Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Victor
The lobby door is heavier than it looks.
I push through it with more force than necessary and catch the edge of a man's forearm with my elbow, sending the stack of papers he's carrying sideways across the floor in a slow, unhurried fan.
He's sixty-something, broad, wearing a cardigan that has seen better decades, and he looks up at me with the expression of a man who has decided to be amused rather than annoyed, which is a choice I can respect.
"Son," he says, "that door has been opening inward for thirty years. Hasn't changed once."
"My apologies." I crouch and collect the papers. They're maintenance requests, handwritten, organized in some system I can't immediately decode. I stack them and hand them back.
He takes them, looks at the stack, and looks at me. "You're built like a wall, you know that? No offense."
"None taken."
"I'm Roberts, building manager." He tucks the papers under his arm, glances at his watch, and extends his hand with the easy confidence of a man who considers this building his personal jurisdiction and everyone who enters it his business. "I run the place. Are you here to see someone?"
"I know someone in the building," I say. "I wanted to pay a surprise visit."
"At this hour?" He looks at his watch, then back at me, with an expression that is not quite suspicious and not quite welcoming, and manages to be both simultaneously. "Who is it you're looking for?"
"Alex Riggs," I say. "Fourth floor."
Something happens to his face immediately — it opens, warms, the way faces do when you say the name of someone they're genuinely fond of.
He waves a hand toward the elevator like he's directing traffic.
"Alex. Of course. Come on then, I'll walk you up.
" He's already moving toward the elevator with the unhurried authority of a man who moves through this building at his own pace and expects the building to accommodate him. "You a friend of hers?"
"An acquaintance," I say. "We met recently," I quickly add, “at work.”
"She doesn't have many of those." He hits the elevator button and looks at me sideways.
"Visitors, I mean. She keeps to herself, Alex does.
Works constantly, that girl. I don't know how she does it — two jobs, the little one to look after, never complains.
" He shakes his head with the fond exasperation of someone describing a person they've decided to worry about.
"I always keep my eye on them, you know. Her and Evie."
The elevator opens. We get in.
"Evie?" I say.
"Her daughter." He says it simply, the way you state facts that aren't in question.
"Twelve years old. Sharp as a tack, that one.
Quiet, though. Watches everything." He presses four.
"Alex works late most nights. I keep my volume down so I can hear the hall if the girl needs anything.
" He glances at me. "She shouldn't have to be worrying about a child on top of everything else she carries, but she does it without a word. Never asks for more than she needs."
She has a daughter.
David's report said dependent on the lease, minor child, and he hadn’t found a birth certificate with Alex listed as the mother. But dependent is a word that doesn't carry much weight in reality. For some reason, I had it in mind that the minor was a sibling, perhaps a cousin, but not a daughter.
"She's lucky to have a neighbor looking out for them," I say.
"Other way around." He says it firmly, like he's correcting a misunderstanding.
"I'm an old man living alone in a building I've managed for thirty years.
Those two are the best things in this building.
" The elevator opens on four, and he leads me down the hall with the proprietary ease of someone who knows every board on this floor.
"Alex brought me soup last month when I had a cold.
Didn't ask, just knocked on the door with a container and told me to heat it up.
Who does that?" He stops outside 4C and knocks.
Three times, quiet and familiar. "Evie," he calls, low enough not to carry down the hall.
"It's Mr. Roberts. You've got a visitor, sweetheart. "
A pause. Footsteps — small, quick, bare feet on a hard floor. The door opens two inches on its chain, and a pair of dark eyes looks out at me and then at Mr. Roberts and then back at me with the sequential assessment of a child who has been taught to verify before she opens anything.
"He's alright," Mr. Roberts says, in the tone of a man whose word is the relevant credential here. "Friend of your mom's."
The dark eyes move to me one more time. They're serious eyes, older than twelve, the kind that have been reading rooms for long enough that it's become the shape of how she sees. She opens the door slowly, cautiously, before moving back and allowing us to enter.
