CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
?
MARY
The next morning I came down to Nicolas’s kitchen at seven to put the ovens on. I had the proving drawer in my head and nothing else in it, and I was two steps past the doorway before I worked out that the noise I’d been hearing through the ceiling for an hour was not the rain.
Three men in yesterday’s clothes. I got one foot back onto the bottom stair, and Luca said my name across the island the way a man catches something coming off a shelf. “Mary. Stay where you are—please. Stay.”
Luca had said please as flirtation and please as a joke. This one had neither underneath it. My hands went cold before I had any reason for it, and I stayed where I was.
Yelena came around me with a cup and set it on the black stone at my elbow.
A cortado, cinnamon on the foam, made before anybody in the building knew I was awake.
Then she took the dead flowers off the island, wrapped the stems in a paper towel, and went out through the hall without looking at one of them.
She has run this house for twenty years and she did not say a word. That is how I knew this kitchen had done this before.
There were three cups already on the island, gone cold, skinned over.
Rain was coming across the glass on three sides in sheets, east to west, so hard the terrace was under two inches of standing water and the chairs out there had moved themselves overnight.
Nobody had turned a lamp on. The light was the color of dishwater and it made all three of them look worse than they are, and I could smell the Coliseum on their jackets.
“You put something in her contract and you didn’t tell me,” Rian said. “Me. I’d have carried it for you.”
“I told you what I could tell you at the point I could tell it.”
“That’s a sentence with nothing in it, Luca.” Rian put his brother’s name down the way a man puts a glass down hard.
“It’s a sentence with a date in it. You’re welcome to the date.”
“Give me the date, then,” Rian said.
“You won’t like where it sits.”
“It’s seven in the morning,” I said. “Whatever this is, it kept overnight. It’ll keep till the ovens are on.”
“It didn’t keep,” Rian said.
Rian had his palms out and his voice all the way up, and the rain was coming down hard enough that he had to put it there to be heard. Nicolas set both hands down on the black stone. Nicolas holding still was louder than Rian at full volume, and I had learned that in my first week here.
“Sit down, Rian,” Nicolas said.
“No.”
I had heard Rian refuse small things. This was the first time he had refused a direct order to sit in front of me. I watched that no land on the stone between them and nobody picked it up.
Then Rian turned and said it to me instead of to them, which was the only kind thing anybody did in that kitchen all morning.
“Page nine.”
Two words. I had signed one thing that none of us could leave alone, in the Perch dining room, with a notary at the table and my whole name written twice, and I have thought of it since as a stack of paper with my bad luck typed on it. Nobody had ever said a number at me like that.
?
“What’s on it?” I said, across the island in Nicolas’s kitchen.
“No,” Nicolas said.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the honest version of one.” He said it at the one volume he has, and he did not take his hands off the stone.
“Is it about me?”
“Yes.”
“Is it about Danny?” That one came out of me with a crack in it I had not authorized.
“No.”
“Am I allowed three more of those, Nicolas, or is that the whole ration for the morning?”
“Ask them,” Nicolas said. “I’m at the end of what I’ll say to you and I’d rather stop than start shading it.”
“There’s a version of this where I put it in front of you and take it apart line by line, and I’ve been standing in that version since before I—” Luca stopped. He put his hand over his mouth and took it away again, and whatever the end of that sentence was, it stayed in him.
“Finish it, Luca.”
“I can’t. That’s the honest version of mine.”
“I don’t know what’s on it either,” Rian said. “I heard the number yesterday, in a room with a table full of men, from Vasily Sokolov. So you and me are closer than you think.”
And that was when my body did the single stupidest thing it has ever done to me.
Nicolas’s forearms on the stone with his sleeves shoved back, the side of Rian’s neck, Luca’s jaw going gray and unshaved at the edge of it: my nipples went tight under the T-shirt and there was a low pull behind my clit, and the wanting came up the same pipe as the fury and would not separate out of it, and I put my hand flat on the warm stone because the floor had gone soft.
That island was the only warm thing in the room. I hated that it helped.
“You’re all standing there in yesterday’s clothes looking like the worst decision I’ve ever wanted to make twice,” I said.
Rian made a noise that started as a laugh and died in his chest.
“You can be furious with me and still let me stand this close,” Luca said. “People do it. It’s a whole branch of the law.”
“Don’t be charming at me this morning.”
“It’s the only thing I brought.”
I put both hands on the stone then, the way Nicolas had his, and I asked the better question. The first one had been about the paper. This one was about them.
“How long has each of you known there was a page in my life I’ve never read?”
Luca looked at the island. “Since before you came.”
