Chapter 10
Earlier that same Wednesday, before I wrote the dinner invitation, I parked across from Rourke Investigations at eleven in the morning.
Dani did not know I was there. I had told her I was running to the hardware store for extra tape, which was technically true in the sense that I did eventually buy tape, and I knew I would have to tell her the rest before the day was over.
We had a system now. I didn’t get to exempt myself because I had a theory and a parking space.
The building was a squat two-story professional block with a dry cleaner on one end and a tax office on the other.
Rourke Investigations occupied a ground-floor unit with blinds that stayed exactly half open, which felt, once I noticed it, like the most Caleb detail imaginable.
Not fully closed. Not fully open. A controlled amount of visibility, offered on his terms.
I told myself I was here to confirm an address. I was aware of how thin that was and chose to sit with the thinness instead of pretending it away.
He came out a little after eleven thirty with a woman beside him, sixty maybe, cardigan despite the heat, purse held against her stomach with both hands as people do when their hands don’t trust themselves not to shake.
She was talking fast, the words tumbling over each other, and I couldn’t hear any of it through my closed window.
I couldn’t read her face from that distance either, not really, not as well as I wanted to believe I could.
What I could see was this: Caleb stood with his whole body angled toward her, not glancing at his phone, not checking his watch.
He said something short. She wiped under one eye with a knuckle.
He said something else, and her shoulders came down, just slightly, the kind of small release a body gives when a held breath finally goes somewhere.
I didn’t know what had gone wrong in her life. I didn’t know what he’d told her. I only knew what I’d watched, which was a man who did not rush a frightened stranger, and I let myself hold that as exactly what it was, an observation, not a verdict.
Then he walked her to her car, three steps behind and to the side, the way you’d walk someone across ice, and stood there until she pulled out of the lot, and only then did he go back inside.
I sat there for another full minute before I trusted myself to start the car.
Not because I was afraid of him. Because I was afraid of how easy it would be to let one sidewalk cancel out one window latch, and I didn’t want to let anything cancel out anything.
I wanted to keep both facts in the same file, sitting next to each other, unresolved, for as long as it took me to actually understand what kind of man held both of them at once.
I had a file on this man. A real one, growing, methodical, dates and vehicles and a faucet and a spider relocated with what I could only call tenderness, and now this, a woman on a sidewalk who left steadier than she’d arrived.
None of it canceled out the fact that he’d broken into my apartment to fix a latch I hadn’t asked him to touch.
It just sat there next to it now. Dani, when I told her over lunch, did not share my capacity for nuance.
“You drove to his office.”
“I drove near his office. The car was already going that direction.”
“Josie.” She said my name the way she said it when she wanted me to hear the whole sentence that came after it even though she wasn’t going to say the rest out loud. Then she set down her fork. “You told me you were buying tape.”
“I did buy tape.”
“That’s not the part I’m stuck on.” She didn’t raise her voice.
That was worse, somehow, than if she had.
“We agreed on this. Documentation, and me knowing where you are when you’re doing something about him.
Not me finding out at lunch that you sat outside his office alone with no one aware of it. ”
“I know.”
“I need you to actually know it, not just say it so we can move on.”
I put my sandwich down. “I know, Dani. I should have told you before I went, not after. I’m not going to do the alone-and-unaccounted-for thing again. That’s not me being brave, that’s just me being a bad teammate.”
She studied me for a second, decided that had landed the way I meant it to, and let it go, a mercy I understood.
Then she pulled out her own legal pad, the twin of mine, because apparently we were both people who needed paper to feel like a decision had structure.
“Fine. We’re doing the dinner. Let’s do it like adults instead of like two people improvising a hostage negotiation. ”
We went through it at the counter of The Last Door with the register drawer open between us like a makeshift desk.
Dani wanted a call at seven fifteen and planned to be parked two blocks away with coffee and her phone, close enough to reach my door in ninety seconds.
“No candles,” she said. “If this goes bad, I refuse to have the incident report include the phrase tripped over ambiance.” I let that one go without a fight.
“You’re not actually scared of him,” she said, watching me write it all down anyway. Not quite a question.
“I’m scared of being wrong about him,” I said, which was truer than anything else I’d said all week, and she let that sit there without trying to fix it, because Dani had never once tried to talk me out of a feeling I was willing to name honestly.
She only fought the ones I tried to disguise as jokes, and the office thing had been one of those, and we both knew it, and neither of us needed to say so again.
I cooked at home instead of suggesting a restaurant, which I knew, even as I was deciding it, made a statement of its own.
A restaurant would have been safer in the obvious ways, witnesses and exits and somebody else’s kitchen knives.
But the front door mattered more than the safety of a public room, because a man who let himself into a bedroom through a window needed to learn, in his body, what it felt like to wait outside a door and be let in on purpose.
I wanted him to feel the difference between the two kinds of entry, and I didn’t think he’d feel it anywhere except right here, on my threshold, with me choosing the moment the latch turned.
I kept it simple. Chicken, a salad I overdressed and undersalted in roughly equal measure, and a bottle of wine.
I set two places at the small table beside the window that had carried every note so far, and found it faintly funny that we would eat within arm’s reach of the glass that had done all our talking for us.
I kept my phone unlocked on the counter, the way Dani wanted, and moved the pepper spray Rosa had given me two Christmases ago from the junk drawer to the drawer nearest the door. I did not think I would need it. I put it there anyway.
That night, I tore a fresh sheet from the legal pad and wrote it in the same block letters as always, no different weight to the pen, though my hand was not quite steady the way it had been for the smoke detector or the spider.
SATURDAY. SEVEN. DINNER. USE THE FRONT DOOR THIS TIME.
I taped it to the glass at the usual angle, stepped back, and looked at it the way I’d look at a prop before opening night, checking that it read clearly from a distance, that nothing about it could be mistaken for anything other than exactly what it said.
Two days passed the way two days do when you’ve made a decision and are simply waiting for your own life to catch up to it. I told Dani everything, in order, every time I thought about backing out. She talked me down from exactly one moment of panic on Friday night and did not gloat about it.
By Saturday, the chicken had one burned edge and I had run out of useful tasks. At six fifty I texted Dani: he’s not here yet, and got back I’m two blocks away, phone’s in my hand, followed a full minute later by go be brave, I’ve got the rest.
At six fifty-nine, standing at the counter with my phone faceup beside the salad bowl and my whole body strung tight as a wire pulled to its last inch of give, someone knocked once on the front door.