Chapter 4 #2
"Go ahead."
"Why did you come here?" She says it without accusation, just directly, with the matter-of-fact curiosity of a child who has decided she's owed honest answers and isn't interested in the alternative. "It's really early."
"I wanted to check on your mother," I say, which is true, as far as it goes.
"She's okay," Evie says, with the practiced certainty of a child who has been reassuring people about her mother for a long time.
"She always is. She's really good at being okay.
" She says it like it's just a fact, reality.
"I just worry sometimes. She works so much and she doesn't really tell me things. " She picks at the corner of her paper.
"She doesn't seem like someone who scares easily," I say.
"She doesn't get scared about normal things." She looks up at me. "She gets scared about me. And about — other things.”
She stops there, like she's reaching the edge of what she's decided to say.
I look at her. She's gone back to picking at the corner of her paper, not looking at me, and her left hand is resting on the table and I can see the scarring on it from here — old scars, silver and faded, across the back of her hand and tracking up toward her wrist in a pattern that I know, immediately and completely, was not made by any accident.
I look at the paper. I don't say anything. But something in me has gone very quiet in the way that people who know me well would recognize. A very specific kind of quiet. The kind that comes before a decision rather than after one.
"You're good at math," she says, looking back up, the other thing set aside. "Did you go to school for it?"
"Not traditional school, no."
"Then how do you know so much?"
"I paid attention to the things that mattered," I say, "and I found people who could teach me the things I didn't know."
She thinks about this seriously. "That's actually really smart."
"It's served me well."
"My mom does that too," she says. "She figures things out.
She learned how to fix the window lock in the bathroom because the building manager took too long.
She learned how to do my hair from videos online because she said she wasn't going to let me go to school looking—" She stops herself, like she's shared more than she meant to.
Then she looks at me with those assessing eyes and makes a decision.
"She's going to be grumpy when she gets out of the shower, she’s always tired when she gets home. She always is after the late shift."
"I won't stay long," I say.
"You can come back," she says. "If you want. She doesn't really have many—" She stops again. Recalibrates. "You could come back," she says, more simply.
"I'd like that," I say.
She nods, satisfied, and goes back to her last problem.
I stay twenty minutes longer than I should.
I know I'm staying too long but I stay anyway, watching her work through the last of the problems with the pencil tapping and the focused eyes and the occasional small sound she makes when something clicks into place, and I think about the cameras she doesn't know I've placed and the scars on her hand that she doesn't know I've catalogued and the things she said about her mother with the particular mixture of pride and worry that children have when they love someone they can see is carrying too much.
When she finally sets the pencil down and stretches her arms above her head with the comprehensive full-body stretch of someone who has been sitting still too long, I stand.
"I should go," I say.
"You didn't even get to see her," Evie says.
"Another time." I take my jacket from the arm of the chair where I'd set it. "You did good work tonight."
She looks at the stack of completed problems. "I actually did," she says, like this is a fact she's evaluating objectively. Then she looks at me. "You promised to come back."
"I said I'd like to," I say. "That's the same thing."
"People say things they don’t mean," she says, in the flat, informed tone of a child who has learned the gap between what people say and what they do.
I look at her for a moment.
"I don't.”
She studies me. Runs her calculation. Then she nods once, the nod of someone who has made a provisional decision and is reserving the right to revise it. "Okay, I believe you.”
I let myself out.
Mr. Roberts is in the lobby, predictably, with his papers reorganized and a mug that has replaced the one from earlier and the expression of a man who has been waiting to be talked to and is pleased the moment has arrived.
"Smart cookie, huh?" he asks, meaning Evie.
"She’s very capable," I admit.
He laughs, warm and genuine. "That she is. Both of them are." He shakes his head. "That little girl has been through things, I think. Don't know what exactly — Alex doesn't talk about it and I don't pry — but you can see it on her. She's braver than she should have to be."
He looks at me with the sharp eyes he keeps tucked behind the warm manner. He accepts this without asking what the occupation is, which tells me he's smarter than he lets on. "Was there something you needed? You said you know Alex — anything I can help with?"
"Actually." I look at the bulletin board, the hand-lettered notices, the photograph of a block party. "Are there any available apartments in this building?"
He blinks. Then the slow smile spreads, warm and thoroughly unsurprised, the smile of a man watching something arrive exactly when he expected it. "4D," he says. "Opened up last week. Good unit. Faces the same direction as Alex's."
"I'll take it," I say.
He looks at me for a long moment. "You move fast," he says, not necessarily disapprovingly.
"When something is worth it, I do.”
He nods, satisfied, like this is the right answer to a question he's been sitting with for a while. "Come by in the morning," he says. "I'll have the paperwork ready."
I thank him and walk out into the November dark and call David before I reach the car.
He answers on the second ring. "Well?"
"4D in the building," I say. "I need it furnished and ready by tomorrow evening. Whatever it takes."
A pause. The very specific pause of a man who has been expecting something and has just had it confirmed. "What exactly are your intentions here, Victor?"
I think about Evie's pencil tapping against the table and the scarring on her left hand and the way she said she worries it'll find us with the flat certainty of a child who has already decided to be brave about it, regardless.
"Maintaining a possible liability," I say.
David grunts. Then: "I'll have it ready by six."
"Good." I get in the car. "And David — any updates on the background?"
"Still digging. But Victor—" He pauses again, differently this time. "She has no emergency contacts on any of her accounts. No family listed anywhere. No one to call." Another pause. "Whatever she ran from, she ran from all of it. There's no one behind her."
I look up at the fourth floor of the building. The window of 4C is dark. She'll be home in a few hours, tired from the shift, and she'll check her cameras and her locks, and she'll look in on the girl, and she'll do all of it alone because she has always done all of it alone.
"Keep digging," I tell him.