Chapter 35: Finding Noah

Jonathan Cole moved faster than a man with his diagnosis had any right to move.

He was out of the diner and on the pavement before Damien had finished the call with the police and I was beside him and Damien was behind us and Rosa was standing in the diner doorway looking at the three of us with an expression that had moved beyond her usual comprehensive emotional range into something that had no category.

"Call me," she said.

"I will," I said.

Jonathan's car was at the curb. The driver, a young man with the particular careful blankness of someone who had recently understood that his employment situation was significantly more complicated than he had been told, was behind the wheel. Jonathan spoke to him through the window in a tone that was very quiet and entirely final and the driver nodded and got out of the car and stood on the pavement and Jonathan got into the driver's seat.

Damien looked at his father.

"You can drive," he said.

"On good days," Jonathan said simply. "Get in."

We got in.

Jonathan pulled into the November traffic with the calm confidence of a man who had driven in New York City for forty years and found its patterns comprehensible rather than hostile and I sat in the back with Damien and Damien's hand was over mine on the seat between us and I could feel the tension in it, the particular tightly controlled tension of a man doing everything in his power to stay functional in a moment that was testing every resource he had.

"Tell me where we're going," Damien said.

"A building on the West Side," Jonathan said. "Forty sixth street. I own it. I have owned it for twenty years. It is currently in the process of being sold as part of the restructuring of my estate." He paused. "Gregory Rearden has been managing that sale."

"Rearden has access," Damien said.

"To the building and the management codes and the security system yes," Jonathan said. "He has been using it as a staging point for the sale process." He navigated around a delivery truck with the unhurried precision of a man who did not believe in unnecessary agitation. "It is also where I kept certain documents. Personal ones. The kind that Rearden would have found useful."

"The guardianship document," I said.

"Among others," Jonathan said.

I looked out the window at the city moving past and thought about the name Jonathan had said at table six and tried to construct from the materials available to me how a name from four years of diner shifts connected to Gregory Rearden and Jonathan Cole and a guardianship filing and a woman who had come to an apartment door with a story about a gas leak.

The name was Angela Marsh.

She had worked at Rosario's for eight months approximately two years ago. A waitress like me. Quiet and competent and entirely unremarkable in the way of people who were not trying to be remarkable because being remarkable was not their current function.

She had left without notice one Thursday. There one day and not the next. Rosa had been annoyed. I had covered her sections for two weeks.

I had not thought about Angela Marsh once in the subsequent two years.

But Jonathan had said her name and it had connected something because I had a memory of Angela Marsh that I had not accessed in two years and that arrived now with the particular vividness of things that had been stored carefully rather than discarded.

Angela Marsh had sat at table six once on her break.

Not because table six was a particularly comfortable table or had any special quality beyond being the one the man from Rosario's past had chosen for his Thursdays.

She had sat there because she was meeting someone.

I had not paid attention to who. It had been a busy Thursday and I had my own sections and my own problems and a woman on her break meeting someone at a table was not something that required my attention.

But I had seen them.

A young man.

Dark suit.

The easy confident manner of someone whose background had not required him to develop uncertainty.

I had not known his name then.

I knew it now.

Gregory Rearden.

"They have been working together for two years," I said.

Damien looked at me.

"Angela Marsh worked at the diner," I said. "She was there when Rearden was building toward something. She was his access point into the diner environment. Into the people who worked there." I paused. "Into me."

Damien was very still.

"She was watching you," he said quietly.

"Before we met," I said. "Before the street. Before any of it." I looked at my hands. "Rearden knew your father was watching me. He found out somehow. And he put someone in the diner to watch from the inside."

"Why," Damien said.

I thought about it.

"Because if your father was watching me," I said slowly, "then I was going to end up in your life. And if I ended up in your life then I was a variable that affected everything Rearden was managing. The sale of the building. The estate documents. The guardianship filing." I paused. "He needed to know who I was before I became significant."

"And then I became significant," I said.

"And then the headline happened," Damien said.

