With the specific quiet of someone who means it without ornamentation. “Yes.” She said. “It’s him.”
Reuben nodded slowly. “What are you going to do about that?” “Nothing.” She said. “Right now, I’m going to sit here with you until they kick me out.”
He almost smiled. It was a very small almost. “You’re terrible at answering direct questions.”
“I learned from you.” He laughed. A real one, brief and startled out of him.
It was the best sound she’d heard in 3 days. She didn’t go back to the estate for a week.
She stayed with her mother and Reuben in the apartment on the South Side that smelled of her childhood.
Jollof rice and the specific brand of laundry detergent her mother had used as long as Imani could remember.
And she let the world outside do what it needed to do. She read the Tribune coverage every day and the follow-up pieces in the Sun-Times and the financial press, which had discovered the story with the enthusiasm of outlets that had been watching Briggs Development’s IPO and now had a far more interesting angle.
She talked to Callaway’s attorney twice, providing supplementary documentation they needed for the SEC cooperation.
She talked to Days once more, a follow-up conversation that stayed off the record. Two women at a diner on 47th Street drinking coffee and being honest.
She did not talk to Callaway. He texted twice. Both times the texts were brief and functional.
A question about documentation, a confirmation that her employment at the estate remained open whenever she chose to return.
She replied to both and kept the exchange professional and felt each time the specific discipline of someone maintaining a necessary distance while not being entirely sure why the distance felt necessary.
She understood what was happening in a general way. The shape of it. The gravitational pull of a situation where two people have been through something extreme together and the extremity has created a proximity that looks like connection and may or may not be connection and the only way to know which it is requires more ordinary time than they have had.
She understood that. She was good at understanding things. Understanding them didn’t make them easier to sit with.
Reuben’s surgery was on a Tuesday and it went well. The procedure took 3 hours.
The new access site was placed without complication. His nephrologist, a small precise woman named Dr.
