard he thought the woman in blue might see it through his shirt.