CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
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ADRIAN
Luca stood between me and the stairs with a wrench in his hand. The shop behind him was dark. Tuesday morning, and the first man I saw had already decided I was not getting past him.
“Move,” I said.
“No.”
He had never said it to me that way. No warmth, no argument waiting behind it. His left shoulder had nearly healed. He could have lifted that wrench with either hand now.
“You came up after midnight,” he said. “Stood outside her door. Went away.”
“I went to the roof post.”
“She heard you leave. Didn’t sleep after.”
I had stood there wanting in. Not because of Marcus or Luca. Because she had asked them to stay and had not asked me. That was a thing a man could survive without turning it into somebody else’s problem.
I had made it one anyway.
Bex came out of the passage with a crate against her hip. “Lock plate on the public cage door’s been turned over and put back wrong. Also somebody tied a Crane courier tag to the northeast post. Inside.”
“Keep it. Don’t clean the screws.”
“Already photographed. And before anybody asks, Victoria’s upstairs. Dressed. Not answering me.”
She kept walking. For once she had no joke to put between us and the room.
Marcus laid the drop-cage sheet on the long table. Beside it he put a copy of the old watch rota.
“I asked the depot about the guarantee,” he said. “They sent me to our archive. Funny place to find an answer about your courier.”
“She isn’t my courier.”
“No. She’s a woman you recognized in June.”
Luca’s grip changed on the wrench.
I looked at the rota. My father’s initials. Mine beneath them. A red line through the last assignment, dated five years ago.
“How long were you going to let us work around this?” Marcus asked.
“I’m telling her.”
“Then tell her. Don’t hand her another hour to be frightened in while you find a version you like.”
He picked up the file, not the rota. He left that on the wood for me.
Shouting would have been a negotiation. Marcus had stopped negotiating.
Luca crouched and laid the wrench flat on the bottom tread.
“Eleven years,” he said. “I’ve never had to wonder what you meant. Thursday I put myself between her and a nail because I knew what I wanted. You knew more than I did, and you let me stand there without it.”
“You’d have gone anyway.”
“That’s the part you keep using as an excuse.” He straightened. “You swore to the book. Not to a man. Not even to yourself.”
I went to the roll-up. Karim stood in the wet with his collar turned up.
“Gate stays shut,” I started.
Luca was still behind me. He said nothing.
I could hear the rest of my order before I said it. It doesn’t open when she asks. Make the fence do what I cannot make a woman do.
“Gate watch stays doubled,” I finished. “Anybody leaving gets an escort. Nobody gets dragged back.”
Karim nodded and went.
Her scent came down before she did. Then the boots on the turn of the stairs, one lace dragging, and Victoria with the wall behind her, stopping where she could see all of us.
Marcus came back in from the yard. Luca moved to the parts window. Neither of them offered to leave.
“Okay,” she said.
I had commanded men in rooms where a wrong word got somebody killed. I had never been more afraid of a woman waiting for one right sentence.
“The Sable Room,” I said. “June. You came in with a woman in a green jacket. Black coffee. You chose the end stool because it faced both doors.”
She went still.
“I knew the bond then. I knew your surname when Bex called across the room. I let you walk out.”
“You told me you knew before Tuesday. How far before was the part you wouldn’t say.”
“Yes.”
“Three months.”
“Yes.”
“Then tell me why there’s a rota on that table.”
I picked it up. The paper was thin. I could see my hand through it.
“Our grandfathers watched the Russo house. Two men each night, from nineteen seventy-four on. Your grandmother knew the old men. She did not know every change of shift. After she died, my father kept trying to find the family.”
“She died in seventeen.”
“I know.”
“Eight years ago. I was nineteen. I was right there.”
“And our file said you’d gone west with your mother’s people. Your grandmother had given us an address that stopped forwarding mail. She wanted you outside the work.”
Victoria looked at the red line on the rota.
“In twenty-twenty my father died,” I said. “I stopped the watch.”
“Because you couldn’t find me.”
“That was the reason I put on paper.”
Her hand went flat on the rail. I had watched that hand steady a bowl, a book, another man’s chest. It did not shake for me now.
“What was the real one?”
“I was tired of the job costing us men. My father died still trying to finish it. I wanted to be the president who brought people home.”
“So you decided there was nobody left worth looking for.”
The words hit harder in her voice than they had in mine.
“I decided the line was finished. It was easier than admitting I’d stopped trying.”
Luca let a breath out at the wall.
“And in June?” she asked.
The compressor cut off. Every sound in the room belonged to us.
“In June I found out I was wrong. About the line. About being finished. About what I could look at and walk away from.”
“Then you had three months to fix it.”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t.”
“No.”
“Why?”
Because my father would have been right about me.
Because I had built a whole presidency on the version of myself who did not need that watch.
Because the one woman I wanted for myself turned out to be the woman my family had sworn to protect, and I did not want either wanting or duty to tell me where to stand.
I gave her the ugly part, not the list that sounded like a defense.
“Pride. I wanted the choice to be mine. I pretended doing nothing was a choice that hurt nobody.”
Her mouth moved once. She swallowed whatever had been in it.
“I was alone in that elevator.”
“I know.”
“No. You don’t get to know it from a file. I was there. There was a man waiting for my name and nobody on my side of the table.”
Marcus looked away. Luca did not.
“I should have been,” I said.
“You should have told someone. It didn’t have to be you.”
That was the sentence I had earned. It did not have to be me. I had made myself the only man allowed to decide and then failed to decide anything that helped her.
She came down another step.
“Did you know the book was in the cage?”
“Not until Marcus proved it last night. I knew our charter backed the public storage agreement. I didn’t know that agreement had been sold.”
“Did you arrange the delivery?”
“No.”
She looked at Marcus. He shook his head.
“I checked his calls and the routing changes,” he said. “He didn’t arrange it. He hid something that could have stopped it.”
Victoria took that distinction without making it kinder.
“The chair,” she said. “The food. The way you put things in my hands when I count. Was any of that for me?”
“All of it.”
“You knew the chair in June.”
“I knew where you liked to sit. Not who taught you to look at a door that way. I don’t know that unless you tell me.”
She shut her eyes a moment. When she opened them, she was looking at the space beside my shoulder instead of my face.
“I wanted to believe you saw me.”
“I do.”
“You saw something you wanted. That isn’t the same work.”
I put my hand out. Six inches short of her wrist, I stopped.
She watched me take it back.
“Don’t touch me to make this easier,” she said.
“I won’t.”
“Don’t tell me to stay.”
I had the word ready. I kept it behind my teeth.
She came down the last steps and went past me, close enough to feel warm through my sleeve. I did not turn with her. Luca stayed at the wall, and Marcus moved to the open door, leaving her the whole width of it.
A bike started in the yard. Mine.
I went as far as the roll-up. Victoria sat on the Dyna with both boots down. She had taken the key from the board. The loaner stood beside it, smaller, easier for her to lift.
I wanted her off mine. I wanted her on mine. I wanted a hundred things, and not one of them was useful.
She shut the engine off.
“I’m taking my name off his freight,” she said. “That’s why I’m staying today. Not because you’ve fixed this.”
“I understand.”
“You’ll help Marcus. You’ll give us every document you’ve got. And when I ask a question, I get the answer, not a gate.”
“Yes.”
She got off the bike and put my key in my palm. Her fingers did not touch mine.
Then she took the loaner’s key off the board and put it in her own pocket.
The next sound out of the office was the typewriter.
She was not waiting for me to become a better man before she saved herself.