Chapter 5 #2
"They're not contracts," he agreed. "They're consents.
Contracts are for the grey coat. He's very literal.
It's why he only ever gets eyes." He stood and dusted nothing off himself.
"I don't need you to sign. I need you to keep choosing him, out loud, four more times, which — forgive me — you're going to do, because you're in love and you're bad at hiding it from everyone except him. "
"Stop."
"You can refuse. Genuinely. It's available." He looked down at me. "Refusing means it stalls. Stalling means you both go under inside a year. That's not me punishing you. That's just what happens to two unarmed people standing in the middle of a road."
"What happens to you," I said, "if I refuse?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing."
"Nadia." He said it almost tenderly. "You keep looking for the place where I lose.
There isn't one. That's not a boast, it's the condition — I don't have a stake, I have a seat.
If you take it, that's a good ending. If you refuse and it stalls and the two of you go under inside a year, that's a different good ending, and honestly it's the one with better bones. "
"You'd prefer that one."
"I'd prefer whichever one I haven't seen."
"And you've seen both."
"I've seen a thousand of both," he said, and for the first time all morning there was something underneath it that wasn't delight. "That's the trouble with the job. You'd think it'd be power. It's mostly reruns."
"Why," I said. "Why any of it. You said you don't want anything."
"I don't."
"Then why."
He crouched down so we were level, and for one second there was nothing behind his eyes at all, no floor, and the fog stopped moving around us.
"Because fifteen years ago I told a nineteen-year-old boy a joke," he said gently, "and I've been waiting to hear if it lands."
Then he stood up, and he was a man in a suit again, and he tipped his hat.
"Give him my regards. Don't, actually. It'd ruin it."
He walked up the dock and past the boathouse and around the corner of it, and I got up and followed and there was fifty feet of open grass and a fence and nothing else, and I stood there in the wet for a while.
Then I went inside.
Trick was up, in yesterday's jeans, making coffee on a camp stove because the power was still out, and he'd found a bag of hard candy in a drawer and was eating it for breakfast like a criminal.
"Hey," he said. "Where'd you go?"
And I stood in the doorway of a stranger's kitchen and looked at the man I'd married eleven days ago, and I understood with total clarity that I had exactly one asset left in the world, and it was that he could no longer tell.
"Down to the dock," I said. "Couldn't sleep. Watched the fog."
"That's it?"
"That's it."
"Anybody out there?"
"A fisherman," I said. "Way out. Bad hat."
And he laughed, and handed me the coffee, and said, "Sounds about right."
"Bad hat how?"
"Silas."
"No, I need the hat, I'm building a picture—"
"It was one of those canvas ones with the flaps."
"Oh, that's a terrible hat."
"That's what I said."
"Fishing at five in the morning in a flap hat," he said, shaking his head, pouring. "That's a man with a story. That's a man who's had a conversation with a wife."
He believed me completely.
I watched him do it. I watched a fifteen-year professional take a lie out of my hand like a dinner roll and eat it without checking, and something in his face relaxed while he did it, the way a face relaxes when it's been holding a thing up for a long time.
That was the moment I found out how much time we had left.
Because sixty percent is a number that goes up.
I drank the coffee. It was terrible. I told him it was terrible, which was true, and he argued about it for eleven minutes, which was also true.
We cleaned the house before we left. That was my rule and I made him do it with me — dishes washed and put back in the right cupboard, blanket folded, rug straightened, candles down to stubs and thrown in the truck so nobody would count them.
"He's going to know somebody was here," Trick said. "There's a window out of the mudroom."
"He's going to know somebody was here. He's not going to know somebody lived here."
"What's the difference?"
"The difference," I said, wiping down a countertop in a stranger's house at eight in the morning, "is whether he tells the story as a break-in or as a haunting."
Trick stood in the doorway watching me do it.
"You're upset," he said.
My whole body went cold.
"I'm tired."
"You're upset and you're cleaning a house that isn't yours and you have not made a joke in forty minutes, which for you is a medical event."
And there it was — the thing I hadn't accounted for on that dock.
He couldn't read me anymore. Fine. But he'd spent fifteen years watching shoulders and hands and how long people take to answer, because when everyone believes you, the only entertainment left is watching what they do about it.
He'd built a whole second skill under the first one, and the first one was leaving, and the second one was still there.
"I'm going to be upset for a couple of days," I said. "That's the true thing. I'm not going to tell you why yet."
He considered that for a long moment.
"Okay," he said.
"That's it? Okay?"
"You said 'yet,'" he said. "I can work with a 'yet.'"
I nearly told him. Right there, in a mudroom, with a broken window and a bucket. I got about as far as opening my mouth.
Then I closed it, and we packed the tote of 1948 into the back of a hearse and drove south toward Cheyenne with the windows down.
And somewhere behind us, on a dock, on a lake, a man in a very good suit was crossing a fourth thing off a list and starting a fifth.