"Tell me about Sabrina," said Elizabeth one night, propping herself up on her hand.
David winced. "Aw, honey. I'm pretty sure I've told you everything already. You want to spend our first night this week that you're not on call talking about the closest my brother has ever come to personal scandal?"
Elizabeth merely shifted positions and looked more interested.
"All right." David set aside his water glass and plumped up his pillow as he turned to face her. "First off, you need to know that Sabrina's a wonderful girl, and absolutely nothing that happened — almost happened — was her fault. She grew up just across the lawn from me, but I barely knew she existed …"
For all his faults, David was a gifted talker. He dove into what little he remembered of Sabrina as a child and occasional playmate, before segueing into her transformation in Paris and the chain reaction it had triggered among the Larrabees as neatly as if it had been a movie. The increased span of time since then had given him some new insights he didn't know he had until he said them aloud.
Elizabeth knew about his fickle affections well before they married, so the part he'd been most dreading to rehash — the obvious way he'd fallen for Sabrina right in front of Elizabeth's parents — merely elicited an eyeroll.
"So," he concluded with a sigh, "I don't know where she is today. I mean, obviously she left the house, but beyond that, it's like the staff is keeping omertá. Can't say I blame them. Linus and I both treated her like …" David gestured fruitlessly.
"Like a pawn?" Elizabeth suggested.
"Well. That's how Linus treats everybody. Even if he likes them. No, I was worse, I think. I treated her like a distraction. Like the channel you flip to so you'll have something to watch until the commercials are over on the channel you're really interested in."
A narrowing of the eyes showed that Elizabeth didn't think too much of David's attempt to disarm her with flattery.
"I know. You told me this the day you called me to your office instead of taking Linus' tickets and going after her."
"And you told me, 'sorry is as sorry does,'" David reminded her. "How am I doing?"
She let him dangle in suspense for a moment, coolly appraising him at arm's length, before relaxing against his side. "You've surpassed even my expectations," she reassured him quietly.
He basked in her approval until his cell phone rang.
"Seriously?"
"I'm sorry, honey, I forgot I had it in my jacket pocket," David groaned. He scooted off the bed and fished the phone out from among the folds of fabric piled in his armchair. "There's only about three people who have this number. I better answer it. It might be an emergency." He extended the antenna and lifted the cover. "Yeah."
"David. I want you to review the yearly cash flow at the Manchester Evening News. Plug the holes, cut the dead wood, and allocate whatever surplus you find to employee salaries."
David lowered the phone slowly and stared at it.
"David."
"Linus, I am in bed with my wife," he emphasized, matching Elizabeth's askance expression.
"Must not be too exciting. You picked up."
"Yeah, cause I thought someone might be dying, Linus. And since when do we own the Manchester Evening News? Never mind, I don't want to know the answer to that. Sure, I'll — I'll request those reports in the morning. Go to bed."
Linus started to rumble something sarcastic in response, but David clapped the phone shut and carried it out of the room and across the house.
"I am calling an emergency meeting of the board, with or without him, and we are tying him to a massage table in Tahiti if it's the last thing any of us do," David fumed as he re-entered the bedroom.
Elizabeth was half-sitting on the edge of the bed with one foot on the floor, scribbling in a notepad.
"Oh, now don't tell me you're working too."
"What does Linus want with a news outlet in Manchester? I've never heard him mention it before."
"I don't know, he just said for me to clean up their accounts and try to raise wages with the extra cash."
"Interesting. I'll ask Dade about that." She made another note.
"Who?"
"Your webmaster. He has the listserv of all employees of all Larrabee affiliates."
David nodded slowly, realizing. "You want to find out whose salary he's trying to raise."
"Think about it, David. Is it like Linus to pick an entire division, or an entire subsidiary, and just throw his hand out and say, 'Raises for everybody'?"
"No, it's not," David agreed. "He leaves that up to the division managers. The only time he gets involved is if there's a partic … ular employee."
They raced for the bedroom door, but only ended up colliding with each other and it.
"Tomorrow," Elizabeth laughed, slumping against the door.
"Good idea."
The beads of rain on the bus windows every morning were gray, and so was the world beyond them. Sabrina contemplated this with a rueful grin. She'd spent two years in sparkling, rose-tinted Paris trying to get over David. Now here she was in gray, ironic Manchester, and doing little better at leaving Linus behind. Maybe this process wouldn't take so long if the places she chose to convalesce were less reminiscent of the men she'd come there to forget.
It was less painful to focus on the surprising parts of her new life. She was surprised by how much she enjoyed covering the music circuit, never having paid much attention to the pop, underground, or experimental scenes before — essentially, anything people her age listened to. Handbills for Puressence, Urban Cookie Collective, The Charlatans, N-Trance, Elbow, Primal Scream, The Outfield, New Order, The Verve, Oasis, Moloko, Mr. Scruff, 808 State, Rae & Christian, Electronic, Dub Pistols, Sleeper, Black Grape, and Take That cluttered one wall of her flat's front room. If she thought a new band might make it big one day, she drew a little star in the corner of their flyer.
She was intrigued by how much the old and the new were intertwined here. Paris was all old, Manhattan was all new, and the North Shore was somewhere outside time; but the brick row houses, timber-framed pubs, and glass-fronted shopping centers of Manchester almost looked like they'd grown up together.
The chaotic mélange of garish clothing that surrounded her made Nicola's style tips seem positively grandmotherly. It was like one of Vogue's more fanciful photoshoots had escaped the set and permeated the city. Sabrina's elegant Paris clothing started to spend more time in her closet on the days she worked away from the office.
Other surprises were not so enjoyable. Sabrina's new boss showed her a map of the city on her first day, pointed out Moss Side and several surrounding neighborhoods, and informed her that she was never to go there without her reporting partner, Dez, no matter how good the scoop was.
Dez was a veteran of the eighties skate scene. He took her to the outskirts of some of those places later, pointing out where he or one of his mates had had a particularly good wall grind or nasty wipeout. Her obvious shock at the poverty they encountered led him to pause their tour and threaten to tie her camera strap around her head so her jaw would quit dropping. She began to wonder if she'd only ever seen the "nice" parts of Paris, or if the homelessness in Manchester was truly in its own league.
"It's mental like," Dez agreed. "Dodgy blokes in every ginnel, and Council can't be bothered. You've gotta look dead sharp."
"I understand most of what you're telling me," said Sabrina.
"Ya poor toff. Well time for us to peg it, la."
Sabrina laughed and pestered him all the way back to Chadderton until he admitted he'd been overdoing the slang just to confuse her.
She had him and most of the office charmed before long with her soft manners. Her own experimental forays into Mancunian met at first with uproarious laughter; but eventually she could greet the news that her favorite chippy had closed for the night with an "absolutely gutted me" and no one did a double take.
The number of rough sleepers and people trying to skulk out of sight in the less savory parts of the city still continued to trouble her. She combed the society pages, looking for mentions of charitable efforts directed toward this issue. While trudging home with her four bags of groceries one day, she spotted a flyer on a church gate that urged those facing homelessness to contact Crisis at the number provided.
That sounded promising. She set all her groceries down on the sidewalk (and got called a "barmy bird" by a passing motorist for it) so she could copy the phone number into her pocket notebook.
It only occurred to Sabrina after she'd gone fifty more steps to the stairwell into her building that she could have taken her groceries inside and then come back down to get the number. Ah, well. A good reporter never missed a moment.
