By Monday morning Celia had decided Adrian Sato was probably a teacher, or an architect who had forgotten to dress like one. Something that accounted for his interest in how things worked and his lack of interest in keeping his clothes clean.
Then a long black car pulled into the depot yard, and he stepped out talking to a woman who handed him a tablet, a folder and a cup of coffee in an order they had plainly perfected.
He was wearing a suit. It didn’t transform him into someone else. His hair still seemed to have been arranged by a different person on each side. But the driver had come around to open the rear door, and a man waiting by the office straightened the moment he saw him.
“That’s Gavin Reed,” Imogen said beside Celia. “Commercial director. I hope he doesn’t want a sign the size of the bus.”
“Whose commercial director?”
“Adrian’s.”
Celia watched Gavin clap Adrian on the shoulder, then begin speaking with the absorbed urgency she’d seen Quentin reserve for people who could affect his income.
“He owns the company?”
“Founded it. Still owns a great deal of it.” Imogen glanced at her. “Didn’t you know?”
“He didn’t mention it.”
“He was carrying my boxes. I wasn’t about to stop him.”
Imogen went back inside. Celia stayed where she was with a crate against her hip, remembering herself assigning him work. That was foolish. People who owned companies could carry books. It didn’t mean he’d thought her ridiculous.
Adrian looked up and smiled. He started toward her, but Gavin said something and held the folder open. Adrian’s smile became an apologetic lift of his fingers.
She went inside before he could see her watching.
The new layout had been marked on the floor in blue tape. Celia followed it from the proposed entrance past the low shelves to the rear windows, trying to imagine twenty damp children taking turns rather than arriving all at once. Her phone vibrated in her back pocket.
Quentin had sent a photograph of a utility bill. No message. She looked at the amount, made a note to transfer her half, and put the phone away.
There were ways to stay busy for an entire life without ever deciding what you wanted. She began measuring the space between the tape and the wheelchair area.
“I should have warned you.”
Adrian stood at the bus door, his folder tucked under his arm.
“About the sign?” she asked.
“What sign?”
“Nothing. Imogen’s worried.”
He looked toward the office, then back. “I meant the car. I could have driven myself, but I need to work on the way back.”
“You don’t have to explain your car to me.”
“You looked surprised.”
“I was. I thought you were an architect.”
“That’s flattering. I couldn’t work out how to remove a box.”
She smiled reluctantly. He climbed aboard and stood on the far side of the taped aisle.
“My company is supplying some equipment. And part of the conversion grant. I came Saturday because Mom asked me to, but I should have said.”
“I told you to empty boxes.”
“You gave very clear instructions. I appreciate that in a person.”
Her face warmed. She looked down at the ruler in her hand.
“Have you got time for lunch?” he asked.
“Today?”
“That was the hope.”
“Don’t you have to go back?”
“At two. There’s a place by the harbor. We could walk.” He paused. “Unless you’re working through.”
She was about to say she probably should. It was the sensible answer. She had known him two days. She had a new job to consider and a first clinic appointment to attend and a whole previous life waiting in boxes she hadn’t yet collected.
But his eyes were on her face, and she wanted to go to lunch.
Wanting made the next part necessary.
“There’s something you should know.”
He waited. She put the ruler on a seat so she wouldn’t bend it between her fingers.
“I’m pregnant.”
He blinked.
“I’m also newly single,” she said, rushing now. “Very newly. This isn’t a situation where someone is coming to punch you. I just thought you ought to know before—”
“Before lunch?”
“Before you decide what you mean by lunch.”
He looked through the window for a second. She heard a van reverse in the yard, the intermittent warning loud enough to fill the space where he wasn’t speaking.
“I didn’t have a speech ready for that,” he said.
“You don’t need one.”
“Good. It would be terrible.” He looked at her again. “Are you all right?”
She could have told him yes and escaped. “Mostly. Sometimes. I found out last week.”
“And the newly single part?”
“Afterward.”
“Ah.”
“He doesn’t know. I haven’t told him yet.” She disliked the sound of it between them. “I’m going to. I need to make some arrangements first.”
Adrian moved the folder from one hand to the other. “Is there something I can—” He stopped himself. “Sorry. No. You’ve barely met me.”
“I don’t need rescuing.”
“I was going to offer a chair. You look as though you’re standing up to be cross-examined.”
She stared at him, then laughed, startled and relieved. “I feel a little like it.”
“I still want lunch. If you do.”
He didn’t add anything grand about being different from other men. He stood there in his expensive suit with his folder pinched under his arm, waiting for the answer.
“I do,” she said.
The cafe occupied the front of a weathered building above the harbor path. Adrian held the door, then stepped aside while Celia chose a table. She chose the window. Through it they could see a man in orange waterproofs coaxing a rope into a heap on a boat deck.
“I come here with Mom,” Adrian said. “They know she wants the table away from the door, but she never actually asks for it. She tells them she’s happy anywhere until they offer.”
“I may know someone like that.”
“You?”
She pulled off her gloves. “Possibly.”
The owner called him by name and asked if Margaret was coming. When he said no, she looked at Celia with open curiosity. Celia reached for the menu and found herself smiling down at the list of sandwiches as though it had done something charming.
“Do you mind?” Adrian asked after the owner left.
