Chapter 16: Adjusted

I went back to Southie on Monday, because Niamh's crib was there and because I don't run.

I slept in my own room across the hall.

Page four.

Conall didn't knock.

He left tea outside my door at six every morning, milk and two sugars, with a saucer on top to keep it hot.

On Tuesday I drank it.

On Wednesday I drank it and left the cup on his side of the hall.

On Thursday nobody followed my car to my mother's.

I checked the mirror the whole way.

Nobody.

The invitation to the Harborline investor reception had come to every Mercy trustee.

Including the bondholder seat.

"Mrs. Conall Byrne and guest," my charge nurse read off the cream card. "They spelled your name wrong on purpose."

"They spelled his right."

"Do I get to wear the black dress again?"

"With the shoes."

"In case we have to run."

The reception was on the top floor of a hotel in Back Bay.

Glass walls on three sides, the river going pink below us in the last of the light.

A man played the piano nobody was listening to.

There were bankers from New York in good shoes, and two state senators, and a model of the towers under a glass box, lit from inside.

Gwyneth was beside it in red.

She'd been discharged from a New York hospital forty-eight hours before, and she looked like she'd spent them at a spa.

Davis was at the bar.

He looked like he'd spent them on a plane.

He saw me come in and set his glass down very slowly.

He didn't come over.

"Phone," my charge nurse murmured.

I'd put it in my clutch with the voice recorder already running and the clutch's clasp left open a quarter inch.

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