Let Me Not Know
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Monday came in gray. I didn’t leave the apartment before nine. A woman who leaves early on the one day something is scheduled to move is a woman who knows a schedule exists.
I made coffee I didn’t drink. I read the same paragraph four times and couldn’t have said a word of it back. The band sat cool through all of it. A woman resting. I let it think that. The alternative was giving it something to name.
My body didn’t agree to the performance. My face did.
It had kept its own ledger since the bathroom. The machine was never built to read that one. Monday it opened without asking me. My shoulders wouldn’t sit where I put them. My hand went to my throat, low, where his mouth had been on the tile. I had to make it come down.
I had learned to want him in the abstract. A want was a thing I could set down when the room required it. I couldn’t set this down. It had stopped being a want. It had gotten into every column now, not just the one marked want, until his name was somewhere in all of them.
Wednesday was five days back. Twelve minutes at the glass on two, and not one wrist had lifted in any of them. Caleb had said noon. Somebody in that house had said no.
Callow had said Monday. Callow had not said what hour. I had learned by now that the gap between a promise and its hour is where it does its worst work.
The eleven thousand had cleared on Thursday night.
The six inside it went to a name Charles never got to see.
By now it had reached them or it had not.
There is a version of Monday where a mother and a child are further down that road than anyone can follow.
There is a version where they are not. I had no instrument for telling the two apart. Neither did the band.
Penelope’s voice came through the panel at eleven, pleasant, procedural.
“Ms. Vale. Building accounting has a query on file. Nothing that concerns your schedule.”
I didn’t ask what the query was. Asking was a woman with something to protect. I said thank you, the flat register I kept for weather and elevators and every other thing in that building I was not permitted an opinion about.
By noon I knew two things the band could not read off me.
A query on file meant someone downstream of Charles had watched a number leave a column it had no business leaving. That was the first.
The second was worse. I had no way to learn whether the number had arrived where I sent it. Not knowing sat heavier in my chest than any read the band had ever taken.
Matthew came at one. He didn’t knock. I had stopped expecting him to.
He wore the suit. Not the sweater.
The lapel stitching meant a room with Charles in it. I read it without deciding to. The same unasked-for fluency I had for the count, the ring, the weight of a silence before he broke it.
“Charles called me at eleven forty,” he said. “Accounting flagged an outbound transfer that didn’t route through his desk. He wants to know if I authorized it.”
“Did you.”
“I didn’t know it existed until eleven forty.
” He set nothing on the marble. No folder.
No performance. Just the stillness he wore for rooms he had not decided about yet.
“Which means either the building has a hole Charles doesn’t know about, or someone inside it does, and I’d like you to tell me it’s the first one. ”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“You can tell me you don’t know anything about it.”
“I could.”
He held the look. He had put that same look on my wrist in the kitchen on Wednesday. He had learned since that the band would not tell him anything worth having.
“You’re not going to.”
“No.”
Something behind his face opened and didn’t find its way shut. It had been doing that since the bathroom.
He was quiet long enough that the building came up under both of us.
“I let Charles think it was clerical,” he said.
“I told him accounting flags things every week and it usually is nothing. I bought you a day. Two, if he stays busy. I did it without knowing what I was buying, and that is not a thing I do. I have not done it for anyone. Not inside these walls. Not anywhere in my life.”
“Why.”
He didn’t answer fast and closed, which was how he answered everything.
He took the time a man takes when a sentence is going to cost him.
“You looked at me in that corridor like the forty minutes were the only true thing that had happened to you in a year.” The face he kept for the record was not in the room.
“I have spent every month here building a woman I could read. I would rather not be able to.”
I didn’t have an answer that was safe to say out loud. I said the true one instead.
“If you find out what it was, you’ll have to choose.”
“I know.”
“Not eventually. If Charles pulls the thread and it leads where I think it leads, you will pick a side of your own family in a room with witnesses. I am not going to make that easy by telling you now.”
“I know that too.” He came around the marble, not fast, like a man measuring a distance he already knew the answer to.
