Part Six: What Comes Next
She met him for coffee the following Tuesday. Then dinner the following Thursday. Then an afternoon in a gallery, where Marcus turned out to have opinions about art that were specific and unpredictable and occasionally wrong, which she found more reassuring than if he had been right.
He was, she learned gradually, the sort of person who had spent so long alone with a long project that he had grown slightly strange around the edges in ways that were not unpleasant. He had read extensively, and walked extensively, and had a habit of going quiet in the middle of conversations when something struck him — not rudely, but completely, as if he had stepped briefly into a different room. He was not what she would have designed, had she been given the option.
He was better than that.
Her father, through lawyers, contested the stake. The lawyers took one meeting with Marcus’s legal team and called Elliot Voss the following morning to tell him, in careful professional language, that it was uncontestable. Elliot called Madeline that afternoon. The conversation was short and largely one-sided and ended with him saying something he didn’t mean and then, a few days later, calling back and saying something he did mean, which was smaller and harder and cost him more.
It was a beginning.
The Whitmore engagement was dissolved quietly, by mutual and unsurprised agreement. Charles Whitmore did not seem heartbroken. He had the look, at the brief meeting arranged to formalize the dissolution, of someone who had been told a deal had fallen through — which is perhaps, she reflected, exactly what he had thought it was.
Marcus bought a pair of shoes. Brown leather, good ones, worn in quickly. She teased him about them, occasionally. He would look at his feet with the expression of someone who had not quite decided whether ordinary life was everything he’d hoped, and then look up at her, and she could tell that whatever the verdict was on the shoes, it did not extend to everything else.
