12: Chapter Twelve: Three A.M.
12: Chapter Twelve: Three A.M.
She told herself, in the morning, that the three a.m.
episode did not count as weakness because she had not acted on it.
This was, she felt, a reasonable position.
She made tea.
She ate two crackers and half an apple, which her body accepted with reluctant grace.
She opened her notebook to the current week’s page and reviewed the plan.
The Soo-Yeon editorial was confirmed: four weeks out.
She had begun research into the three casting directors she needed to be on the radar of by the end of the second quarter.
She had a follow-up with Carla this afternoon to discuss the summer preview booking and potentially — potentially — something Carla had mentioned in passing about a print campaign for a home brand that was ‘asking about fresh faces.’ She wrote the day’s tasks in order of priority.
She did not write anything about Lucien.
She did not need to.
He was not on the list.
She went to the window with her tea and looked at the brick wall, which was doing exactly what it always did — standing there, unchanged, entirely unconcerned with anyone’s opinion about it.
She had come to find this oddly comforting.
The wall had no feelings about her situation.
The wall simply was.
Her phone buzzed.
She looked at it.
A text from her mother: *Saw a cat this morning that looked exactly like the one you described.
I took a photo but I don’t know how to attach it to this.
Call me tonight?* Lina looked at the message for a moment.
Then she smiled — genuinely, the kind that started in the chest — and typed back: *Tonight.
Definitely.* She put the phone down and went to get ready for the day.
By seven forty she was out the door, notebook in her bag, ginger biscuits in her pocket, and the name of the casting director at the top of her mental priority list.
She did not think about three seventeen a.m.
again until three seventeen a.m.
the following night, when the baby had opinions again and the bathroom floor was cool and familiar, and she sat there and looked at her phone and put it face-down and said, slightly more firmly this time: “No.” Progress.
………………………………………………
Maggie had worked for the Cole family for nineteen years.
She had worked for Victor Cole, Lucien’s father, for the first four — a period she thought about rarely and discussed with no one, because Victor Cole had been the kind of man who ensured that the people around him understood their position and maintained it with precision.
She had been young.
She had needed the work.
She had kept her head down and learned everything there was to learn about how the Cole household operated and waited, with the particular patience of a woman who plans, for Victor Cole to do what powerful men usually did, which was get older and hand things off.
When Lucien took over at twenty-six, the house had changed.
Not everything — the bones of Victor Cole’s world were in the walls, in the way the staff spoke to each other, in the particular formality that existed at every dinner and in every corridor.
But Lucien was not his father.
He was not warm exactly, but he was fair.
He paid well, expected competence, and did not weaponise the power differential in ways his father had.
Maggie had stayed.
And then Lucien had brought home a wife.
✦ ✦ ✦ She had watched Lina for three years with the particular attention of someone who understood what it was to be a woman in a house that belonged to a man.
She had seen the dinners Lina planned and replanned.
The dresses chosen and changed.
The expressions practised in the mirror — Maggie knocked before entering every room and had once knocked a fraction too late and seen Lina at the vanity, smiling at her own reflection with the focused, effortful concentration of someone rehearsing a role.
She had seen the way Lina’s face did when Lucien’s car came up the drive.
Not the face she showed him — the one before that.
The one in the ten seconds before the door opened.
She had said nothing.
It was not her place.
But she had felt it the way you feel a weather front coming — a pressure in the air that everyone in the house pretended not to notice.
When Lina had walked out at midnight with one suitcase, Maggie had watched from the upstairs window.
She had seen Lucien stand in the study doorway for a long time after the taxi pulled away.
She had not gone to him.
He hadn’t needed her.
He had needed the silence.
Now she was on Senter Street with a second round of braised chicken and a question she was going to ask and not apologise for.
✦ ✦ ✦ “Does he know where you are?” Maggie said, unpacking the dish while Lina made tea.
“Probably.” Lina set two mugs on the small table.
“He has resources and I haven’t been particularly secretive.
I didn’t tell him but I’m not hiding.” “He hasn’t come.” “No.” A pause.
“Maggie,” Lina said, sitting down, “you can say whatever you came to say.
I’d rather you said it than carried it.” Maggie sat across from her.
She folded her hands on the table in the manner of someone who has decided to be direct and is organising her directness properly.
“He’s not the same, since you left,” she said.
“I’ve worked for that house for nineteen years and I know what it sounds like when a man comes home to a house he’s happy to come home to.
He was never that, before.
He was always—” she searched for the word “—returned.
Like a thing going back to its place.
Efficient.
But this past two weeks, he—” she stopped.
“Maggie.” “He cancelled his ten o’clock last week and drove himself somewhere.
He came back in at noon and he’d been to a greenhouse.” She paused.
“There were lily petals on his coat sleeve.” The kitchen was very quiet.
“He changed the flowers in the main hall,” Maggie said.
“Yesterday.
White lilies.” Lina looked at her tea.
She looked at it for a long time.
She’s still not going to.
But that’s TWO nights in a row.
I see you, Lina.