Ripple Effect

Chapter Eighty-Five: ...where they stood.

Elizabeth

12:44 PM

It was a mistake. She should have made it clear to Russell that she intended on seeing Henry later at home. She should have given Henry his glasses and a peck on the cheek and told him that she had a few things to sort out at work first. She should have diffused the jaw-achingly awkward tension before Conrad excused himself, Russell and Stevie, and left the two of them alone. Then she wouldn't have been forced to say 'don't' just to put a stopper on things before either of them got hurt.

Elizabeth halted in front of the door to the Oval Office. She thought about glancing over her shoulder and catching a glimpse of Henry before he left. But who would that help? He'd probably stalked off already anyway. That huff. That bitter smile. That, 'Well, I guess I'll see you at home'. Her fault, but still...

Her gaze drifted up to the crown moulding above the door instead. Spidering cracks fractured the plaster. She drew in a breath that unfurled down to the base of her lungs and then rolled up to the apex until every last part of her chest ached and burned. She steeled herself. Compartmentalise.

She rapped her knuckles against the wood—three sharp taps—and then grasped the cool bronze handle and pushed open the door before Conrad had the chance to reply. The knock was only a courtesy, really. They both knew she'd be back.

Conrad leant against the front edge of his desk, the fingers of one hand curled around the lip of the stained oak, whilst with the other hand, he held out the book he had given her and that she'd left on the cushions of the sofa—the English translation of La Disparition. With the snow tumbling down beyond the windows behind him, the flakes as thick and as delicate as the swirls of cherry blossom had been when she'd hurried back to that chipped white bench thirty-odd years ago, it felt as though she were living both the past and the present at once, as though the path of her life had looped back on itself and ran alongside where she had walked decades before.

She padded along behind the couch. The surrounding hush of the room, broken only by the clink...clonk...clink...clonk...clink...clonk... of the grandfather clock, elevated the faint tread of her sneakers against the carpet. The quiet spoke of familiarity and comfort—a balm compared to the silence that had jarred and bristled and strained between her and Henry just minutes before. She laid Will's jacket over the back of the couch as she walked past. The coarse green-grey fabric clashed with the velveteen cobalt.

Conrad's smile echoed the hint of her own as she took the book from him—a nod to their shared memory. Back then it would have seemed impossible that they would be where they stood today, he as the president and she as his secretary of state, and in some ways it still did. Was it odd that she missed the girl who had sat cross-legged on the bench that day—so much life before her to discover, so naïve, so eager, so certain—in the same way she might miss a long-lost friend?

She perched against the arm of the couch, and for a long moment—a minute, maybe more—she stared down at the book cover, with its jumble of 'e's that swarmed to spell out 'A Void' in the gaps that they left between them. A presence out of the absence. It came with a bittersweet tug, like the strum of a chord long forgotten. After all, you can't write Elizabeth without the letter 'e'. She loved that book, but at the same time she wished she'd never gone through the loss that enabled it to speak to her, that she could read it as just a word game and not see it for something deeper. But then again, if she could, then she wouldn't be the Elizabeth she was today.

When she looked up at Conrad, she held the book to her chest and twisted it around to show him a flash of the deep purple cover. "I wanted to thank you for this." She paused, holding his gaze, and then returned the book to her lap, her fingers wrapped around its spine. The flex in her muscles tweaked at her stitches. "It means a lot to me. It means even more to me that you not only heard the ramblings of a twenty-something-year-old girl geeking out over her love of language and math but that you took the time to listen to her, and that almost thirty years on you still remember."