3. Imogen
Imogen
The contract has a clause in it that flips my whole stomach over, but I sign it anyway.
Eight in the morning, his kitchen, the marble cold enough under my forearms that I can feel the dread coming up through the stone.
He slides the pages across with a pen already balanced on top, and I make it three lines down before coastal site, two months, live-in stops me cold.
I read them again to be sure I’m not inventing them.
Then I do the math I’ve gotten very good at this year, the math where rent and groceries both want the same forty dollars but only one of them gets it.
I don’t question it out loud. A woman with options asks what the live-in clause means, why a math tutor needs to be housed at a construction site for two months, what exactly she’s agreeing to.
A woman with my balance writes her mother’s name on the line and slides it back like relocating her entire life is a thing she does before coffee.
He watches my hand cross the page. His attention catches there a second past comfortable, then he takes the contract and says nothing, which I’m starting to understand is his native language.
“You’ll want to keep a copy,” he says.
“I’ve read it.”
“Keep it anyway.”
He says it like he’s doing me a favor. I say nothing back, because I’ve already decided that picking fights before nine in the morning is a losing strategy in this apartment.
The first session tells me what the flashcards already told me. This kid doesn’t need a tutor. He needs somebody to get in.
Luke is so far ahead of where six is supposed to be that the worksheets are an insult to both of us.
He walks me through how arctic terns fly pole to pole every year like he’s daring me to catch him in a wrong fact, draws me a deep-sea fish with a little light hanging off its head, labels the light without me asking.
Then I put a column of subtraction in front of him and watch him go dead behind the eyes from boredom.
The numbers aren’t the work. Everything around the numbers is the work.
There’s a snack box on the counter when we break, divided into compartments, apple slices in one, almonds in another, two crackers laid side by side so the edges don’t touch.
“Your dad makes these?” I ask, holding it up.
“The night before,” Luke says, not glancing up from his fish. “He says mornings are for getting out the door, not deciding things.”
“Smart man,” I say.
Luke considers this. “He’s okay.”
That’s his father in a six-year-old’s mouth, word for word. I’d bet my tuition on it.
“You ever been to the ocean?” I ask, light as I can make it, since we’re headed to a coast and I want a thread to follow. “Bet your mom likes the beach. Most people do.”
Luke shuts like a laptop. His shoulders climb toward his ears, the pencil goes still in his fist, and he hands me a smile with the lights off behind it.
I note the change but say nothing.
“I don’t talk about that,” he says. Six years old, closing a door he’s had way too much practice closing.
So I leave it. You don’t jimmy a lock on day one with a kid who’s already this good at locking it.
His father is a different problem, the species I can’t tiptoe around because he’s home all day and the trouble keeps wandering back to my table.
He’s set up in his office down the hall, on calls, in and out, but every time Luke and I break he materializes to adjust whatever’s nearest. There’s a printed schedule waiting when I sit down, color-coded by subject.
There’s a second sheet under it, approved snacks, approved screens, approved topics, like the kid comes with a warning label and a list of banned substances.
First break he fixes the angle of the blinds.
Second break it’s the pencil in Luke’s hand.
“Triangular ones build proper grip,” he tells Luke, swapping it out. “The round ones teach the hand bad habits.”
Luke takes the new pencil without looking up. “Imogen doesn’t care what pencil I use.”
“Imogen isn’t responsible for your handwriting.”
“She kind of is, though,” Luke says. “That’s literally her job.”
Ashton looks at me, but I look at the worksheet.
By the third time he stops at the table, I’ve run out of patience for swallowing it.
“Reading first,” he tells me, making it sound like an order as he lifts Luke’s math sheet off the table before the kid’s even finished the row. “His focus is sharpest early. Math should come after.”
“He’s a kid, not one of your projects.”
It’s out before I can talk myself out of it. So much for the recommendation.
He goes still. He brings the full weight of his attention onto me, dark eyes moving over my face like he’s reading something printed too small, and he stays there past the length the sentence asked for.
“What did you say your name was?”
“Spencer.” I don’t drop his eyes, because dropping them now undoes the whole stand I just took. “Imogen Spencer. Same as the one on the contract you watched me sign.”
“I know what name’s on the contract.”
“Then I’m not sure what you’re asking.”
He holds my eyes one more second, then tugs his cuff straight and moves off toward his office, leaving me with the distinct sense that I stepped on a wire I couldn’t see and heard something go off in another room.
