Ten Years to Win Her, Two Weeks to Leave Her novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Transfer
Nolan files his transfer two weeks before the wedding, holds off his brother in the corridor, hands back the ring, and Lydia says she will file hers before lunch.
Nolan Ridley put the signed transfer form on the personnel director's desk at nine in the morning.
"I'd like to move to the Northwestern Branch," he said. "Please add my name to the list."
The director looked up from his monitor.
"Nolan, you and the director's daughter get married in two weeks."
"Yes."
"Everybody in this building knows why you came to the Institute. You've followed that woman for ten years, and now she's all but yours."
"I know why I came," Nolan said. "I'm finished."
The director read the form twice.
"Does your fiancee know?"
"Not yet."
"Her father has to stamp the release. He won't."
"The Branch chief has a desk for me. I called her last night. Send it up anyway."
The director sat back and said nothing more.
Nolan walked out into the corridor.
It was a long hall of glass walls and framed star charts, and on the way to the stairs he passed the roof door.
Tonight was the peak of the Perseids.
For ten years, on every Perseid night, a green thermos of hot cocoa had been waiting on the roof ledge.
He had never found out who left it.
He kept walking.
Behind him, a door banged against a wall.
"Nolan!"
His brother Russell came down the hall in his gray facilities jacket, fast, with two people from accounting hurrying out of his way.
Russell was five years older and thirty pounds heavier.
"Personnel just called me," Russell said. "You filed a transfer?"
"I did."
"Two weeks before the wedding? Harold gave me my job because of you and Lydia."
"Harold gave you your job because you do what he says."
Russell hit him with both hands, flat against the chest.
Nolan's back foot slid half a step on the tile.
Then he stopped, and he took hold of Russell's right wrist and held it.
"Don't," Nolan said.
Russell pulled, and the wrist didn't move.
Doors were opening up and down the hall.
Someone had a phone out.
"Ten years," Russell said, low and furious. "Ten years Harold let you walk these halls because of her, and you think you can just leave?"
"Yes."
"Russell." A third voice cut in, easy and kind. "Let him go. People are watching."
Dr. Leland Crewe stepped between them in a pressed gray jacket, two coffees in his hands.
He ran the Deep Field programme, and he had been polite to Nolan every day for six years.
He held one cup out.
Nolan let go of Russell's wrist and took it.
"I heard in the elevator," Leland said. "Walk with me a second."
They went three doors down, out of the hearing of the staff.
"The Deep Field announcement goes public tomorrow morning," Leland said. "I want you to see it before anyone else does. Harold wanted your initials in the footnotes. I fought for the full name."
"Where is it?"
"The acknowledgments. Technical support, N. Ridley."
Nolan looked at the coffee.
Seven years of work had gone into the filter that found the signal.
He had written every line of it on night shifts in a basement lab, and it was going to be a line of thanks under someone else's name.
"Thank you," he said.
"It's the best I could do," Leland said, and he clapped Nolan's shoulder.
"I'm sure it is."
At the end of the hall the elevator opened.
His fiancee, Lydia Wexford, stepped out.
She wore a gray blouse, her auburn hair pinned up, her badge clipped at the hip, and she walked down the corridor at an ordinary pace.
She stopped beside him.
Russell had gone quiet.
Leland, beside them, was watching her face.
"Nolan," she said. "Personnel's assistant called me. Dinner is at seven tonight, by the window, the way you like it."
She said it lightly.
She did not ask why he had filed.
Ten years, and she had never once asked him a hard question out loud, and two nights ago over dinner with her father she had not said a single word when Harold called him a very good hire.
"I'm not coming to dinner," Nolan said.
"We can talk about it there."
"There's nothing left to talk about."
He took off the plain silver band she had given him at the engagement party.
He held it out.
"I'm leaving, Lydia. Take this back."
The hall was completely silent.
Lydia looked at the band for a long moment.
Then she closed her fingers around it, and she did not cry, and she did not beg.
She looked at Russell, and at Leland, and at every open door.
"The Northwestern Branch needs an astrophysicist as much as it needs an analyst," she said. "I'll file my transfer before lunch."
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