Union Atlantic Page 0,96

shotgun being fired. Woke me right up. You used to climb this tree, do you remember?"

"Charlotte. We're supposed to be there in twenty minutes. Wouldn't you like to change first?"

She set her clippers down. Crushed and rotting apples lay all about her on the grass.

"This was the tree you wanted to build your fort in, but Mommy thought it would be an eyesore. Which is why you built it down by the river. Did I tell you there were still planks of it left when they cut down the woods? The dogs and I went by it every morning."

"No, you didn't mention it," he said. "We really should be going. I've got the car here waiting."

"I have an idea. Why don't we go for a walk? There's something I want to show you."

"We don't have time."

"It'll only take a minute."

Closing his eyes momentarily, he tried to marshal his patience. Every hour counted at this stage of the crisis. The markets were relentless, the system more fragile than most people imagined. Duty called now more than ever. But Charlotte ... she had something to show him.

And so he followed her, around the far corner of the house, past the woodshed and into the garden. For years, she'd maintained the bushes and flower beds and small trees that their grandparents had planted. Recently, however, her attention had wandered. Thistle had taken root along the foot of the evergreen hedge and the beds were covered in ground ivy. A bench where his father used to sit and read the paper on August evenings rotted at the edge of the path down which they walked now toward the rear of the garden.

Henry wanted to be gone from here, once and for all. To be done, at long last, with the decay of this place. How Charlotte could stand living here all these years, he'd never understood.

When they reached the field at the back, Charlotte led him down the far side of the hedge, through the dead grass, and came to a stop in front of a skeletal bush six or seven feet high and quite wide, a collection of upright, arching branches, its leaves and flowers long since gone.

"What is it?"

"It's a lilac," she said. "The funny thing is, after all this time, I only discovered it a few years ago. It had been hiding here behind the hedge. It's the same shape as the one we had at home in the yard. In the springtime, don't you remember? You used to love to play inside it. To chase me. To listen to me sing."

How insupportable, he thought, to remember in the way she did. The present didn't stand a chance against such a perfectly recollected world.

Just then, to his shock, Charlotte stepped toward him and taking his face in her chapped hands touched her lips to his. Smiling, her watery gray eyes impossibly close, she said, "I'm not going to visit that place, Henry."

He tried to speak but she put a finger to his lips. "Listen. My life here, it's not your fault. And I want you to know, I don't regret it. None of it. I want you to understand that. I know I haven't made it easy on you. That I've been a burden at times. But I'm all right. And listen ... Daddy, he would have been proud of you. Strange to say that after all this time, but it's true. He would have been proud."

"There's no need to be maudlin," he said, stilling a tremble in his throat.

"You sound like me ... We've done all right, the two of us," she said, squeezing his arm. "We have."

His phone rang in his jacket pocket.

"It's okay," she said. "These people - they need you. Go ahead."

"This is not the end of this. You can't stay here."

"I know," she said, turning them back toward the garden. "I know."

AT JUST AFTER six o'clock that evening, Henry stepped from his cab onto Liberty Street and passed through the black gates of the New York Fed. Upstairs, in a conference room, his team had assembled and were already well into discussions with the exchange authorities in Hong Kong and Osaka. On Henry's instructions, the Bank of Japan and the Japanese Ministry of Finance had been notified of the likely sell-off of Atlantic Securities' massive position in Nikkei futures. Meanwhile, the head of open-market operations in New York was reviewing plans for the coordinated provision of domestic and international liquidity in the event it was needed