CHAPTER 3
Domestic Architecture
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The oak tree outside the north-facing window had lost three leaves since the last time Ashley looked at it.
Three leaves. Two minutes. Approximately three hours of sleep, which was less than her usual and more than she'd expected.
Ashley lay still and decided what her protocol was.
The protocol took thirty seconds to establish in its main lines.
She was here. The contract was signed. The contract required her continued academic function, which meant her continued academic presence, which meant she needed to behave as though this were a temporary inconvenience in a series of temporary inconveniences — a fire alarm that had gone on a little longer than expected, a water main break, a maintenance issue. She would go to her two classes.
She would sit in her usual seat. She would do the reading, which she had already done. She would not explain herself to anyone who did not need an explanation.
What she would not do was perform distress she did not currently feel, or perform equanimity she did not currently feel, or perform anything at all for men who were presumably still asleep or still working depending on which man she was considering.
At three in the morning, on the way back from the bathroom, she had passed the third-floor study door and seen the light under it.
A thin rectangle of warm yellow light on the floorboards of the corridor.
She had not heard anything from behind the door.
She had stood there for approximately four seconds — she clocked it — long enough to register the faint smell of pencil shavings and old paper through the door, and then continued to her room, and that was that.
Lysander Grimes — the name had been the third on the contract's pre-printed signature lines, beneath Simon Parkes and her own — apparently did not sleep at hours that most human beings considered sleeping hours. She stored it.
She got up.
◆
The kitchen at Veilmoor Hall occupied the back of the ground floor, which meant its windows looked out onto the garden rather than the street.
The garden was in its end-of-September formality — cut back, controlled, waiting for nothing in particular.
The kitchen itself was large in the way old houses sometimes were: not designed for efficiency, designed for a different understanding of what a kitchen was supposed to do.
Lucian Veilmoor was at the stove.
Ashley registered him before she registered anything else about the room: the broad back in a faded grey shirt that had been through too many washes and had gone soft with it, the burn scars on his right forearm — three circles, evenly spaced along the inside of his forearm, the skin there smooth in a different way than the surrounding skin — visible because his sleeves were pushed up. Athletic shorts.
He was back from a run, or he was going on one, and either way he had been outside in the forty-degree near-October morning in shorts, which was a choice.
He had already made coffee.
She could smell it from the doorway: dark, scorched at the edges, coffee brewed strong on purpose, or by someone whose calibration was different from the baseline.
He didn't turn around.
"How do you take it?" he said.
She came further into the kitchen. There was no obvious reason to stay near the door. "Milk. One sugar."
"Actual sugar or substitute."
"Actual."
He reached for the cabinet to his left without looking — the motion of someone who had mapped this kitchen thoroughly enough that he didn't need to check.
He found the sugar. He found a mug. He poured coffee and added milk from a container in the refrigerator that he'd also retrieved without apparent effort and put back the same way. He set the mug on the counter near her.
"It's strong," he said. This appeared to be the complete warning.
Ashley picked up the mug — the ceramic heavy in her hand, warm enough through the glaze to mark the cold of the room by contrast. He was right: it was very strong, the kind that stripped away the idea that coffee was a gentle thing, a comfort beverage.
It was strong in the way of something that intended to do a specific job.
She drank it anyway, because she needed the specific job done.
He had turned back to the stove. There was something in a pan — eggs, she determined from the sound of it, or possibly from the smell. The organized unhurried sound of someone who cooked regularly and didn't need to think about the sequence of things.
She leaned against the counter with her mug and looked at the garden through the window.
The silence lasted for approximately five minutes, and the five minutes were, unexpectedly, not difficult.
She had anticipated this part being difficult.
She had anticipated some species of management — either his or hers, someone narrating the situation, someone establishing the terms of the transaction in conversational form.
She had been prepared to be efficient about it: yes, I know why I'm here, yes, I understand the arrangement, yes, we can be civil. She had the words ready.
She didn't need them. He was cooking eggs. She was drinking coffee that was too strong. The oak tree in the garden was smaller than the one outside her room and was still holding most of its leaves, which meant the north-facing tree was more exposed.
"You're always up this early?" Lucian said. He hadn't turned around.
"Usually," she said. "I don't sleep more than five hours."
A beat. He plated the eggs, turned off the burner, set the pan to the side.
"Huh," he said. "Me neither."
He said it simply, the way someone states a fact that connects to another fact without knowing yet what the connection means.
Not what a coincidence, not that's interesting, not anything that required a response or a reciprocal disclosure.
Just: me neither. Ashley picked up her mug and drank more of the very strong coffee and let it sit there as what it was, which was two people in a kitchen at 6:45 in the morning who both apparently stopped sleeping before anyone else had started.
He set a second plate on the counter — eggs, toast, neat.
"You don't have to," she said.
"I made extra," he said, and sat down at the kitchen table with his own plate, which meant he had sat down away from her and was looking out the garden window himself, which meant the plate on the counter was genuinely just extra eggs and not a gambit.
She ate standing at the counter. She did not thank him effusively. He did not appear to require it.
◆
At precisely 7:15, Simon Parkes came downstairs.
She heard him before she saw him: not the sound of someone being careful to be quiet, not the sound of someone not caring, but the sound of someone who had a specific route through the morning and was executing it.
His footsteps were even. He came into the kitchen already dressed — dark trousers, a grey button-down buttoned to the throat over what Ashley could now see was a thin chain.
Whatever hung from it stayed under the cloth.
Business-casual that meant he would be somewhere later in the day that required the appearance of professional competence.
He went directly to the coffee.
"Good morning," Ashley said, because she had decided it was worth establishing whether he was hostile.
"Good morning," Simon said. He poured coffee, looked at his phone, drank the coffee standing at the counter.
He looked at his phone with the complete attention of someone reading something that required complete attention, or performing the appearance of someone reading something that required complete attention.
She couldn't determine which from where she was standing.
At 7:18, he rinsed his mug and put it in the drying rack.
At 7:20 — she checked, because she was curious whether Lucian's assessment had been approximate or specific — he was gone. Not dramatically. He walked out of the kitchen, she heard the front door, and he was absent where he had been present.
She filed this away.
Simon Parkes: arrived 7:15. Coffee. Phone.
Gone by 7:20. Said "good morning" in response to a good morning.
No additional words. No hostility, no warmth, no management, nothing that required anything from her.
He was not unfriendly. He was self-contained like a system running all its processes on the inside and had no reason to run them externally.
She could work with that. It was considerably better than several alternatives.
Lysander Grimes had not appeared by 7:30, when she went upstairs to get her bag and her notebook.
She paused on the third-floor landing on the way back down.
The light under the study door was still on.
She heard nothing from inside. She stood there for two seconds this time, not four, and then went downstairs and out the front door.
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The cryptography seminar met in the sciences building at nine, in a room that had been retrofitted from a lecture hall into something that wanted to believe it was a seminar room by the placement of a single long table that didn't quite fit the space.
Professor Aldwin — who had never once appeared to care whether anyone liked his teaching style, which was possibly why Ashley liked it — stood at the board, which he would not use until the third question of the day, and asked the room about the substitution-permutation network problem from the week's reading.
Ashley was in the front-left seat. She was always in the front-left seat, in every seminar, because it was the seat with the best sightline to both the board and the door, because she had decided this in her first week at Whitmore and had not changed it since.
She had done the reading on Sunday, before any of this had happened. She had her notes.