12. Margot
MARGOT
Ilet him into the back room, which is the most naked I have ever been with another human being.
The back room is where I keep the version of myself that doesn't stand at a register and hand-sell paperbacks with a smile.
It's where Josie's ghost lives loudest, where the boxes I can't sort and the drafts I can't finish and the grief I've never learned to file all sit waiting for me to be braver than I am.
I have never once let a date past that curtain.
I have barely let Birdie. And tonight I hold it open for a man whose last name I still don't have, because he asked me over closing, in that low and level voice, whether I wanted a hand making sense of my grandmother's papers, and the yes was out of my mouth before my good sense could reach the door.
I tell myself it is research, and I am even telling the truth, technically, which is the most dangerous kind of lie there is.
There are papers. There is a next book that badly needs them.
But a woman does not put on the good sweater and light the second lamp and open the biscuits she pretends she keeps for customers because she wants help sorting receipts.
I have written enough scenes like this one to know exactly what it is while it is happening to me, and knowing has never once slowed me down by so much as a step.
He takes to the work the way he takes to everything, completely and without any visible effort, and inside twenty minutes he has turned my catastrophe of a back room into something with a spine. This offends me on a level I didn't know I had.
"You are alphabetizing," I say, watching him square a stack of paper that hasn't been square since another decade.
"I am sorting," he says, without looking up. "Alphabetizing is what comes later, once we know what we are holding."
"We do not alphabetize grief, Daniil. Grief goes in piles. Meaningful, load-bearing piles, arranged by a logic only I understand and could not defend under oath."
"That is not a system," he says. "That is a hostage situation."
I throw a balled-up receipt at him. He catches it without seeming to move, which is somehow the most alarming thing he has done all night, and sets it down, smoothed flat, on top of the pile where it belongs.
I have dated men who could not locate their own shoes in a lit room.
This one fields my grief left-handed and files it.
"Do you do this professionally," I ask, "or is terrorizing a woman's filing just a hobby?"
"I used to bring order to complicated situations," he says. "It is restful, after."
"After what?"
"After the part I do not talk about." And he almost smiles, the smallest possible admission that he has just told me something and nothing at all in the same breath.
He holds up a shoebox of Josie's receipts as though it has personally let him down. "These are not in any order."
"They are receipts, not a novel."
"Everything is in some order," he says. "People only pretend otherwise so no one can hold them to the order they chose." He says it lightly, the way he says most of the things that turn out, three hours later, to have been about something other than what we were discussing.
We work like that for a while, in the good kind of quiet, the kind I had forgotten a room could hold.
He doesn't fill silences, which means the ones we make together are actual silences and not two people idling until it is their turn to talk.
Every so often he lifts something out of a box, a matchbook, a train ticket, a photograph of a dog that has been dead for decades, and he holds it a second longer than sorting requires, and I understand that he knows precisely what he is handling, which is not paper.
It is a person's whole life taken apart, waiting to find out who will bother to be gentle with the pieces.
He is careful with every single one. I fall a little further with every single one.
Somewhere around the second pot of tea, I make the mistake of reading him a scene.
It's the one I've been stuck inside for a week, where my Bratva boss lets a man who has betrayed him walk out of the room alive. I am proud of the mercy in it. I think it makes him complicated.
"He would not do that," Daniil says, before I have even finished the paragraph.
"He's complex," I say. "He contains multitudes."
"He contains a bullet for that man, and the man is dead before the week is out.
" He sets down the folder in his hands. "Your boss is gentle on the page because you are gentle, and it shows, and it is the one false note in a book that is otherwise frightening in all the right places.
A man in that chair does not let betrayal walk out a door.
He lets it walk exactly as far as it takes to learn who else it has been whispering to. Then he closes the door."
"You said that like a stage direction," I tell him. "Like you have stood in the wings for it."
"I read a great deal," he says, which is the answer of a man who has just heard his own voice and did not care for what was in it.
I look at him for a long moment. "That," I say, "is a deeply upsetting note. It is also the best one anyone has ever given me."
"You asked."
"I did. I regret it. Do it again." And he does, taking my villain apart with a jeweler's patience and fitting him back together meaner and truer, and I sit on an upturned crate with a pencil clamped in my teeth and fall the rest of the way in, quietly, the way a building comes down, slowly and then all at once.
