Chapter 32
thirty-two
Evie
Icome back into my body slowly enough that I have a choice about what to do with that information.
The first signal is sound. A man's voice somewhere above me, not loud, complaining about a phone he says has been dead since lunch.
A second voice answers from further away, dry, the consonants tighter, the kind of speech pattern that gets clipped through training.
A third sound underneath both, the low electrical hum of a fluorescent panel and the soft scrape of a chair leg shifting on bare floor.
The second signal is the chair I am sitting in.
Metal, hard, no upholstery. The edge of the seat bites the backs of my thighs where my dress has ridden up.
My wrists are not bound. My ankles are not bound.
The pose I have been put in is the pose of a woman who passed out in the middle of being asked a question.
The third signal is the weight against the back of my head, the dull pressure radiating from the base of my skull where something cracked me hard enough to take the lights down without breaking the skin.
My memory hands the moment back to me in pieces.
The conference room at the American Civic Trust quarterly briefing.
A side hallway I did not take by choice.
A door that was supposed to lead to a service stair and led instead to a loading bay.
A man behind me with a cloth and a smell that was not chloroform but was close enough that the difference does not matter.
Don't open your eyes. Listen first.
The closer voice is the one complaining about his phone. He's a little drunk on boredom. The further voice has stopped responding to him and is scratching on the table in a rhythm that sounds like a pen on a legal pad.
"—telling you, man, I been through every line in the donor file. There ain't nothing here she didn't already give her father's office. Receptionist data. Confirmation calls. She set up the rooms. She wrote the welcome speeches."
"Then she set up the rooms."
"Bro." The chair scrapes. "She's twenty-six. Look at her. Look. She has a TV face."
"I have looked at her."
"There's no way she doesn't know, sure. Fine. Maybe she signed something. But the names? She doesn't have the names. She wouldn't recognize half the men in those rooms without the place cards we just took off her desk."
"Stop talking, Marek."
"Why."
"Because she's been awake for about ninety seconds and you are a stupid man, and I would prefer not to start the conversation explaining to her why my colleague has been informing her of our priors."
A long, slow pause.
I keep my breathing even. I let one eyelid flutter the way an actual fainting woman's eyelid would flutter coming back. I let my fingers twitch in my lap. I let my head loll a half inch to the right.
The further voice has stopped flipping pages.
"Open your eyes, Evangeline."
I open my eyes.
The bare bulb overhead turns everything the color of old paper. The man across the table is in his forties, dark hair clean-cut, white button-down rolled at the sleeves, clean fingernails, legal pad open in front of him with notations in a hand so disciplined it looks typed.
The room he has put me in is concrete-floored, fluorescent-lit, one door at my back and one door in the far wall past the man complaining about his phone.
The complaining man is younger, thicker, wearing a polo shirt and jeans, and the phone has just gone back into his rear pocket.
The room smells like fertilizer and dry wood. There is no clock. There is no window.
The attentive one watches me orient. He does not introduce himself. He does not introduce his colleague. The slip the colleague made naming him Marek is the slip the colleague made and the attentive one is not going to repeat it.
"The disbursement schedule, Evangeline." He says my name the way donors say it at fundraisers, like someone who memorized a file. "Your father's foundation processed quarterly transfers through five different entities. You managed the donor relations calendar. Walk me through the approval chain."
I let my eyes fill. I let my hands twist in my lap.
I let my shoulders curve inward, making myself smaller, because men who ask questions in rooms with locks on the outside expect the senator's daughter to fold and I am the senator's daughter and folding is the easiest thing my body knows how to do.
"I scheduled meetings." My voice catches on the second word, a hitch that sounds like barely contained tears.
"I didn't approve anything. The transfers went through Patricia in accounting, and Daddy's chief of staff signed off on the disbursement codes.
I just, I made sure the donors had parking and name tags and the right cocktail preferences. That's all I did."
That's not all I did. I processed seven wire transfers with nonstandard routing codes because Daddy told me they were time-sensitive and I didn't ask why, because good girls don't ask why, because asking why means the smile stops working and the pride in his voice goes quiet and the hand on my shoulder lifts and doesn't come back.
I do not flinch at my own thought. I sit in the chair with my hands twisting in my lap and let the truth move through me and back out into the part of me that has been managing truths like that one for twenty-six years.
The attentive one makes a note.
"The seven donors who received private meetings at the Ardoin estate last November. We need the names, Evangeline."
I let my lip tremble. "I can try to remember."
I already remember. Every single one.
The attentive one's pen lifts off the legal pad. He waits. The silence sits between us and grows teeth.
"Try, please."
I close my eyes for a moment, the way a woman trying to retrieve a hard memory would close her eyes.
I let two tears get loose, slow, sliding down both sides of my nose at the same time.
They are real, partly. The base of my skull is throbbing in a pattern that makes my eyes water on its own, and I am letting the throbbing do the work my acting class would not have been able to teach me.
"Walter Ardoin." A whisper. "He hosted, so. Obviously. And. There was a Mr. Patterson. He always comes."
The attentive one writes. He writes Walter Ardoin and Mr. Patterson and waits for the next name. Walter Ardoin is dead and Mr. Patterson is the name of every other man over sixty in Louisiana. I have given him nothing.
"Who else."