My phone lights up against the table. Dad. I let his name sit there, buzzing, until it tips over into voicemail, same as I always do.
This isn’t about the job. He doesn’t know there is a job, doesn’t know about the listing or the program or the marble I’m standing on.
I’ve never handed my father the details of my days, not because we’re at war, but because the instant he gets wind of a thing, he’s got an opinion, then a plan, then a man on the phone fixing it before I’ve realized what’s going on.
The only way my life has ever stayed mine is by keeping it off his desk.
He gets the holidays. He doesn’t get this.
I finish out the session, pack up Luke’s worksheets, and head home the second my hours are up, because as of today I still have an apartment, a life, and a standing date with the only person who’ll tell me the truth about any of it.
Bex turns up that afternoon, hauls in a sweating bag of dumplings, drops onto my floor with the container balanced on her knee. She gets one dumpling in before she starts the interrogation.
“So,” she says. “The boss.”
“What about him?”
“On the phone you gave me the kid, the elevator, the insane contract, the rulebook. You said exactly nothing about the man. Which is interesting.”
“There’s nothing to say. He’s my employer.” I get up to grab us waters, mostly to have somewhere to put myself.
“Mm.” She tracks me across the kitchen. “How old?”
“Older. Late thirties, maybe forty.”
“Tall?”
“Yes, fine, tall.” I hand her a glass and drop back down across from her.
“Muscles?”
“He’s a real estate guy, Bex, not a lifeguard.”
“That’s not a no.” She points the chopsticks at me. “Abs? Yes or no.”
“He had a shirt on. I don’t have X-ray vision.”
“What shirt?”
“A suit,” I say, like that ends it, but I’m not that lucky.
“What suit? Color, cut, go.”
“Gray. Tailored.”
Bex sets the chopsticks down, her eyes shining with excitement. “Here’s what you don’t understand about a tailored suit. The front is nothing. Any man can stand there and own a front. The tailoring is all in the back.”
“I’m not doing this.”
“A good tailor gives you an extremely honest preview of the situation back there. The trousers don’t lie.” She gestures at the air behind her like she’s presenting an exhibit. “So. The situation. Firm? Flat? Tragic?”
“I am not describing my boss’s ass to you over dumplings.”
“You described the suit unprompted. We are already most of the way there.” She waits. She has all the time in the world, this woman, and a face that says she’ll outlast me.
And the worst part, the part I will carry to my grave, is that I know the answer, which means at some point today my eyes went somewhere I did not send them.
“Firm,” I mutter into my dumpling. “Fine. Firm. Are you happy now?”
“Thrilled.” She goes back to eating like she didn’t just pull that out of me with tongs. Then, too casual, “Eyes?”
And here’s where it goes sideways on me, because I open my mouth to say I don’t know and instead I’m back at the table this morning with him holding still over my shoulder, dark eyes moving across my face while he made me lose the end of my own sentence.
I know exactly what color his eyes are. I knew it without trying, which is the part that needles at me.
“Dark,” I say. “Brown. Almost black.”
Bex’s chopsticks stop halfway up. She heard the half-second it took me to answer that one differently than I answered the ass.
“Hair?”
“Also dark.” I’m looking at the dumplings now, not at her. “Pushed back. A little gray at the sides.”
She sets the container down on the carpet, all of her attention swinging onto me, and I get the distinct feeling of being a slide under a microscope. “What’s his name?”
“No.”
“I just want the name.”
“You want the name so you can look him up, and then you’ll send me forty links at midnight, and by morning I’ll have a whole dossier on a man I’m contractually living with for two months.” I move the dumplings out of her reach. “You don’t get the name.”
“So you’ve thought about how weird it is that you’re living with him.”
“I’d have to be brain-dead not to. It’s a weird situation, Bex, I signed it anyway.”
“Mm,” she says again, the most annoying sound a human can make, and lets it go, because Bex never pushes a door, she just notes that it’s locked and comes back for it later.
So I hand her the thing I actually brought home to talk about, the rulebook, because I need this conversation anywhere but on his eyes.
“He printed this out.” She flips it to check the back. There’s more on the back. “With a header.”
“He’s thorough,” I tell her.
“He sure is something.” She turns to the page where the approved-snacks list lives, and her eyebrows go up a quarter inch, which from Bex is a scream. “There are sub-bullets.”
“I’m aware.”