"And suddenly a woman from a Bronx diner was in every newspaper in New York connected to the Cole family," I said. "And Rearden understood that the variable had become central. That I had access to you and to Noah and to Jonathan and to everything he was trying to control."

"So he used Angela," Damien said.

"He used Angela," I said. "To get to Noah."

Jonathan navigated the car through the midtown traffic with the same unhurried certainty and said nothing because there was nothing to say to the architecture of what we were describing that was not already self evident.

The car stopped on West 46th Street outside a building that was not remarkable from the outside. Mid century. Glass and stone. The kind of building that had once been significant and was now simply present, occupying its footprint with the patient indifference of structures that had outlasted several versions of their own purpose.

Jonathan turned off the engine.

We sat for a moment.

"How many floors," Damien said.

"Twelve," Jonathan said. "Rearden uses the eighth. There is a suite of offices up there that was used by my management team before they relocated."

"Security," Damien said.

"Managed by Rearden's access codes," Jonathan said. "Which he believes I do not know." A pause. "He forgot that I built this building. I know every system in it."

He got out of the car.

We followed.

The lobby was empty in the way of buildings that were in transition, cleared of their operational furniture, the reception desk a clean rectangle of paler floor where it had sat for twenty years, the security station unmanned. The kind of emptiness that was not abandonment but preparation. A building between one life and the next.

Jonathan went to the security panel beside the elevator.

He entered a code without hesitation.

The elevator opened.

We rode to the eighth floor in silence.

Damien was standing very still beside me with his hands loose at his sides and his face composed in the way it was composed when something was costing him everything he had to maintain and he was maintaining it anyway because the alternative was not useful.

I put my hand through his arm.

He covered it with his without looking at me.

The elevator opened onto a corridor.

At the far end a light was on.

Damien moved first.

I was beside him and Jonathan was behind us and we walked down the corridor toward the light and I was aware of my own heartbeat in a way I was not usually aware of it and aware of the ring on my finger and aware of the eight weeks I was carrying and aware of all of it simultaneously without any of it slowing my feet.

Damien reached the door.

He did not knock.

He opened it.

The office was large and largely empty. A desk. Two chairs. A window looking out at the midtown skyline doing its November thing. And on the floor against the far wall, cross legged with Gerald, his rabbit, who he had apparently brought from somewhere, sitting in his dignified lean against the baseboard, was Noah.

He looked up when the door opened.

He looked at me.

Then at his father.

"Daddy," he said. Not with distress. Not with the particular quality of fear that children carried differently from adults. With the simple direct recognition of someone who had expected this arrival and was glad it had happened when it had. "I told the lady you would come."

Damien crossed the room.

He crouched down in front of his son and looked at him with those dark eyes and his hands on Noah's face and Noah looked back at him with complete composure.

"Are you alright," Damien said. His voice was entirely steady. I understood what that cost him.

"Yes," Noah said. "The lady gave me crackers." He considered this. "They were not very good crackers."

"We'll get better crackers," Damien said.

"Gerald didn't like them either," Noah said.

Damien sat on the floor beside his son and pulled him close and Noah leaned into him with the natural ease of someone entirely unbothered by the architecture of what had just happened and entirely certain that the person beside him was the correct person to be beside.

I looked around the room.

Angela Marsh was not there.

Neither was Gregory Rearden.

But there was a second door at the back of the office.

Closed.

I looked at Jonathan.

He looked at the door.

Then he walked to it and opened it without hesitation and stepped into whatever was on the other side and Damien looked at me from the floor and I nodded at him slightly and he understood and stayed with Noah.

I followed Jonathan.

It was a smaller room. A back office. A desk with a laptop and papers and the particular organized chaos of someone conducting business that needed to not be visible from the main office.

Angela Marsh was sitting behind the desk.

Gregory Rearden was standing at the window.

They both looked up when we came in.

Angela looked at me with an expression that was not defiance or fear but something more complicated. Something that had lived with itself for two years and was not entirely comfortable with what it found there.

Rearden looked at Jonathan.

