“He contacted Eamon,” Farrow said. “He wants a meeting.”
Chapter fourteen
Farrow
My phone vibrated against the nightstand at five fifty-five a.m., and I was sitting upright before it stopped. I killed the alarm, pulled on jeans and a clean henley, and went downstairs barefoot.
The kitchen door was open.
Cabot sat at the table with a mug between both hands. Dane was at the counter pouring coffee into a fresh mug. He wore a black hoodie, sleeves shoved to the elbows. It was the same one I’d removed the night before, freshly washed.
He set the new mug on the island near my hip. “Morning,” I said.
“Morning,” Cabot said, without looking up.
Dane poured another mug and set it at Cabot’s elbow.
“Cabot, what’s got you up so early?” I asked.
“I’ve been thinking about August, the luncheon on Martha’s Vineyard.”
“You’ve described it for us.”
“I’ve described what was strange. I haven’t described what wasn’t.”
I sipped my coffee.
“The entire thing runs with well-designed choreography. Old money behaves like old money. They know before it happens who will pass a dish when, who will interrupt, and who will stay silent on purpose. They’ve been doing it since they were seven. Most of them have forgotten it’s a game.”
He looked at his hands.
“Henry didn’t play. He passed dishes when it suited him. He poured water for the woman beside him without being asked. When I mentioned a biography I’d brought up months earlier, he asked me about the twelfth chapter. He’d kept it in his head all summer in case he saw me again.”
I glanced at Dane. He was listening intently.
“He acted like a man trying to remember what normal people are like.”
I knew people like that. I’d worked for a version of what Cabot described a dozen times over. There was an executive who couldn’t remember the last party where he wasn’t being managed and a CEO who’d asked me three drinks in how to make her husband stop performing for her. People isolated within power structures lost the rhythm of ordinary life. When they remembered it, they reached for it like someone in the desert reaching for water.
Above us, the floorboards shifted. One slow footfall, then a pause, and then another. It was Wiley.
He came down without speaking, wearing a Northeastern hoodie that was a size too big across the shoulders. It was Samuel’s. He stopped and looked at us from the doorway. Dane poured a fourth mug of coffee without being asked.
He seated himself at the table and wrapped both hands around the mug. “You’re thinking too loudly for this hour, Stanley.”
“I’ve been thinking that I want to talk to Henry.”
“Save that for Eamon,” Dane said. “He arrives within the hour.”
***
Eamon spoke. “Stanley, the conversation needs to happen. I agree. How do we get the two of you together?”
Cabot picked up his mug and sipped. He looked at Dane and me. Then he returned his attention to Eamon.
“Henry eats breakfast alone every Thursday morning at a café in the South End.”
He said it quietly. Eamon nodded.