Chapter 12: What Tom Heard

The rumor took roughly two months to travel from the outskirts of Evan’s old life to the floor of the Mercer Industrial warehouse, which Robert would later decide was both an extraordinarily long time and no time at all, depending on which direction he looked at it from.

It started, the way these things generally do, sideways and small. A customer asked one of the younger sales reps, half-joking over the phone about a delayed shipment, whether it was true the wedding got called off because Grant “got a little too involved with the bride.” The rep laughed it off, said he hadn’t heard a thing, and then, being human, went and asked three other people whether they’d heard anything, which is precisely how a rumor stops being a rumor and becomes something closer to an established fact in a town of that size — not through malice exactly, just through the ordinary human need to know things that are happening around you.

By the time the question reached Robert’s desk directly, in the form of a phone call from a longtime customer asking, delicately, whether “everything’s alright with the family,” Robert had already rehearsed how he intended to handle it, because he’d been quietly dreading this exact call for weeks.

“Everything’s fine,” he told the man. “Private family matter. Appreciate you asking, but I’d rather not get into it.”

“Sure, sure,” the man said, in a tone that suggested he’d gotten exactly the confirmation he’d called looking for without Robert saying a single confirming word. “Just wanted to check in. You know how it is around here — folks talk.”

“I appreciate that, Hal.”

He used that same line eleven more times over the following two weeks, by his own rough count, though he stopped counting somewhere after ten because counting made it worse. He said it to customers on the phone. He said it, more carefully, to a reporter from the regional business journal who called ostensibly about the Fairlane expansion and worked in, almost as an afterthought at the end of the interview, a question about “some tension” she’d heard rumored within the family — and Robert had to sit very still in his chair and keep his voice level while he told her he wasn’t going to discuss family matters in a business interview, thank you, and could they get back to the expansion numbers. He said it to his own longtime employees, when they asked, gently, sideways, whether Evan was doing all right wherever he’d landed, because everyone in the building had noticed the youngest Mercer simply stopped showing up one week and nobody in management would say why. A woman in accounts payable named Sharon, who’d worked there almost as long as Tom had, asked Robert outright one afternoon in the break room, no sideways about it at all — “Is Evan okay, Bob? We all just want to know he’s okay” — and Robert told her the family matter line, and watched something in her face close off politely, the way a shade comes down without slamming.