"Mr. Cole," he said. With the smooth composure of a man who had been in difficult rooms before and had survived them with his presentation intact. "I can explain."

"I know you can," Jonathan said simply. "You have always been very good at explaining." He looked at his lawyer across the small room with those dark eyes that were so much like Damien's and had, on this good day, the same quality of focused complete attention that missed nothing. "I am considerably less interested in your explanations than I was three weeks ago when I was not having a good day."

Rearden opened his mouth.

"The child is safe," Jonathan said. "That is the only thing that matters right now. Everything else is a conversation you will have with lawyers who are not me and in rooms that are not this one."

Rearden closed his mouth.

Angela was looking at me.

"I'm sorry," she said quietly.

"I know," I said. Because I did know. The same way I had known with Serena. Not the same situation but the same human mechanism. Someone who needed something and had been offered a way to get it that cost someone else more than it cost them and had taken it and had been living inside the cost ever since.

"Go home Angela," I said.

She looked at me.

"Go home," I said again. "Let the lawyers sort the rest of it."

She stood up.

She left.

Rearden looked at Jonathan.

"The filing will be withdrawn," Jonathan said. "Today. The documents you had me sign on a bad day will be voided. Every action you have taken using my authority without my informed consent will be reversed." He paused. "And your relationship with Cole interests of any kind is finished."

Rearden looked like he was going to say something.

He looked at the expression on Jonathan Cole's face.

He said nothing.

We went back to the main office.

Noah was on his feet now demonstrating something to his father involving Gerald and the baseboard that appeared to be a continuation of the sitting up versus leaning debate conducted in new terrain.

He looked up when I came in.

"Mia," he said.

"Hi," I said.

"Gerald found a good leaning spot," he said. "The baseboard is better than the doorframe."

"He's adaptable," I said.

"Yes," Noah said, with great satisfaction.

Damien stood up from the floor and looked at me and I looked at him and the eleven floors of a midtown building and a November morning and everything that had happened since six forty three on a Tuesday sat between us and also did not sit between us at all because we were on the same side of it and had been since a rainy street.

"Okay," he said softly.

"Okay," I said.

He crossed the room and kissed me once and I felt his hands at my face and the warmth of them and the certainty of them and Noah said from behind us "Are you kissing again" with the weary tolerance of someone who had decided this was simply a feature of the adult world that he was going to have to accommodate.

"Yes," Damien said against my mouth.

"Okay," Noah said. "Gerald and I will wait."

Jonathan appeared in the doorway of the back office.

He looked at his grandson for the first time at close range in the full light of a room rather than across a restaurant table in photographs or documents or the secondhand account of people who had been watching from careful distances.

Noah looked at him.

The loading thing.

The processing of new information.

Then Noah said "You have the same eyes as Daddy and Eleanor."

Jonathan went very still.

"I do," he said quietly.

"We all match," Noah said. With the serene certainty of someone who had assessed the available information and reached the obvious conclusion.

Jonathan Cole stood in the doorway of a midtown office on West 46th Street on a good day that he had used for something genuinely unselfish and looked at his grandson with those dark eyes that were bright with something that was not quite crying and was not quite not crying.

"Yes," he said softly. "We all match."

Noah considered him for a moment with those serious eyes.

Then he picked up Gerald from his baseboard lean and crossed the room and held the rabbit out.

Jonathan looked at the rabbit.

Then at Noah.

"His name is Gerald," Noah said seriously. "He's a leaner." He paused. "You can hold him if you want."

Jonathan crouched down to his grandson's level with the careful movement of a man who was being very deliberate about every physical thing.

He took Gerald with both hands.

He looked at him carefully.

"He seems very dignified," Jonathan said.

"He is," Noah said, with the profound satisfaction of someone having their assessment confirmed by a credible source.

They stayed like that for a moment. A man with eighteen months of good days and a boy with his whole life ahead of him crouched on an office floor in midtown with a rabbit named Gerald between them.

I looked at Damien.

He was looking at his father and his son.

The expression on his face was the one with the name I had finally found and intended to go on finding for a very long time.

Home.