Chapter 4
Callum
Here is a list of things I have learned about Noor Abbasi in three weeks.
She eats almonds when she is stressed. Specifically, she eats them one at a time, from a tin with a hinged lid, and she chews each one twelve times.
I know this because I counted. I did not mean to count.
I was sitting across from her at the diner on Tuesday and she was on the phone with a difficult vendor, and her free hand was in the almond tin, and at some point I noticed she was chewing in a rhythm, and I started counting because I am the kind of man whose brain, when given nothing to do, will count almonds.
She is consistent. She is twelve every time.
I have not asked her about this and I do not intend to, because there are things in this world a man has the right to keep, and the chewing rhythm of Noor Abbasi when she is dismantling a tent vendor over the phone is one of them.
She taps her pen four times when she is thinking.
The pen is always the same — a black gel-ink rollerball with a slight indentation in the cap from where she chews on it when the thinking gets serious.
The four taps are on the desk, the table, the dashboard, the arm of a chair, whatever surface is nearest. The taps are evenly spaced.
They are the metronome of her cognition.
After four taps, she will either say something brilliant or stand up and refill her tea. There is no third option.
She goes completely still when she is about to say something cutting.
This is the most dangerous of her tells, because if you are not paying attention to her, you will not see it coming, and the cutting thing will land before you have time to brace.
The stillness lasts about half a second.
It is the kind of stillness an animal does before it strikes.
I have seen her do it twice in vendor meetings, both times to men twice her age, and both times the men have walked out of the meeting visibly chastened and still not entirely sure how it happened.
She has a small habit of touching her ear when she is nervous. She doesn't know she does this. I'm not going to tell her.
She drives with her hands at exactly nine and three, never ten and two.
She does not eat breakfast. She drinks tea instead and calls it breakfast. When pushed on this, she says, "Tea has antioxidants," in a tone that ends the conversation.
She wears a thin gold chain around her wrist that she touches sometimes, when she's listening to someone she's about to disagree with, and the touching is brief and I think it might be a thing she did with her grandmother once that has become, now, a thing she does when she misses her.
She uses Genevieve, the label maker, more than is strictly necessary. There is a label on the inside of her tea cabinet that says tea.
She is, in totality, the most precisely calibrated human being I have ever met, and I have spent three weeks sitting next to her watching her work, and I have, against every directive of my own self-preservation, fallen in something that is not yet love but is making serious arguments for the role.
I have told nobody this. I have, in fact, gone in the other direction.
When the brothers ask about her, I am breezy.
I am professional. I am all just doing my job, just running the assignment, just keeping out of trouble, and I think I am pulling it off until Tuesday morning when Havoc corners me at the coffee station in the compound and says, with no preamble, "Brennan. You have it bad."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"You have it so bad you can't see it."
"I'm doing the assignment."
"Brennan." Havoc is leaning against the counter with the careful patience of a man who has been married for nineteen years and has therefore developed an unholy radar for emotional avoidance.
"I have been in this club for fifteen years.
I have watched twenty-three prospects come through that door.
None of them — and I want to stress this, none of them — have come back from a vendor meeting with an event planner glowing the way you have been glowing for three weeks.
You're glowing, Brennan. You look like a candle. "
"Havoc."
"You look like a goddamn votive candle."
"Havoc."
"What's her name?"
"Noor Abbasi. You met her at the all-hands."
"Is she good?"
"At her job?"
"Sure, that. But also in general. Is she a good one."
I think about it. I take it seriously. Havoc has not asked me a frivolous question yet in two years and he is not asking one now.
I think about Noor on the phone with the difficult vendor.
I think about Noor at the dinner with the predatory client, walking past my bar seat with her chin up and the situation already managed before I could even stand.
I think about Noor handing me a folded napkin that said thank you, and the way she paused at the door of the restaurant on her way out, just for a second, just long enough to look back at me, and then continued.
"She's a good one," I say.
