She was not the kind of person who cried easily, and she was not trying to hide it. “I want to ask each of you something,” Eleanor said. She looked at Robert. “When did we last have a conversation that wasn’t about the company or the estate?
”
Robert opened his mouth and closed it. “I don’t remember either,” Eleanor said. “That is something I would like to change. ”
She looked at Margaret.
“When did you last tell me something that frightened you? ”
Margaret pressed her lips together. “Not recently. ”
“I think I became someone who was easier to report to than to talk to.
I would like to be someone you can talk to again. ”
James said, “I want to apologize for the phone calls I didn’t make and the visits I didn’t make. You taught us you were always fine. You were so good at being fine that we believed you.
”
Eleanor held his gaze. “Thank you. ”
Noah looked at Robert, then Margaret, then James. “She talks about all of you all the time,” he said.
“Every visit, she tells me about when you were little. She told me about Robert’s first job, and how she and Mr. Richard drove four hours to celebrate. She told me about Margaret’s first case, and how she stayed on the phone until three in the morning.
She told me about James building a treehouse that fell down, and he built it again and it fell down again, and he built it a third time and it held. ”
He paused. “She’s not a person who stopped caring. She’s a person who has been very alone and didn’t know how to say it.
I know what alone feels like. It doesn’t make you stop loving people. It just makes everything quieter. ”
Robert looked at his mother with an expression she had not seen on his face since he was very young.
Not the executive, not the heir. The boy. “Noah,” Robert said, “what do you want to be when you’re older? ”
Noah thought.
“Architecture or engineering. Something where you figure out how things should fit together and then you build them. ”
“I have a structural engineering firm that does work for Whitmore. Every summer they take on two high school interns.
When the time comes, I’d like to make sure you’re considered. ”
Noah looked at him carefully. “Thank you. ”
Margaret asked about his favorite book.
Noah talked about bridges and a girl who runs away. Margaret smiled. “I’ll send you something I think you might like. ”
At eleven o’clock, Margaret embraced Eleanor at the foot of the stairs.
Robert shook her hand—the handshake was long and held something neither of them put into words. James kissed her cheek and said, “I’ll be here in the morning. ”
Eleanor sat alone by the fire. The wind had died down.
The house was quiet in the way it was when it was full of sleeping people—a completely different quiet from the quiet of emptiness. She thought about the night in the rain, the cold pavement, the phone that rang and rang, the specific terror of understanding that no one was coming. She thought about the small voice that broke through it, a boy in the dark with his jacket extended. She thought about what Noah had said earlier: what a family looks like when it’s trying.
Her family was trying. And there was a boy asleep in the blue room at the end of the hall who had reminded them how. She put out the fire the way Richard had always done, checked twice, turned off the lamps, walked up the stairs slowly. At the end of the hall, a thin line of light under the blue room door.
She knocked twice. “Still reading? ” she said. A pause.
“Maybe. ”
She smiled at the closed door. “Sleep well, Noah. ”
“You too, Eleanor.
”
She walked to her own room at the other end of the hall, the room where she and Richard had slept for twenty-five years. She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the photograph of him laughing, the summer light behind him. “I think I found my way back,” she said quietly. The room held what it always held—the particular quality of a space that had been loved in for a long time.
Eleanor took that as the answer she had been hoping for, lay down, closed her eyes, and for the first time in longer than she could remember, slept without difficulty.