“Long enough,” Nicolas said.
“Since yesterday,” Rian said, “and I’d like that on the record.”
Three answers and three different lengths, and I did not have to do any arithmetic to hear the shape of them.
The longest one belonged to the man who had promised to read me every line of it and sign my full legal name twice.
The middle one belonged to the man who had picked out a word for it in advance.
And the short one belonged to the one they all use for the heavy end, and it was one day old, and he was the only one of them looking at me while he said it.
“There’s more,” Rian said. “Bogdan’s gone and his phone’s dead. I’ll have him by Sunday.”
Nobody argued with him. Luca argues with the weather and Luca said nothing at all, and Nicolas had both hands where they had been all morning.
“Bring him to me after,” Nicolas said.
That was the whole sentence.
“Bogdan drove me to the bakery,” I said.
“I know.”
“He’d carry my sheet pans in from the car when my arms were full. He called me ma’am and got it wrong every single time and never once stopped doing it.”
“That too,” Rian said, and he kept his eyes on the floor when I needed them on me.
“What happens to him when you find him?”
“You don’t want that in your head, and I’m not putting it there,” Rian said. “That’s not me being careful with you. That’s me being selfish.”
“Then be selfish out loud,” I said. “It’s the only version of any of you I can stand at this hour.”
“Fair,” Rian said.
?
I went down the hall. Nobody came after me for the first six steps and then somebody did, at Luca’s speed, quick and light and never quite behind me.
My copy has been in the drawer in the bedroom since the second day, under a folded sweater I have never worn. I took it out. I held it in both hands with my thumb on the staple in the corner and I did not open it, and I could feel the metal of the staple through the paper.
“It won’t be in yours,” Luca said from the doorway. “Don’t open it.”
“Why.”
“Because you’ll go looking for something that isn’t there, and by lunchtime you’ll have decided I hid it in some clever way, and what I did wasn’t clever.”
“What did you do?”
“I wrote a page,” Luca said. “That’s the sentence. I’ve been carrying a much longer one around for weeks and it turns out the whole of it is four words.”
“Four words,” I said. “You’ve had weeks of it and I get four.”
“You get four this morning. You’ll get the rest, and it won’t be because I got brave about it. It’ll be because I ran out of room to stand in.”
He said that last part gently. That was the second unbearable thing he did to me that morning.
I put the stack back under the sweater. I closed the drawer with my hip, because both my hands were busy doing the other thing, which was shaking.
Back in the kitchen the three cold cups were where they had been and so were the three men. Nicolas’s hands had not come off the stone.
“Page nine isn’t going to be discussed in this kitchen this morning,” he said, “and I’d rather you were angry with me than lied to.”
“Those aren’t the only two.”
“They’re the two I’ve got.”
“And you’ll stay off Calle Ocho until this is finished.” He did not raise it and he did not soften it. “I’m not asking you, and I’m not going to stand here pretending I am.”
“For how long?”
“Until I say.”
“There’ll be two men on the night watch as well from tonight,” Rian said. “You won’t see them, and that part isn’t up to you either.”
Luca looked at the island and did not say one word for me, and he had been talking all morning.
There was one lease in my life before this one. I read the whole of it on a bus with my finger going under the words, and I understood about half, and I read it anyway.
“I kept a shop alive with money I didn’t have, and I still read every bill. You bought me, and none of you will let me read the paper.”
Then I picked up the cortado Yelena had made me before any of this started and I drank it cold, all of it, the cinnamon skinned over on top and the sugar-free bitterness of it going grainy at the bottom. I set the cup down on the stone. And then I did not say anything.
I am the person who fills a silence. I have talked my way through a repossession, a funeral, and the night three men came to my door. I stood there and I let it get long.
Nicolas’s hands came off the stone. I had watched them stay flat through the whole hour, and he stood there with them and did not appear to know where they were supposed to go.
Rian stepped backward into the counter. The drawer handle caught him across the spine and he didn’t turn around to see what he’d hit.
And Luca started talking.
“Mary, if you’ll let me just—”
“There’s a way to do this properly, and it isn’t—”
He ran out. He stood in the middle of that kitchen in yesterday’s shirt with his mouth open and nothing came, and I watched three men who own this city go quiet because a woman put a cup down.
“Mary,” Nicolas said.
I looked at him. I did not ask him anything and I did not answer him, and I watched that land on a man who has never in his life had to guess what I wanted.
I went to the door. It was a little after eight and the rain had not let up once all morning, and the three of them were standing in the same three places they had been standing in when I walked in.
“Then I’ll stop asking. All three of you can watch what that’s like.”