"No. Thank you, Frances. I'm sorry." She picked up her bag. "The campaign is good. It's very good. Wren is extraordinary. Please don't punish her for me. Please run it. Gerald can run it. He'll do it fine." She turned to go. At the door she stopped. "His name is Theo," she said, to no one in particular. "He likes rivets and the number seven."
She walked out of the boardroom and down the long glass hallway and into the elevator, and as the doors closed she saw her reflection in the polished steel, flawless, and she thought: they'll give it to Gerald by lunchtime.
She was right. Frances Moll called at twelve-fifteen and said, kindly, that the board felt it needed stability at this moment, and that Celeste should take some time, as much as she needed, and that they would talk about her role when she came back. It was the gentlest dismissal Celeste had ever heard. She had delivered three or four like it herself.
By then she was already in a taxi on her way to the Fenway.
* * *
The Boston Pediatric Heart Center was a curved building of glass and pale stone, and the family waiting area on the fourth floor had a wall of windows, an aquarium with a single slow orange fish, and a television showing a cartoon about a dog who drove a bus. It was nearly four in the afternoon. Theo's surgery was still fifteen hours away. She had no idea whether he and his father would even be there.
She asked at the desk. The nurse looked at her—the cream wool coat, the handbag, the face—and asked if she was family.
"No," Celeste said. "I owe them something."
The nurse hesitated, then picked up a phone. A few minutes later Marcus Hale came around the corner from the inpatient hallway. He was wearing the same gray quarter-zip and carrying a paper cup of coffee, and when he saw who was standing at the desk he stopped walking.
They looked at each other across fifteen feet of polished floor.
"He's in pre-op," Marcus said finally. "Getting his labs done. Bloodwork. He hates needles, so." He didn't come any closer. "What do you want?"
She took the drawing out of her bag. She had put it in a clean manila envelope from the hotel business center so it wouldn't crease. She held it out.