Part 3
Lucy was sitting on the low platform with her notebook beside her hip. Natalie crossed the room and lowered herself to the floor, taking care with a knee that objected to the tile.
“Ready for lunch?” she asked.
Lucy nodded, then glanced toward the equipment rack.
Natalie waited while the pencil moved.
Can Grant come?
Across the room, Grant became unnecessarily occupied with coiling a resistance band.
“I’ll ask,” Natalie said.
The diner was two blocks away, warm enough to fog Natalie’s glasses when they went inside. Grant took the outer end of the booth after helping them arrange the wheelchair where Lucy wanted it.
He studied the menu briefly and ordered a turkey sandwich. Lucy chose soup. Natalie ordered a salad she knew she would only partly eat.
Nobody mentioned the foot.
A waitress refilled Natalie’s coffee. Grant noticed the corner of Lucy’s notebook beneath her elbow.
“Were you drawing those before you got hurt?”
Lucy shook her head.
When I was in the hospital.
“After the crash?”
She nodded.
He turned his water glass slightly. “My son does that. Draws when he’s trying to sort something out. He’d tell you he was just making pictures.”
Lucy pulled the notebook closer.
You have a son?
“Owen. Eight.”
How is he?
Grant considered the question rather than smiling at it.
“He’s had a rough couple of years. He still has an opinion about everything I do.”
Natalie looked up from her coffee. She had searched Grant’s name after their first meeting and found little: an employment listing, an old address, almost nothing that explained the precision she had watched in the therapy room.
“Have you been in Dunwick long?” she asked.
“About as long as I’ve had this job.”
“And before that?”
“Some moving around.”
She let him take a bite before asking, “How long were you in the service?”
“Fourteen years.”
“Which branch?”
“Navy.”
He laid down his sandwich, making it clear he had answered the question he intended to answer.
Lucy tapped the table. When he looked at her, she slid the notebook over.
Why did you leave?
Grant read it twice, although the words were plain.
“My wife became ill. I needed to be home.” His thumb flattened a fold in the paper napkin. “After she died, Owen needed me there. I left.”
Lucy took back the notebook and wrote slowly.
I’m sorry she died.
“Thank you.”
The waitress passed their booth carrying three plates on one arm. Grant waited until she had gone.
“I’m sorry you lost your dad, Lucy.”
Natalie’s hand went still around the cup. She had given him the basic history before he began assisting with treatment. She had not expected him to say Thomas so plainly into the space between the soup bowl and the notebook.
Lucy looked down at the table. Then she nodded once.
Grant reached for his sandwich again. He did not ask her to explain the nod.
Three days later, Natalie sat at the hotel table with her executive team and largest shareholders arranged in small rectangles across her laptop.
The quarterly figures were sound. The acquisition discussion took seventeen minutes. Natalie answered two questions from Ben, approved the next stage of due diligence, and began closing the meeting.
Walter Kessler cleared his throat.
“Natalie, before we go. A concern has come up about how long you’ve been managing from Maine.”
She took her hand off the trackpad.
“What concern?”
Walter was sixty-three and had invested early enough to remember the company when Natalie’s office had contained a folding table. He rarely asked a question he hadn’t already tested privately.
“Availability. Delegation. Some people feel decisions are being made under unusual strain.”
“Which decisions?”
He paused. Two faces on the screen turned deliberately neutral.
“I’m told Lucy’s treatment has been reorganized around the advice of a maintenance employee.”
“Grant Mercer.”
“I’m not criticizing the man personally.”
“You’ve reduced him to a job title. What exactly are you criticizing?”
Walter leaned back.
“You have access to the best specialists in the country. We’re concerned about the judgment involved in substituting—”
“No one has been substituted. A licensed therapist and the director oversee her care. Grant identified preserved function that eleven specialists had not pursued. Repeat examination supports what he noticed. Lucy has now initiated movement.”
Ben looked down at the papers in front of him.
“We understand he was in the military,” Walter said.
“Fourteen years in the Navy. I haven’t asked him to provide his full history to justify what we can already measure.”
“I’m raising a perception problem.”
“Then hear my answer clearly. My daughter’s treatment does not require a shareholder vote. I’ll address business performance with you whenever you like. I will not remove the first person who has helped produce a change because his badge makes somebody uncomfortable.”
For several seconds, the only sound was a faint rustle from another participant’s microphone.
Walter nodded. “Understood.”
They finished with ordinary courtesies. Natalie shut the computer and remained at the table.
On the dark screen, she could see the reflection of the hotel kitchenette behind her. Lucy’s cereal bowl was drying beside a saucepan. A visitor’s badge lay near the fruit Natalie kept buying because Lucy sometimes wanted it.
She had once sorted people almost as quickly as Walter had sorted Grant. Credentials, position, usefulness. It had made meetings efficient.
She picked up her phone and checked the time of Lucy’s afternoon session.
Owen Mercer had already been at the center twice when Lucy finally spoke to him in the manner she used most easily.
He was sitting beside his backpack, reading, when Tessa wheeled Lucy out after water therapy. Lucy’s hair was wrapped in a towel, and she looked ready to refuse anything that required additional effort.
“Is that pool actually warm?” Owen asked.
Lucy blinked at him.
He looked toward the therapy room. “Places always say warm. Usually they mean you won’t freeze.”
Lucy made a wavering motion with her hand.
“That’s what I thought.”
She pulled out her notebook.
What’s the book?
He held up the cover. “Shipwrecks.”
Worth reading?
“There’s a good one about a crew stuck on a rock after their ship broke up off the northern coast. Three days. In winter.”
Lucy’s pencil moved again.
Did they all get rescued?
“I’m not done. Don’t tell me if you know.”
She shook her head, almost smiling.
“My dad told me about it,” Owen said. “He knows things like how to keep warm when you don’t have the right stuff. Mostly he says you have to stay calm long enough to do the next useful thing.”
Natalie came around the corner, saw the two children, and stopped before they saw her.
Lucy wrote a longer question. Natalie couldn’t read it from where she stood.
Owen bent over the notebook.
“He says that about bodies, too,” he answered. “You give them something clear to do. You don’t let being scared decide everything.”
Lucy looked at the page for a while. Then she turned to a clean one and asked about the ship.
Twenty minutes later, Grant came out carrying a small metal bracket. He stopped at the sight of Owen sitting cross-legged beside Lucy’s chair, arguing with something she had written.
“No, because a lifeboat would just get smashed there,” Owen said. “Look at the picture.”
Lucy pointed to a different part of the illustration.
Grant looked across the corridor and found Natalie watching.
Neither interrupted. He slipped the bracket into his pocket and leaned against the wall until the children reached the end of the page…
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