Page 50 of When Ice Queens Collide
“Have you told anyone else yet?”
“No, not yet. You’re the first.”
“Thank you,” Meg said quietly. Her eyes reflected an emotion Alexandra rarely saw from her.
Alexandra nodded, softer than usual.
Meg drew in a breath and shifted back into work mode, which was, Alexandra knew, a kindness for both of them. “Then the Monday rollout about the acquisition won’t run, but we still need to get the piece about Vivian’s departure out. It’s a much smaller communication, but we need to make sure it’s not coupled to anything about an acquirer, potential or otherwise. I’ll coordinate with Ruth this afternoon, and we’ll have a clean draft for you to review tomorrow evening.”
“Good.”
Meg was silent for a beat, and Alexandra didn’t rush to fill the void. She knew Meg liked to think before speaking, even more so when it was something personal. Alexandra resisted the urge to rebuild her walls. But whatever it was on Meg’s mind, she didn’t say it. Instead, she gathered her documents and tucked them inside the folder. “Let me know if anything changes between now and Monday.”
Alexandra wondered what words Meg had swallowed and knew she’d be thinking about it long after Meg left. “I’m meeting Simone at four today at the coastal trailhead, so I’ll let you know.”
Meg’s eyebrows shot up, less like a question and more like a confirmation of something she had been holding to herself. She set the portfolio down again.
“What?” Alexandra asked.
“Oh nothing. I just notice things. It’s my job.”
Alexandra felt something tighten and release in her chest. “What did you notice?”
“More than I was going to mention.” Meg picked up her mug and swallowed the rest. “I’m really glad you slept.”
Meg stared at her pointedly, and Alexandra felt a flush rise up her neck despite herself, like she had been caught doing something she wasn’t supposed to do.
Meg picked up the portfolio again. “I’ll work on the new sequence with Ruth this afternoon. She’s going to want to hear about Friday from you directly, but I can take the rest off your plate.”
“Thank you.”
Meg walked to the back door. At the threshold, she paused with her hand on the frame and looked back at Alexandra still at the kitchen table. “Whatever happens at four o’clock, good.”
She didn’t wait for a reply and walked out. Alexandra sat at the kitchen table for a few minutes after Meg left, listening to the car start in the driveway and recede toward the gate. The kitchen was warmer than usual now. She picked up her phone and called Ruth, a call that lasted only eleven minutes because Ruth rarely asked any personal questions, preferring to keep conversations grounded in professionalism.
When Alexandra hung up, she closed her laptop and washed both coffee mugs by hand then set them on the rack to dry before wiping down the counter.
At three, she put on her coat and grabbed her keys. She flipped off the kitchen lights, set the alarm, and walked outside. The drive north took forty minutes. Alexandra parked at thetrailhead a quarter til four. Simone’s rental car was already there.
Simone was standing at the trail map by the gate, wearing jeans and a charcoal-colored wool coat that wasn’t built for Phoenix Ridge weather. Her dark shoulder-length hair fluttered in the wind. She turned when the door of Alexandra’s car closed. For a second, neither of them moved.
Alexandra paused, recalibrating. Simone was here, in daylight on neutral ground, and was the same woman whose breathing Alexandra had listened to in the dark, and the two versions of her did not yet know how to occupy the same space. Alexandra had spent months keeping Simone-the-acquirer and Simone-in-a-bedroom in separate compartments in her own mind. Standing on this gravel trail, she could feel the walls of those compartments collapsing into each other, and she didn’t have a plan for what to do with the woman who emerged from the wreckage.
“You’re early,” Alexandra said.
“I’ve been here since three-thirty.”
The wind whipping off the water cut between them. Alexandra looked at Simone’s coat again. It was wrong and she debated offering the fleece in the back of her car then reconsidered. Simone didn’t come here to be looked after by a mother hen.
“Would you like to walk?” Simone asked.
“Yes.”
The trail ran a quarter-mile through second-growth Douglas fir before it broke into open headland. They walked it without speaking. Alexandra was conscious, in a way that she hadn’t been before, of their height difference—Simone slightly shorter, the top of her head in line with Alexandra’s mouth—and of Simone’s stride, which was shorter than Alexandra’s by a margin she had to actively account for to stay at pace with her. Simonewasn’t in a hurry, but she didn’t dawdle. Alexandra had spent her entire adult life moving as though she were already late, and she slowed her pace by half a step. Simone matched it without comment.
Alexandra could hear Simone’s breathing beside her, slightly faster than the cold or pace warranted. She let their shared silence carry them to the open ground, and then she stopped. At the headland, the water was the color of slate. A line of cormorants sat on a rock fifty yards out, drying their wings. The grass was flattened by the wind. Alexandra turned to look at her. Simone looked back, hands stuffed in her coat pockets, the wind moving her hair across her face. She didn’t push it back.
“I have a question,” Alexandra said, breaking their silence. “I’d like an honest answer to it.”