His hand came up to my jaw, the place it always found.
I felt the tremor in it before it landed.
Small. Controlled. Failing to be controlled.
“Let me not know for a few more days.” He didn’t dress it up as anything but the ask it was.
“It’s the only version of me that gets Friday. ”
“Friday isn’t decided.”
“Friday is the only thing in this building I’ve decided without checking a readout first.”
His thumb moved once along my jaw and stopped.
He held the motion at the edge of where his control used to end for everyone but me.
His hand was not steady. I had catalogued every measured half-inch he ever gave anyone. I knew what his hands did when he told them to. Until the bathroom, they had never failed him.
I put my hand over his, on my own face, and held it still.
I wasn’t ready to spend Friday early. My body wanted to finish what his thumb had started. I held it there instead. Unfinished.
He was not going anywhere. Neither was I. I had started banking the want instead of spending it, the way I banked everything else now, and I had already decided, somewhere under the counting, what it was saving for.
“Not today,” I said.
“No,” he said. “Not today.”
I’d never once set a term in that building and had it hold. He took it standing. Nothing was written down.
He left without letting the door close hard, like a man rehearsing what it would feel like to leave a room he wanted to stay in.
The band warmed after the door closed. A small tick.
I didn’t check the number. I knew what a body did with a man’s thumb held still against her own jaw by her own hand. I didn’t need the machine to give it a name.
I took my own inventory after. This time the columns filled in faster.
There was no line for what he had given me by not knowing. There was no line for what I had taken from him by not telling him. There was no line for Wednesday.
What there was instead was a fact I had not had to hold before. I trusted him with my silence more than I trusted myself with his.
I’d been certain the day he learned the truth would be the day he chose the family. Some hour that morning, without deciding to, I stopped being certain.
A certainty gone soft has no column either. I put it where I keep everything that counts.
I spent the afternoon doing ordinary things with my hands while the rest of me ran arithmetic. I folded towels that didn’t need folding. I watered orchids that were already wet.
Jess passed me in the sixth-floor hall with a cart of fresh sheets and didn’t stop. Her eyes found mine for the length of one held breath. She pitched her voice under the cart’s rattle.
“Heard accounting’s been busy.”
She kept walking. A folded sheet over one arm, and the set to her shoulders she wore when she was carrying something she had no safe place to put down.
That was the whole exchange. It was enough. The query had cleared Charles’s desk and gone into the building’s other circulatory system, the one that runs on carts and uniforms and women nobody pays to notice things.
Callow found me at four, in the corridor outside the salon. Not the alcove. A public stretch with a dome at either end. She didn’t slow down when she passed me.
“It landed,” she said, low, not stopping. “This morning. Before the query.”
“Charles doesn’t know who.”
“Charles doesn’t know who yet.” She kept walking, unhurried, a woman with somewhere ordinary to be. “He knows a number moved. He does not know it moved to a name that would cost this family more than the number ever could. That is the only lead you have on him, and it is a short one.”
“How short.”
“Short enough that I would not spend a Friday in a hallway with a schedule this fragile, if I were the one deciding.” She slowed for the first time. “Somebody has started asking about the south corridor. Not the alcove. The corridor. Whether it’s on the maintenance schedule for a camera upgrade.”
The floor didn’t move under me. My stomach did.
He knew about every hallway. He had told me so himself, with his hands loose at his sides.
I set that down without looking at it. There was a column for it. I didn’t open the column.
“Who’s asking.”
“I don’t have a name yet. I will by Wednesday.”
“Does Mateo know it landed.”
“Mateo knows what a can of water tells him and nothing else. That is how he has stayed alive.” She was moving again. “Spend the next two days deciding what you do with Friday if the corridor closes before you get back into it.”
She turned in at the service door beside the salon. It closed. I was the only one left in that stretch of hall, and both domes had me.
I stood in the hallway with the citrus cleaner and my own pulse doing something the band would log as unremarkable. A woman resting. It had no other column for a woman standing still while a gap closes on her.
Two days to decide what Friday was worth.
The building had already started deciding for me.