Page 74 of The Night We Lost Him

She calls out to Sam. “Nora’s on for you!”

I hear his response coming at me from another room in their apartment, from an echoing distance. “Not a good time,” he says.

“Not a good time?” I ask, as though he can hear me. “Tell him to pick up the phone.”

“He’s walking out the door already,” she says. “Let me send you some inspo pics. Ten a.m. tomorrow at the brownstone, okay?”

Then she hangs up.

* * *

I sit at my drafting table, turning over everything Dr. Clifton said to me. Her suspicions, her uncertainty.

Her words to me: a story emerges. I learned the same early on in my training on how to think about building out a space. A column isn’t just a column. A pillar isn’t just a pillar. It doesn’t just have to interact with the rest of the building but also with the story of what the building needs to do. Who, at the end of the day, am I hoping the building will save? Who do I need it to hold?

I study my father’s will again, going back over the deed and property notes for Windbreak. What am I missing? Who was my father trying to save? Who was he trying to hold?

I zero in on Jonathan’s name on the bottom of several of the documents. Jonathan Reed, Noone’s general counsel, who clearly has access to everything. Jonathan, who is the only person with a legal obligation to keep that information privileged and private.

I shoot him an email anyway. I ask him to give me a call when he gets to the office, that I have some questions about Windbreak, about next steps for me to take possession. These aren’t the questions I have, but they are questions that he won’t try to avoid answering. Questions that, it seems, are in his fiduciary responsibility to try and answer.

Then I get on the subway and head to Austin’s recital.

When I get off at Bleeker Street, my phone buzzes. It’s Jonathan.

I walk toward Austin’s school as I listen to him say hello, listen to the false lilt in his voice.

“It’s quite straightforward,” he says. “You’re free to take possession of Windbreak when you are ready. Or if you’d prefer to explore selling, I can help you with a local real estate agent and prepare the sale from here.”

I have no intention of selling, but I also don’t want to get into that discussion. Because he’ll want to know what I’m going to do with a cottage across the country and I don’t have a good answer yet. I just know that I’m not ready to give up the piece of my father I seem to have held on to.

“Jonathan, was there ever anyone else?” I ask.

“How do you mean?”

I mean, who else did Windbreak matter to the way it mattered to my father? Who may have been there that night with him? Who may have been there because my father mattered to them in a way that was so deep and painful that it ended on the edge of that clifftop?

“I’m asking if it was always my father’s intention for me to get Windbreak or did that plan change too?”

He is quiet, his silence steely. And I wonder if I’m imagining it in the silence or if it’s actually there. The anxiety.

“Nora, I’m not really at liberty to go over the whole history.”

“Should I take that as a yes, then?”

I’ve arrived at Austin’s school. The auditorium doors are open, family and friends heading inside. I see Elliot racing toward the entrance from the other direction, still in his hospital scrubs, holding a present for Austin

“If it’s helpful to know,” he says, “your father always wanted to take care of you.”

“That’s not answering my question, is it?”

“It’s the best answer I have,” he says. “Your father wanted to do the right thing, for you, for your brothers. For everyone he loved. He was nothing if not loyal.”

A teacher comes out and starts to swing the auditorium doors shut. I click off the call and race inside.

It isn’t until the curtain goes up, Jonathan outside my grasp, that I find the question I want to ask. The question he didn’t answer. The question no one will answer.

Loyal to whom?

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