"Then don't screw it up."
"It's a working relationship, Havoc."
"Brennan." He puts his coffee down. He looks at me with something almost affectionate. "I have been at the all-hands. I have seen the way you talk about her at the all-hands. You're not even fooling yourself."
He claps me on the shoulder. He walks off. Mateo, who has been pretending to read a magazine at the next table, looks up and says, "She's cute, by the way."
"She is not in this conversation."
"I'm just saying. She's cute. I support."
"Mateo."
"I'm a professional colleague. You can confide in me."
"You are a patched member who dragged me out of a Dumpster six months ago."
"And? I have your trust now. We're bonded. Tell me about the event planner."
I do not tell him about the event planner.
I take my coffee and I leave the compound, and I drive to her office, and I spend the rest of the morning watching her work through a vendor crisis involving a permit that, it turns out, was filed under the wrong year by somebody at the Chamber and is now technically expired, and I watch her solve the problem in forty minutes through three phone calls and a personal visit to the Chamber that I am very glad I do not have to witness, and I think, while she is gone, Havoc is right. I am a votive candle.
The plan for the afternoon is a site walk-through at the Ember Falls fairgrounds.
We are checking the staging areas, the vendor footprints, the parking flow, the emergency egress routes.
I have been at the fairgrounds before — there's a fall festival every October that I worked as a prospect last year — and I know the terrain.
Noor has not. She arrives in flats, which I respect, and a navy blazer that is not labeled but is clearly her site visit blazer because it has the kind of slightly rumpled durability that her vendor-meeting blazers do not have.
We walk. I narrate. I tell her where the stages went last year and where the food trucks parked and where the porta-potties caused complaints because they were placed downwind of the pulled-pork tent, which is a mistake that the previous planner made and which Noor has, I notice without noticing, already corrected on her layout.
She nods at everything I say. She does not interrupt.
She makes notes on the tablet. We are working.
We are professional. We are exactly what we are supposed to be at three o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon in the third week of August.
And then I step on the sprinkler head.
I would like to be clear, for the record, that the sprinkler head was not flagged on the maintenance map.
I have studied the maintenance map. I asked the groundskeeper for the maintenance map.
I read it twice. The maintenance map shows the sprinklers in the eastern quadrant of the fairgrounds, where the lawn is.
It does not show the one rogue sprinkler that has, apparently, been installed under the gravel of the western parking lot at some point in the last ten years and was never updated on the map, and which has been waiting, the way a landmine waits, for somebody to step on it.
The somebody is me. The somebody is always me.
The sprinkler activates. It activates with the enthusiasm of a sprinkler that has been waiting ten years to do its job.
It comes up out of the gravel like a geyser, and it does not just dampen us — it drenches us, comprehensively, in a wide and powerful arc that catches Noor in the face and the chest and across the front of her tablet, and that catches me from the knee to the chin in a single sustained blast, and that continues, because apparently the sprinkler does not have an automatic shut-off and is on a timer, for a full ninety-second cycle.
Noor stands there. I stand there. We are both wet.
We are both stunned. The water is cold. The water is so cold that it makes my brain stutter and reset, and I look at Noor through the spray, and her hair is plastered to her face, and her blazer is several shades darker, and her tablet is — I think — totaled, and her eyeliner is doing a thing eyeliner is not designed to do, and I open my mouth to say I'm sorry and what comes out is, "I —" and the sprinkler chooses that exact moment to swing back across us, and it gets me directly in the open mouth, and I make a sound that is, conservatively, the most undignified sound a man has made in this fairground since 1987.
There is a long pause.
The sprinkler is still going. We are still being sprayed.
Noor is staring at me.
She has not moved.
She is, I realize, completely still, in the specific way she is completely still when she is about to say something cutting, and I brace, because I have earned whatever she is about to say.
What she says, in a voice flat as a slate, is: "Jinx."
"I am so sorry."
"Jinx."