I lied to Mrs. Okonkwo at 3:05 on Sunday afternoon, and Bea heard me do it.
"A transcript job," I said, tucking the blanket over her walker's seat so she could watch Bea from the armchair. Bea looked up from her notebook. She did not say "Fact." She just looked, and I walked out of 2B with my coat buttoned wrong.
Nobody knew where I was going. Gideon would have driven. Gideon would have stood next to me, and I needed to be alone with her, because the only thing I had ever won against Celia Thorne I had won by myself.
The steno pad was in my bag, zipped into the inside pocket. I touched it through the canvas the whole ride up the hill.
The conservatory smelled of lemon leaves. Potted trees stood in rows under the glass, small and fruiting, and in the middle of them Celia sat at an iron table set for two.
"Caroline. How good of you to come."
She stood to say it. She poured, and the tea was wrong for her house, wrong in the best way: a paper tag on a string, orange pekoe, the kind that comes in a box of a hundred.
"Gideon mentioned once that it was your favorite," she said. "I thought you should have what you like."
He had told her that in 2020, over a plate of fries on a dock. I had not known he'd said it to anyone.
I did not touch the cup. "I want the complaint withdrawn. You get nothing from me."
"May I see it?"
I took the pad out and opened it to the page. I held the cover with both hands, my thumb pinning the spine. Celia leaned in and read, and I watched her lips move once, at the number.
"You translated it," she said. "Accurately, I think." She sat back. "I was very clear, wasn't I."
No flinch. She might have been looking at a menu.
"Call him," I said.
She did not argue. She took out her phone, set it on the table between the teacups and pressed one name. It rang twice.
"Celia." Draycott, bright and a little breathless, a man who answered everything on the second ring.
"Draycott, you will withdraw the board complaint against Miss Kerr first thing tomorrow morning. Nine o'clock, I think."
A pause, one beat long. "Of course. Is there anything else?"
"That will do."
The line went dead. It had taken eleven seconds. I had spent a day and a half and a drive to Penhallow Point to learn what a woman can do with eleven seconds, and my stomach went cold, because things this easy always have a bill attached.
"Now," Celia said, pleasantly. "My price."
"I said nothing from me."
"You said a great deal. Hear mine." She folded her hands. "One hour at Beatrix's party on Saturday. Three to four. I will be her grandmother, in public, with you watching every minute."
"No."
"Caroline." No heat in it. "The review is in my hands, whatever Draycott files. Two of the three board members were seated on my vote. And there is a reporter who has been very patient with me about a certain photograph." She lifted her cup. "I would not need to raise my voice."
I looked at the lemon trees. I counted fruit, eleven of them, because I count when I am being taken apart.
Eleven. Bea's list. Number eleven was Gideon.
"One hour," I said. "I am standing beside her the whole time. You do not take her anywhere, you do not tell her anything about towers, and when the clock says four, you leave."
"Agreed."
"Why?" It came out smaller than I'd planned. "Why do you want it?"
She was quiet long enough that I thought she wouldn't answer.
"I have watched her grow up from a distance, Caroline. I paid for the privilege." She set the cup down without a sound. "She is public now. A Thorne will be raised as one."
"Watched her how?"
Celia only looked at me, and refilled my tea.
I had braced for a lot of things. I had not braced for the rest of it to come out of me, but it did, there among the lemons, with the original pad still clamped under my hand.
"That summer," I said, "I was twenty-one. I was carrying trays at a yacht club and he was the only person who ever asked what I was typing in the margins of my menus. He learned my shorthand. He wrote me a note in it, badly, and it was wrong, and I kept it anyway." My voice broke on the next part, so I typed the rest in my head instead of saying it, and then I said it anyway. "It was the only time in my life anyone looked at me like I was already somebody. And you priced it. You priced it in an afternoon."
Celia did not interrupt. For once, nothing in her face was arranged.
"Yes," she said. "I did."
I stood. The chair scraped. I put the pad into the bag, zipped the pocket, and told myself that the hour was a thing I could survive.
"Wait."
She had gone to a sideboard under the tallest tree. She opened a drawer and took out a small box, velvet gone bald at the corners, and for a moment she held it against her coat like something that might be taken.
"Take it," she said. "I should have given it back to you five years ago."
I should have said no. I took it. The hinge was stiff. Inside, on a faded satin bed, sat a ring with an old-cut stone, yellowed gold worn thin by somebody's hand.
"His grandmother's," Celia said, and her voice had gone strange, low and unhurried and nearly tender. "He was going to give you this on the first of September, 2020. He asked me how he should do it."
The stone caught the light and threw it across my knuckles.
"I told him you'd gone."