Chapter 15
I had watched a lot of things through glass over the years.
Windows, windshields, the reinforced pane at a bail bondsman’s office where a man once tried to explain to me why his brother-in-law’s truck wasn’t actually stolen.
Glass had always been a kind of neutral country between me and whatever I was documenting, a place where nothing that happened on the other side could touch me unless I let it.
That stopped being true somewhere around the third minute of Josie’s curtain being open.
I want to say I watched it the way I watched everything, cataloging, staying useful to some later report that would never exist because there was no client, no file, no invoice for this.
But I lost the thread of my own professionalism almost immediately, and what replaced it wasn’t the hunger I’d expected from myself.
It was closer to being handed a live wire and told I was allowed to hold it, which was worse, because a stolen thing I could have rationalized.
A given thing required me to be worthy of it in real time, and I didn’t have a framework for that.
She said my name once, toward the end. I saw the shape of it more than I heard it, the movement of her mouth through glass and distance, but I knew the word the way you know your own name shouted in a crowd, no confirmation needed.
I sat with my hands on the wheel and did not move toward the building.
That took more out of me than the two hours I’d once spent motionless in a drainage culvert waiting on a workers’ comp claimant to show his face.
When the curtain closed I felt it in my sternum. Permission had ended, and I did not get to reinterpret it in my favor.
I typed the text before I let myself think too hard about the wording. Curtain closed. Permission ended. Good night, Josie.
I put the phone in the console, started the engine, and drove home with both hands on the wheel the entire way, which I don’t usually bother doing on empty streets at that hour. Ten and two. Obey the boundary. Drive home. Don’t go back.
I didn’t sleep well. She had chosen it, on paper, in her own handwriting, and closed the door on her terms. In the dark of my Mason Ridge house, I understood that I had been treating information about Josie like something I’d earned instead of something she would have had to hand me.
My work paid me to watch people who didn’t know.
This was different. This had a face that said my name.
In the morning I drove to a coffee place two blocks from Rover Court instead of the drive-through I usually hit, and stood at the counter longer than the line required, trying to decide.
I knew what she usually ordered. I also knew, now, exactly what that kind of knowing was worth, which was nothing, if it wasn’t paired with asking.
I ordered her a black coffee anyway, because it was a reasonable bet and because showing up with nothing seemed worse, but I told myself on the walk to Rover Court that if she wanted something else, I’d go back out and get it, and that would just be the morning, not a failure.
I stood at her door for longer than I needed to before I knocked.
I thought about the window I’d already gotten in through once, the bedroom latch that gave if you knew where to press, and set that thought down deliberately, the way you’d set down a weapon you’d decided not to carry into a room.
I knocked instead, two knuckles, unhurried, and stood back half a step so she’d have room to open the door without me looming in the frame of it.
She opened it in a T-shirt and sleep-mussed hair, and her eyes went from my face to the two cups in my hands and back to my face.
Her mouth did something small and unguarded before she caught it, before whatever she usually let people see slid back into place, and I realized that was the part I had no practice reading.
Not her. The half-second before she decided how to look.
“You knocked,” she said.
“I didn’t want to guess wrong about whether that was still allowed.”
“It’s always allowed. Knocking’s not the same as the window.” She stepped back and said, “Caleb. Come in. You brought coffee. I’m not going to make you drink it on the landing like a delivery driver.”
I came in and set the cups on her counter. “I got you black, no sugar. That’s what you usually get. If it’s wrong today, tell me and I’ll go back out.”
She picked it up and wrapped both hands around it before she’d even tasted it. “It’s not wrong. But I noticed you said it like that. Usually isn’t today. That’s new.”
“I minded that I wanted to,” I said. “For what that’s worth.”
“It’s worth quite a lot, actually.” The corner of her mouth moved, quieter than the smile she gave the world.
“You left when the curtain closed. A lot of men would’ve found a reason to knock five minutes later.
Forgot something. Wanted to check on me.
You didn’t do that. You just left. And then you showed up with coffee and knocked instead of walking in with your certainty that I wouldn’t mind. ”
I drank my coffee instead of trying to answer and watched her fingers stay curled around the cup longer than the heat required.
“I want you to beta-test The Night Train,” she said, after a while, setting her cup down with the decisiveness she used when she’d already made up her mind before the sentence started.
“Dani and I need a fresh set of eyes before the launch, someone who hasn’t watched me build it.
You notice things nobody else notices. It’ll be useful. ”
“When?”
“Tonight, if you’re free. And it doesn’t count as a date.
I need that clear before you get any ideas about counting corners on me.
” She pointed a finger at my chest, not quite touching.
“If you cheat, if you use anything you already know about me to solve a puzzle meant for a stranger, I’ll see it.
I built the room. I built the pacing. I know exactly how long every clue is supposed to take a person who’s never met me, and I’ll know if you’re moving faster than that for the wrong reasons. ”
“I wouldn’t cheat.”
“You say that like a man who has never once in his life not looked something up first.”
“I’m asking you to believe I can be new at something,” I said, and meant it more than the sentence let on.
She studied me a moment longer, coffee cooling in her hands, and then she smiled, the real one, the one that reached all the way up into her eyes.
“Fine,” she said. “Come be new at something. Seven o’clock. Don’t be early enough to see the mechanism room.”