CHAPTER 18
Ana
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The sling lay folded flat on the kitchen table, beside a mug of coffee gone cold.
Nobody was in the room to answer for either one.
The window over the sink had whitened at its corners with the first frost of the year.
I looked at the black webbing and at the buckle he had not fastened.
After that I knew exactly where he was and what he was doing out there.
I took a coat off a peg on the boot porch, one that wasn’t mine and smelled of woodsmoke. The air tasted of cold mud, and the goldenrod along the fence line had been killed overnight.
Rian was at the well head with his left arm out of everything, working the handle with his right. Frost had furred the north edge of the well cap and left it pale as salt. He heard me coming and didn’t turn around, which from him counts as a greeting.
“I can prime a pump with one hand or I can stand here and be looked at,” he said.
“Put the sling back on and I’ll do the pump myself, badly, and you can supervise.”
He kept his hand on the handle long enough to make it his decision. Then he let go and stepped back, and the step cost him more than the shoulder had.
“Pour the jug down the top of it,” he said. “All of it, and then work the handle and do not stop.”
I poured, and then worked the handle while he stood close enough to be a nuisance. The metal was so cold that it read as wet.
“You’re pulling from the wrong angle and you’ll be at it all bloody morning,” he said.
“Then I’ll have all morning to hear about it,” I said. “Keep talking. It’s the one thing you can still do at full strength.”
He said something unrepeatable about my forearms. Far down under the yard the foot valve clunked once and then again, late, the way a sound climbs out of the ground long after you’ve earned it. Water came brown into the bucket and then clear.
I carried the sling out and he didn’t take it from me.
He turned a quarter of a turn so I could reach across his chest, and he let me do the buckle, and the letting was the whole morning.
His left arm didn’t rise above his shoulder while I worked.
We both watched it fail to and neither of us said so.
“It goes to about here and no further,” he said, showing me with the good hand. “Cassian told me that over a kitchen table. I have decided to hate him professionally.”
“Then we’ll find you work that lives below your shoulder,” I said. “You can be unbearable about the standard of it.”
The kitchen took us back in with the stove ticking and the smell of scorched coffee. I drank a glass of the water I’d pumped, cold enough to hurt my teeth, and it tasted of iron and of the bottom of the ground. Luca had made toast for five, which is his idea of an argument.
“Barn first, then the treeline, then the gate,” Cassian said. “The roof repeater goes last, because that one takes two of us.”
“He’s been saying the word barn like it owes him money,” Luca said.
“Nobody goes past the barn without telling me which direction they are going.” Cassian opened and closed his right hand once at his side, slowly, the burned skin gone tight in the cold, and he had no idea he’d done it.
“The repeater is the only voice we have. If it goes down, nobody leaves to fix it alone.”
“And the north side of the property, which none of you has mentioned once this morning?” Luca said.
“The northern fence line is walked in daylight and in pairs,” Cassian said. “Nobody walks it after dark. That one is an order.”
Matteo came in from the barn with a screen held against his chest. He put it down between the plates and turned it so all of us read the same thing at once. Then he stepped back to the wall, which is where he keeps himself.
“Two vehicles on the county road,” he said. “The same two, three times, same order.”
The screen showed four news feeds stacked on one another, and my face was on all four.
It was the headshot the firm took for the website, on a floor I’ll never stand on again.
My hair was up on the one pin I used to use.
Under it, in every one of them, sat the phrase person of interest and the name Wesley Pike.
I looked at her for a while. With no warning at all it came to me that I couldn’t remember whether I’d locked my apartment door on the last night I slept in it. I put my left hand in my pocket, found the soft torn corner, and pressed until the edge bit.
The repeater link opened and Sasha’s voice came into the kitchen, level and Estonian and entirely awake.
“Your photograph is on four wire services and it’s the firm’s own headshot,” she said. “Somebody handed them the file. That was a delivery.”
“A person of interest is not a charge, it’s a headline, and headlines are cheap,” I said. “The question is who this serves. A leak is somebody’s choice, and somebody paid for it.”
