When you analyze a company, do you ever go in at night?”
“At — night?
No, ma’am, we work from the filings.”
“The filings are what they show you.
You should go in at night sometime.
Listen to which offices left the lights on and which ones left the shredder warm.”
Devlin laughed, politely.
Then, three months later, he came into my office and said, “Sir, I’ve started doing a thing.
Don’t laugh.
I’ve been reading the after-hours badge logs on the companies we cover.
Who’s in the building at 2 a.m.
It’s — sir, it’s the single best predictor I’ve found.
I don’t know where I got the idea.”
“I know where you got it,”
I said.
“She was wearing regular clothes.
You thought she was on the tour.”
Vivienne Greaves came to see me in June.
Not Portia.
Vivienne.
She stood in the lobby of my building — the one I own, that my mother’s dress has now been to for a different award — and she said, “I told Rafael there’d been a misunderstanding.
I asked you to let it go.”
“You did.”
“I’ve been thinking about why.”
“And?”
“Because it was easier for me if you did.
Then I’d have never had to know what my husband did to that house.
Your mother knew before I did.
The cleaning woman knew before the wife.”
“That’s the whole answer,” I said.
“Everybody who says it.”
She left.
She and Aldous divorced that summer.
Portia, I’m told, is “staying with friends,” which is a phrase people from that world use to mean the money’s gone and
the friends are counting the weeks.
And my mother.
She still has the blue dress.
It’s been to my first business award, to an engagement party, to a fountain, to a family meeting on a hill, and — last month — to the opening of a thing I built that I have decided is the only building with my name on it that will ever matter.
It’s on Fenmore Street.
