Gabe looked around and back at Lou with uncertainty, smoothing down the new tie he’d been given and checking to make sure he hadn’t dirtied it. “This is the thirteenth floor, isn’t it?” he asked.

“It’s the fourteenth,” Lou replied breathlessly, speaking the words more out of habit and barely noticing what he was saying. He held his hand to his forehead, which was hot. “You got here so quickly…How did you, I mean…”

Gabe looked at him and waited for the rest of the sentence, his face perfectly expressionless, giving away nothing.

“Lou,” Alison hissed. “Your sister’s on the phone. Again.”

Lou didn’t respond, unable to tear his eyes away from Gabe’s.

“Lou?” Alison said a little more urgently. “It’s Marcia. About your dad’s seventieth party.”

Finally Lou managed to speak but still stood cemented to the floor. “Tell her I’m out.”

“But what about the party?”

“Tell her I’ll organize it. Or at least you will,” he said distractedly, finally able to move his eyes away. He reached for his coat. “Make sure you find out the date.”

“It’s the twenty-first. Same date as the office holiday party,” she whispered loudly, covering the handset.

“Change it then,” he said as he went into his office to pick up his briefcase, then walked back out while wrapping his scarf tightly around his neck.

“The office party?”

“No,” he said, wrinkling his nose up in disgust. “My father’s party.”

He caught Gabe’s eye and saw a judging, accusing look. Once again it stopped him in his tracks. “No, actually, don’t,” he backtracked quickly to Alison. “I’ll figure it out.”

Gabe gave him a curious smile at that.

“Okay, I’m off.” He finally broke his gaze with Gabe and power walked to the elevator, phone to his ear. Lou held Gabe’s cool stare as the doors closed and the elevator slowly descended. A few seconds later it reached the ground level, and as the doors opened Lou caused a jam as he froze at the sight before him. While irritated people trying to get off snapped at him to move, eventually pushing passed him, Lou didn’t even notice. He just stood there, staring at Gabe, who was a few feet in front of him.

Even as the elevator crowd cleared and headed out into the cold of the city, Lou remained alone in the elevator, his heart skipping a few beats as he watched Gabe standing by the security desk, the mail cart beside him.

Before the elevator doors closed again, trapping Lou inside, he slowly disembarked and made his way toward Gabe.

“I forgot to give this to you upstairs,” Gabe said, handing Lou a thin envelope. “It was hidden beneath someone else’s stack.”

Lou took the envelope and didn’t even look at it before crushing it into his coat pocket.

“Is something wrong?” Gabe asked.

“No. Nothing’s wrong.” Lou didn’t move his eyes away from Gabe’s face. “How did you get down here so quickly?”

“Here?” Gabe pointed at the floor.

“Yeah, here,” Lou said sarcastically. “The ground level. You were just on the thirteenth floor. Just less than thirty seconds ago.”

“I thought there was no thirteenth floor,” Gabe responded coolly.

“Fourteenth, I meant,” Lou corrected himself, frustrated by his gaffe.

“You were there, too, Lou.” Gabe frowned.

“And?”

“And…” Gabe stalled. “I guess I just got here quicker than you.” He shrugged, then unlatched the brake at the wheel of the cart with his foot and prepared to move. “You’d better run,” Gabe said, moving away, echoing Lou’s words from the morning. “Things to see, people to do.” Then he flashed his porcelain smile, but this time it didn’t give Lou the warm fuzzy feeling it had earlier. Instead, it sent torpedoes of fear and worry right to his heart and straight into his gut. Those two places. Right at the same time.

The Quiet Life

IT WAS TEN THIRTY AT night by the time the city spat Lou out and waved him off to the coast road that led him home to his house in Howth, County Dublin. Bordering the sea, a row of houses lined the coast there, like an ornate frame to the perfect watercolor, windswept and eroded from a lifetime of salty air. In each house, at least one window with open curtains twinkled with the lights of a Christmas tree. As Lou drove, to his right he could see across the bay to Dalkey and Killiney. The lights of Dublin city twinkled beyond the oily black of the sea, like electric eels flashing beneath the darkness of a well.

Howth had been the dream destination for as long as Lou could remember. Quite literally, his first memory began there, his first feeling of desire, of wanting to belong and then of belonging. The fishing and yachting port in north County Dublin was a popular suburban resort on the north side of Howth Head, fifteen kilometers from Dublin city. A bustling village filled with pubs and fine fish restaurants, it was also a place with history: cliff paths that led past its ruined abbey, an inland fifteenth-century castle with rhododendron gardens, and lighthouses that dotted the coastline. It had breathtaking views of Dublin Bay and the Wicklow Mountains, or Boyne Valley beyond; only a sliver of land attached the peninsular island to the rest of the country…only a sliver of land connected Lou’s daily life to that of his family. A mere thread, so that when the stormy days attacked, Lou would watch the raging Liffey from the window of his office and imagine the gray, ferocious waves crashing over that sliver, threatening to cut his family off from the rest of the country. Sometimes in those daydreams he was away from his family, cut off from them forever. In nicer moments he was with them, wrapping himself around them like a shield.

Behind the landscaped garden of their home was land—wild and rugged, covered by purple heather and waist-high uncultivated grasses and hay—that looked out over Dublin Bay. To the front they could see Ireland’s Eye, and on a clear day the view was so stunning, it was almost as though a green screen had been hung from the clouds and rolled down to the ocean floor. Stretching out from the harbor was a pier that Lou loved to take walks along, usually alone. He hadn’t always; his love for the pier had begun when he was a child, his parents bringing him, Marcia, and Quentin to Howth every Sunday, come rain or shine, for a walk along the pier. On those family days, Lou would disappear into his own world. He was a pirate on the high seas. He was a lifeguard. He was a soldier. He was a whale. He was anything he wanted to be. He was everything he wasn’t.

Yes, Lou still loved walking that pier, his runway to tranquillity. He loved watching the cars and the houses perched along the cliff edges fade away as he moved farther and farther from land. He would stand shoulder to shoulder with the lighthouse, both of them looking out to sea. After a long week at work, he could throw all of his worries out there, where they’d float away on the waves.

But the night Lou drove home after first meeting Gabe, it was too late to walk the pier. Driving past it, all he could see was blackness and the occasional light flashing on the lighthouse. And besides, the village itself wasn’t its usual quiet hideaway. So close to Christmas, every restaurant was throbbing with diners, Christmas parties, and annual meetings and celebrations. All the boats would be in for the night; the seals would be gone from the pier, their bellies full with the mackerel thrown to them by visitors. Lou continued on the black and quiet winding road that led uphill to the summit and, knowing that home was near and that nobody else was around, put his foot down on the accelerator of his Porsche 911. He lowered his window and felt the ice-cold air blow through his hair, and he listened to the sound of the engine reverberating through the trees as he made his way. Below him, the city twinkled with a million lights, spying him winding his way up the wooded mountain like a spider among the grass.