The apartment is small and warm and smells like coffee, with that particular lived-in smell of a space where people actually use every inch of what they have.
I take it in the way I take in every room I enter — quickly, completely, noting exits and windows and the small choices that tell you who lives here.
Secondary locks on every window, new hardware, better than the building standard.
A camera lens in the upper corner by the front door that I clock the moment I step inside.
A note on the fridge in large, clear handwriting that I can read from here: At work.
Door stays locked. Call Mr. Roberts if you need anything.
Call me if there’s an emergency. Love you.
Evie has retreated to the couch and pulled her knees up, watching me with the cautious eyes of a child who has decided to observe before she declares anything.
She's dark-haired, dark-eyed, small for twelve, wearing socks that don't match and a sweatshirt with a school name on it.
There's a textbook open on the coffee table, and papers spread around it in the disorder that indicates homework that isn't going well.
Mr. Roberts claps a hand on my shoulder. "I'll leave you to it. Evie, you need anything you just holler."
"I know, Mr. Roberts," she says, certain.
He goes. The door pulls shut. And then it's just the two of us, and Evie looks at me from the couch with those assessing eyes, and I look back and let her finish whatever calculation she's running.
"You can sit down," she says finally, with the specific graciousness of a child who has decided to be a host and is taking the responsibility seriously. "She’s in the shower, she won't be out for a bit."
"I'll wait," I say.
"It's a long wait."
"I don't mind." I sit in the chair across from the coffee table and look at the homework spread across it. Math. Long division, by the look of it, and there are more red marks than correct answers on the page she's been working on. "How long have you been at this?"
She glances at the papers like she'd rather I hadn't noticed. "A while."
"It's not working."
"I noticed," she says, with a dryness that doesn't belong to a twelve-year-old.
"The method your teacher is using has an extra step in it that makes the whole thing harder than it needs to be." I lean forward slightly and look at the page. "Which part are you losing it at?"
"All of it," she says. "But mostly the middle part."
"Show me what you're doing."
She looks at me. Looks at the papers. Looks at me again with the expression of someone weighing pride against a problem they've been stuck on for an hour, and the problem wins, which tells me she's practical, which tells me she's her mother's daughter.
She unfolds from the couch, comes to the coffee table, and turns the paper toward me.
I look at it.
"You're doing the subtraction before you've finished the division step. See here—" I reach for the pencil on the table. "May I?"
She nods, cautious.
I work through the first problem differently, backing up two steps and rebuilding it from the point where she went wrong.
She watches with her chin in her hand and her eyes moving between the paper and my hand with the focused attention of someone who actually wants to understand it, not just get the answer.
"Oh," she says when I finish.
"Try the next one yourself," I say.
She takes the pencil. Works through it. Gets it right. Looks up at me with something that is not quite a smile but is close enough that I'll count it. "Why does everyone teach it the wrong way?"
"Because they were taught the wrong way and nobody corrected them."
"That seems like a big problem."
"It is," I say. "Systemic."
She considers this with the gravity it apparently deserves and then pulls the next page toward her. "Can you stay while I do these?"
"That's why I'm here," I say.
She works through six problems while I sit across from her, and the apartment settles into its late-night quiet around us.
She asks two more questions, and I answer both of them.
She doesn't chatter — she's not a chattering child, she's a thinking child, the kind who speaks when she has something to say and is silent when she doesn't, which I find I prefer.
Between problems, she taps the eraser against the table in a slow, rhythmic way that I think she doesn't know she's doing.
While she's working on the fourth problem with her full concentration on the page, I stand and move to the kitchen on the pretext of looking at the note on the fridge more closely.
It takes me forty seconds, which is enough time for two of the devices I brought — small, clean, the kind that transmit clearly through walls — to find their positions.
One inside the cabinet above the counter, one behind the small bookshelf in the living room.
I sit back down before she's finished the problem. She doesn't look up.
"Done," she says, and pushes the paper across.
I check it. "Correct."
She allows herself the smile this time, small and real. "Can I ask you something?"