"I think a Lassiter? Or a Latimer? I'm sorry, I—" I press my fingers to my temple. "My head."
"Take your time."
I take my time. I give him three more names that are either too vague or already in the public record.
The attentive one writes them all down because he is performing his part of the script too, the part where the patient interrogator builds rapport, gives the asset the experience of being heard, and waits for the asset to relax enough to volunteer the name she was holding back.
I am not going to relax. I am going to perform exhausted compliance for as long as it takes him to decide he needs to escalate or to leave the room.
Marek, behind him, has gone back to his phone.
He set it down on the table when he stood up earlier and slid it into his back pocket when he sat.
I watched him do it twice without looking like I was watching, because he looked at me when I cried and then looked away with the disinterest of a man who has decided I am furniture.
There should be more weirdness about that. The thought surfaces and surprises me. There should be more weirdness about how easily he's decided I'm not a person.
I file that too. I let it sit somewhere underneath the other things I am filing.
The light has moved.
When they brought me back into the chair, the bare bulb threw shadows to the left of the table.
Now those shadows stretch behind me toward the wall where Marek sat for the first three hours before he got bored and started pacing.
The shift means late afternoon, maybe early evening, which means I have been in this chair close to eight hours if I am reading the angle right.
I am not, mostly, reading the angle. I am reading my bladder, which figured out what time it was before my brain did.
"I'm sorry." My voice goes embarrassed, small. "I really do need the restroom again. I've been trying to wait, I just—"
The attentive one glances at Marek. Hawthorne, I have decided in the absence of a real name. The one to whom Hawthorne would have been a credible alias if he had given me one.
Marek exhales through his nose, done with this shift and not hiding it. "Make it quick."
The wobble when I stand is not theater. My legs have gone half asleep against the metal, and the room tilts an inch to the right before it settles.
I let it tilt me into the table the way an unsteady woman would let it, my palm flattening on the laminate next to Hawthorne's legal pad.
He does not move his hand to steady me. He watches my hand on the table the way he has been watching every move I have made.
"Sorry," I murmur.
"Take the corridor right. End of the hall."
I walk the same route I walked an hour ago, when I asked the first time.
Eight hours into the chair Marek had relented and let me up, and the route took me out through the door at my back, down a short concrete corridor with two bare bulbs in cage fixtures, past one closed door I could not see into, to a bathroom set into the building's southwest corner with a window high in the back wall.
I had used the toilet for forty-five seconds and I had not turned my back on the inside of the room for more than two seconds at a stretch and I had walked out having mapped the latch, the height of the window from the toilet lid, the eighteen-inch frame, the small hairline split in the bottom pane where the wood has warped, and the angle of the lockset on the inside of the bathroom door which is a push-button lock that engages from inside and disengages with a fingernail or a coin from outside.
I did not run. I came back to the chair. Because the first time you ask for the bathroom in a room with locks on the outside, you do not run. You come back. You teach them you are the kind of woman who comes back. You set the precedent for the second time, when you are not going to come back.
I walk the corridor now with my left hand pressed flat against my stomach in the universal gesture of a woman about to lose the battle with her bladder, and the wobble in my step is real and the embarrassed dip of my head is real and the second person inside me, the one who has been writing this scene from inside my chest for the last eight hours, is taking notes.
The route to the bathroom door takes me behind Marek's chair, close enough that I can smell his deodorant failing and see the phone he left face-up on the table next to his empty coffee cup.
I knew this when I asked the first time.
The phone has been face-up on the table for an hour.
The first time I went to the bathroom Marek's chair had been pushed in flush against the table and the phone had been in his back pocket.
The second time, three rounds of disbursement-code questioning later, he had stood up to pace and the phone had stayed on the table.
The third time, the time I asked just now, Marek had been deep in his feed when Hawthorne asked his most recent question and Marek had set the phone down again on the same spot.
Sixty-eight percent battery. No lock screen. I clocked the percentage and the screen state two minutes ago when Marek scrolled past a notification and the screen lit up bright. Both pieces of information are why I am now, finally, asking for the bathroom again.
My right hand hangs at my side as I pass the table. My left hand presses against my belly and both of them are watching my left hand because that is the one performing.
My right hand closes around the phone and slides it against my thigh in a single motion, the same motion I have used to palm business cards off tables at donor events since I was sixteen, thumb finding the edge and tucking the weight flat against my hip where my dress bunches. I keep walking.
My pulse kicks behind my sternum hard enough that I can hear it in my own ears.
The phone is already pressed against me under the fabric, invisible, and my left hand is still performing its urgent little dance against my stomach as I reach the bathroom door.
Marek has not looked up.
Hawthorne is writing on his legal pad. He does not look up either.
I reach the bathroom door.
I open it.
"Thank you," I whisper, the way a woman granted a small mercy whispers. I close the door behind me. I turn the push-button lock.
I lean my back against the wood and I let myself, for one second, feel my own heartbeat.
His hands would have done it the same way. Steadier, probably. Faster. But the same.
The thought lands and I close my teeth against the sound it tries to make in my throat.
Not now. Not yet. He is eighteen hundred miles away on a porch with his mother and I am here and the door I came through has a push-button lock that will hold for sixty seconds at the outside before Marek decides he is bored of waiting.
I open my eyes.
I look at the window.