“Answer your own question,” Cassian said. “You do it faster than I can.”
“He wants me arrested rather than dead, because a defendant cannot be a whistleblower. A dead lawyer is a story somebody keeps writing. A charged one has a motive to lie.”
Rian moved until his back found the wall between the window and the door.
“Tell me about the detail on my mother,” I said. “Tell it to me the way you would tell a client.”
“Two on her street and one on the house, rotating, since the first week,” Cassian said. “She has never seen them and she will not.”
“And if somebody comes for her?”
“Then those three are what stands there,” he said. “I will not call it enough, because you would know.”
“Thank you for not doing that.” I turned to the wall where Matteo was. “Does any of this change the filing in a way that matters?”
“It changes nothing at all,” Matteo said. “The instruction fires on your token and on nothing else.”
The link clicked again, and Sasha was talking faster.
“Ana’s mother is on the Beacon line,” she said. “She has seen the photograph and she is asking for her daughter.”
My hand was already halfway across the table. Cassian’s hand came down on the wood short of mine, which was not a grab, and I stopped anyway.
“You cannot be a voice on that line today,” he said. “Whatever you say becomes something she carries alone in that house.”
“Do not stop there, since you have started.”
“She will hear that you are frightened whether you are or not,” he said. “Then she telephones somebody. That is what a mother does.”
“And every person she telephones is a door into this house.” I took the loss out loud, which is a courtesy I have only ever paid to judges. “Sasha, take the call.”
“Tell her something true that is not the whole truth,” I said. “Do not let her hear you choosing the words.”
“I will take it,” Sasha said. “Stay off the link and let me work.”
It went quiet for the length of a long errand. Luca put a plate in front of me and I ate it without noticing. Rian worked his split knuckles with his thumb, one and then the next.
Sasha came back on, and her voice had changed by about a degree.
“I told her you’re working,” she said. “I told her the photograph is a mistake and it’s being corrected.”
“And she took that from a stranger?”
“I said a lawyer she raised doesn’t get arrested on a Tuesday, and she laughed,” Sasha said. “I gave her a number and told her to use it for anything at all.”
“What did she ask you at the end of it?”
“She asked whether you were eating,” Sasha said. “I said yes, and that part was true. Then she thanked me and put the phone down before I could hear her stop being calm.”
I went out to the boot porch and shut the door behind me. The cold came straight through the coat. Past the barn a rook said the same thing four times.
Luca came out after a while and stood beside me, which for him is an enormous physical effort. He put his palms up, empty, the old habit that means he won’t manage me. I let him have the quiet for as long as he could bear it.
The warm part of the afternoon came late and lasted about as long as an argument. We took the table for it, the four of them and me, with the sun low and hard through the glass and the frost gone off everything but the north lip of the well cap. I’d been building the sentence since the porch.
“When this is finished I want a Saturday, and I want all four of you in a kitchen for it,” I said.
Cassian set his weight and did not move again.
“I want to buy vegetables I picked out myself and carry them in with my own hands,” I said.
“I want my mother at that table with her bad knee up on a chair, complaining about the drive. I want a door somewhere with my name painted on it and one client who is not any of you. I want to read a long document because it’s interesting and not because it will kill me.
I want to sleep with a window open and nobody standing at it. ”
“Ana,” Luca said, and then found that he had nothing to put after it.
“I am not asking to be kept anywhere,” I said. “I am telling you what I intend to keep.”
I moved the folded sling out of the space between us.
“I want my license, my own work, and the four of you, and I want to be the one who decides the order.”
“Then that is what we are protecting,” Cassian said. “Say it again tomorrow so I know it holds.”
“It will hold tomorrow, and it will hold in a deposition.”
“Which is a harder room than this one,” Luca said.
Rian laughed once and then made a face, because laughing pulled something. Matteo watched me from the end of the table with his hands quiet on his knees, and when I caught him at it he went on watching.
The light went gold and then it went. Rian stayed at his wall while the others cleared, and when the room had thinned to three of us he said it with no warm-up.
“I’d be no use to you tonight and I’d hate every minute of it,” he said.