Chapter 16: Nothing to Lean On

"I was asked," I said. "By them. Not for you."

Clara looked at the three women at the table.

The circulating nurse looked back without blinking.

"I'll allow it," Clara said, "because they're grown women and they can see whoever they like."

She put her coffee down on the vending machine.

"But this is where I work. Go and say whatever you have to say somewhere else."

"I came to say it to them."

"Then you've said it."

Her eyes were on my face, and they were very tired.

"Mine is still due, Hayes. It isn't this room, and it isn't this week."

She walked past me to the lockers and opened one with her back turned.

I left.

Nobody stopped me, and nobody looked up.

The client I had courted for two years was a hotel group building a waterfront tower.

It was sixty floors, and it was the largest job the firm had ever held.

Their chairman called me to his office at eleven.

He did not make me sit.

"My wife saw the video from the Long Center," he said.

"She asked me if I wanted a man like that drawing where our guests sleep."

"The video is true. I said it because it was true."

"I believe you." He turned a pen end over end on the blotter.

"I watched it three times. I think what you did to the cellist was right."

"What I can't get past is the part about your wife."

"I know."

"A man who can do that to a person in his own house," he said, "is a man whose building I would be afraid to stand in."

"I'm not asking you to like me. The drawings are done."

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Wife's Last Call I Never Answered from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.