“Mind what?”
“People knowing me.”
“I work at an elementary school. People know what I buy at the grocery store because their children tell them.”
“That’s worse.”
“Once I bought six packs of paper cups and a bottle of wine, and a little girl asked me whether I was having a party without her.”
He laughed, his eyes creasing. She liked the shape his face made when he stopped trying to consider what to say.
They ordered soup and sandwiches. Celia’s appetite had become unpredictable, but today the smell of warm bread made her grateful to be sitting down. Adrian removed his jacket. His white shirt sleeve had a faint smudge near the cuff, probably from the bus.
“How much of the bus is yours?” she asked.
“None. The trust owns it.”
“I meant—”
“I know. Equipment, a limited grant. Imogen made very sure I understood I wasn’t buying a library.”
“Would you want to?”
“Apparently I’d be poor at it. I’d have kept the moth book.”
“Most people want books they liked when they were children. They forget those aren’t necessarily the ones children want now.”
“What did you like?”
“Girls on islands. Girls in enormous houses. Girls allowed to go out without explaining themselves to anyone. Also a series about a horse that solved crimes.”
“The horse solved them?”
“I may be overstating its contribution.”
He grinned. When their food arrived, he leaned forward to listen while she told him about a child who’d read only instruction manuals for most of a school year, until she found a graphic novel about building a robot.
“Was that the gateway?” he asked.
“To three more graphic novels. Then another manual. But he stopped feeling he was doing it wrong.”
Adrian considered that. “I’d have liked you at my school.”
It was said lightly. She felt it anyway, a warmth that had little to do with the soup.
“Were you a difficult pupil?”
“I asked why a lot.”
“That’s fine.”
“Not always at useful moments. Mom taught at another school. She’d get home and listen to a teacher complain about me on the phone while I listened through the door.”
“Did she defend you?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes she came upstairs and told me I wasn’t nearly as interesting as I thought.”
Celia laughed with a mouthful of bread and had to reach for her water. Adrian seemed pleased. There were crumbs on the front of his sweater vest, revealed when he’d taken his jacket off, and a little mustard near the edge of his thumb. He looked forty-something, ordinary and tired at the corners, and more attractive by the minute.
She shouldn’t have to decide what to do about that at once. The thought arrived as a small permission she could give herself.
“What sort of company is it?” she asked.
He explained energy storage in four sentences, then stopped. “That’s usually where people’s eyes go.”
“Mine haven’t gone anywhere.”
“You have training. You’ve listened to children explain games.”
“Some of them have very complicated rules.”
“So does investment.”
He talked about wanting the company to expand without giving away every decision that had made it worthwhile. For a few minutes his hands moved as he spoke, and she glimpsed the force that must make people straighten when he arrived. He caught himself looking at his watch and apologized.
“You need to leave.”
“Not yet.” He turned the watch inward against his wrist. “Tell me about your school.”
She almost told him the pleasant version. Then she described walking into the flooded library and finding the paper birds the children had made still hanging from the ceiling. Everything beneath them ruined or stained. The birds turning gently in the draft from the open doors.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She nodded, looking outside. “I keep thinking about little things. Labels I’d finally replaced. A chair I found at a yard sale. It seems selfish when people had water in their homes.”
“It was your room.”
“It was.”
She hadn’t realized how badly she wanted someone to understand that.
When the check came, Adrian reached for it. Celia took her wallet out.
“I invited you,” he said.
“I can buy my own soup.”
“I was hoping you could. Otherwise this was an alarmingly expensive trap.”
She looked at him. He hadn’t taken the check away from her; his hand rested beside it. She could insist and turn the whole thing into a demonstration. Or she could let a man buy her lunch because he’d asked her to have lunch with him.
“Thank you,” she said, putting the wallet back.
“You’re welcome.”
Outside, the wind had shifted. He walked on the harbor side of the path, his hands in his coat pockets. They passed a bench occupied by a small wet dog and a man eating chips. The dog watched Celia with such expectancy that she apologized to it for having nothing.
“You do that often?” Adrian asked.
“Apologize to dogs?”
“I was going to say talk to strangers.”
“Depends on the stranger.”
He glanced at her, and for a moment the bus, the company, the folder under his arm all slipped out of importance. She knew he was thinking about asking something. She wanted him to, and feared what she’d have to say.
“May I call you?” he asked.
“About books?”
“I could invent a question.”
“Please don’t. I get enough of those.”
“Then without one.”
She took her phone out. Her fingers were cold and she got her own number wrong the first time. He waited while she corrected it, then sent her a message so she’d have his.
Adrian. No invented question.
She smiled down at it.
At the depot his driver was waiting with the car running. He stopped beside Celia’s little hatchback, briefly looking as reluctant as she felt.
“You don’t have to decide anything because we had lunch,” he said.
“Neither do you.”
He gave a small nod. “All right.”
She watched him go, then went inside to find Imogen. The assignment page was in her bag, folded at the corners now. She took it out and said she wanted the job.
Imogen asked whether she’d read the hours carefully.
“Twice.”
“Good. We’ll get the formal paperwork started.”
On the way home, Celia stopped at a red light with rain gathering on the windshield. Her phone lay silent in the passenger seat. It didn’t need to light up again. She already had something new to look forward to.