Page 31 of Where Vows Collapse
"Elias," she said, against his mouth.
"Yes."
"I don't — "
"Don't what."
"I don't know what happens after this."
"Neither do I."
"We are very bad at this," she said.
He almost laughed. He felt the almost-laugh move through his chest. He felt her feel it. Her hand at the back of his neck tightened, briefly, and he understood that she was holding on because she didn’t trust the moment to last and wanted, before it stopped, to remember what it had felt like.
He rested his hand along the line of her ribs. He did not move it.
He wanted, with an intensity that was not operational or any of the categories he’d been using to organize his life, to keep standing in this room with his wife. Kissing her. And then making love?—
The intercom rang.
It was the house line. It was the tone the building used when a delivery was being brought up. It cut through the room with the mechanical indifference of a system that did not know, and would not have cared, what it had just interrupted.
The intercom rang again.
Elias pulled back. Reluctant.
"Elias?"
"I — I'm expecting something."
"Now?"
"Yes."
She looked at him.
She was reading him. He watched the reassembling of her composure. He watched her step back, half a pace, to give him room to move.
"Go," she said.
He went.
The courier was a young man with a nylon envelope and a clipboard. Elias signed for the envelope without looking at the clipboard. He closed the door. He stood in the hall with the envelope in his hand.
He didn’t open it.
He could feel his wife, still in the living room, still standing where he had left her. He could feel, underneath the feeling, the weight of what he had been given. He could feel her mouth on his.
Elias opened the envelope. The dossier was brief. A cover memo. A handful of photographs. A summary sheet.
The summary sheet listed Gordon Vanders's movements over the past weeks. The pattern was the pattern of a man routing information: meetings with advisors to two of the older Laurent creditors, a lunch with a lawyer Elias's firm had tangled with on a previous matter, an afternoon at the New York offices of the firm where Michael Warren now worked.
Michael Warren.
The photographs were of Gordon Vanders at a sidewalk cafe on Madison Avenue, across a round table from a man Elias had last seen in a conference room years ago. The photographs were date-stamped. The date on them was the day Gordon Vanders had come to Elias's living room in his overcoat and with his leather portfolio.
He had gone from New York to Elias's wife.