It is the strangest courtship I have ever heard of.
A man is editing my book about a dangerous man, and every note he hands me lands like it was written by someone who has been the note.
It's nearly midnight when I do the thing I know I will spend a long time turning over in the dark.
I trust him. I don't do it on purpose. Trust isn't a decision, whatever people like to tell you.
It is a floor you don't notice until you are already standing on it, wondering how you got there and whether it holds.
He has spent five hours being careful with my grandmother's paper and careful with me, and somewhere in those hours the last of my guardedness clocked out without asking my permission.
So when he asks, easy as breathing, what the coded notes actually are, I show him.
I pull down the Akhmatova with Mr. Vashin's faint little columns marching down the margin, and I lay it open on the table between us.
"This is the thing I kept babbling about.
The whole shop is lousy with them. Numbers, initials, half a sentence that walks off a cliff.
Josie's regulars left them, or she did, I honestly can't tell.
It's a code for nothing, which is the single most Josie thing in this building.
" I run a finger down one tidy column. "I've been strip-mining them for the novel.
It feels like robbing a grave. I do it anyway. "
He goes still over the page. He does that, the stillness, but this is a new altitude of it, the particular held breath of a man who has just found the one thing in a room he was promised would not be there.
"I know," I say, misreading him top to bottom, the way I will go on misreading him for exactly as long as it keeps me happy.
"They get under your skin. I have stared at these until the numbers started rearranging my dreams." He doesn't answer.
He is still looking at the page as though it has quietly said his name.
"There's more," I say, because I have never once known when to stop, and his attention is a controlled substance and I want the whole supply.
I dig out the fat first edition with the rectangle carved into its heart and shake the little brass key loose into my palm.
"Taped inside a book nobody has opened since the moon landing.
Forty-seven. A locker, I'm guessing. I haven't gone to find it yet.
I keep deciding to and then losing my nerve, which is not like me, or is exactly like me and I've been lying about it for years. "
He looks at the key in my hand a beat too long, and then he holds out his own, and I tip it into his palm before I can think better of it, the way I have given him every other piece of Josie tonight.
"Do not lose that," I tell him. "It is the only one there will ever be.
" He closes his fingers around it slowly, and the way he does it lifts the hair on my arms, and I hand the feeling to the late hour and the tea and the nearness of him, because those are easier things to hold than the alternative.
There is a rule I have kept without ever writing it down, which is that the photograph is mine.
Not Vera's, not the book's, not the internet's.
Josie between her two dangerous-looking men is the one piece of her I have never shown a living soul, because showing it feels like making an introduction, and I have been quietly afraid of who might turn out not to deserve one.
Tonight the fear simply isn't in the room.
That should trouble me a great deal more than it does.
And then, because I am all the way unlatched now, I show him the photograph.
Josie is in it, young and lit from the inside, laughing between two men in good dark coats.
On the back, in her slanting hand, are the words "Us, before everything," and not one name anywhere.
"This is my favorite object in the whole place," I say.
"It was taped behind a drawer that did not want to give it up.
Look how happy she is. Look at these two.
Don't they look like they know something the rest of us don't?" I mean it as a joke.
He takes it from me the way you take something with a pulse.
And I watch his face do the one thing I have never once seen it do, which is slip, for half a second, and let a crack show.
His eyes snag on the man with his hand at the small of Josie's back, and something crosses behind them, fast and old and gone before I can put a name to it.
"You know him," I say. It isn't a question.
"No," he says.
"You do. You just looked at a stranger in a photograph older than the both of us like he still owed you money."
"It is a good face," he says. "It reminds me of someone.
" And it's a lie. I can hear that it's a lie, the very same one he handed me on my own doorstep the night he rebuilt my locks, and here is the part I could never explain to Birdie or to a jury.
The lie doesn't cool me on him. It makes me want the truth so badly that I would stand this close to a liar all night to get at it.
He sets it down between us with a care that has nothing to do with what it is worth, and I reach to take it back, because it is the last of Josie I can still hold in my own two hands and I am not finished for the night.
There is something he isn't saying. It's right there behind his teeth, big enough that I can watch it press against the inside of his silence, and I have never in my life wanted so much to be handed a sentence a man is working this hard to keep.
Our hands meet over the photograph, the air goes electric, and instead of telling me the truth I can see burning in his throat, he kisses me.