Chapter 8
Nora was at the desk by twenty to seven, and she was not going to think about why.
She had slept badly. That was a fact. She’d lain awake watching the ceiling fan she didn’t run in winter and thinking about an enormous hand splayed across the small of her back.
She had slept perhaps four hours, in pieces, and none of it had anything to do with anything, because she was a professional.
And it was Saturday, and she had the Trombley quarterlies to reconcile before their nine o’clock Monday morning.
She opened the file. She squared the mouse to the edge of the mousepad. And then she put it into the only language she had for it.
Extraordinary item, she thought. Non-recurring. Does not affect the underlying trend.
There. Classified. An anomaly. A one-off.
The sort of thing you noted in a margin and moved past. A spike in the data with an obvious external cause—fatigue, proximity, twelve months of low-grade fence-flirting compounding at an unsustainable rate—and no bearing whatsoever on the fundamentals.
She entered a number. She entered another number. The numbers were correct. She was fine.
The duck sock was on her desk.
It sat by her monitor, small and yellow and appalling, a single tiny knit sock with a cartoon duck on the ankle, and she had not put it in a drawer.
She had not put it in the little basket by the door where things-to-return-to-neighbors would go.
If she were a person who had such a basket, which she was not.
She was not a person who accumulated other people’s things.
She had not put it anywhere. It sat where she could see it.
Which meant that at some point last night, in the aftermath—her mouth still stinging, her nervous system in open revolt—she had picked it up off the grass where it had fallen.
Carried it back across the lawn into her house.
Set it on her desk. Instead of doing what any rational adult would have done, which was hand it over.
It was a filing decision she had not yet made.
She looked at the sock. The sock, being a sock, declined to look back.
She reconciled Trombley.
At 7:52 there was a knock. She knew who it was before she looked up, the way she knew a drop in pressure meant rain. She got up too fast, then made herself walk to the door at a normal speed.
Rognar filled the frame. Of course he did.
Charlie rode against his chest in a pink sling he’d clearly watched a video to figure out, gnawing on a tiny green fist. Over his shoulder hung a diaper bag with a giraffe pattern that did unspeakable things to the aesthetics of a six-and-a-half-foot professional athlete. In his free hand he held two coffees.
“You’re up,” he said.
“I’m always up.”
“I know.” He held out one of the cups, and she took it.
It was her order—the right roast and the right amount of oat milk and even the half-pump of vanilla she had never once mentioned to him.
He didn’t say anything about knowing. He didn’t do the eyebrow.
He just handed over the coffee like it was nothing, like knowing her order to the half-pump was the least interesting thing about the morning.
“I’ve got a window before Deb’s woman shows up. Thought I’d inflict us on you.”
Charlie caught sight of Nora and produced a sound of pure delight, a wet gurgling crow, and pitched sideways in the sling towards her with both arms out and total confidence that she would be caught.
“She has opinions about you,” he said.
“She has opinions about everyone.”
“She really doesn’t. Ask Fen.” He glanced down. “She’s short a sock.”
She looked. Charlie’s left leg, in its striped legging, ended in a tiny bare green foot with tiny bare green toes, while the right one wore a duck.
The duck’s twin was fifteen feet away on the desk in her office.
Where she had carried it, out of the diaper bag, for reasons that would not survive daylight scrutiny.
“I have the other one,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“It’s—” She stopped. There was no version of this that ended well. It fell off in my yard was defensible. It fell off in your yard last night while I had my hands in your shirt and I carried it home and put it on my desk and looked at it was not. “I’ll find it.”
She didn’t go and get it. She stood exactly where she was, and felt him not asking, and suspected that he knew precisely where it was—because a male who packed a diaper bag down to the muslin cloths knew the whereabouts of a sock.
“Later,” she said, to the doorframe.
He said nothing, which the worse thing he could have done. A remark she could have parried. But he only stood there being quiet about it, and her face went hot.
He came in. She didn’t decide to let him in, and yet there he was, lowering himself onto the nest of floor cushions still in the corner of her office.
He unclipped Charlie from the sling and settled her on his knee, facing out at the room, so she could survey her domain.
From the giraffe bag he produced, of all things, a manila folder.
“You found it,” she said.
“I found it.” He looked absurdly pleased. “It was in the packet the whole time. There were four packets. It was in the boring one.” He clicked a pen. “Deb’s woman needs it signed and I’m not signing anything a day late ever again in my life, so.”
He filled it out against his thigh, Charlie grabbing at the pen.
He narrated it half to the baby and half to the room.
Nora sat at her desk with her correct coffee and did not reconcile a single thing for twenty minutes.
She watched him print his name in careful block capitals like a male who’d been told once that his handwriting was bad and had taken it personally.
She watched Charlie try to eat the folder.
She watched him let her, up to the point of actual paper ingestion, and then redirect her onto a teething ring without breaking his sentence.
“Pediatrician yesterday,” he said. “She’s great, by the way. Charlie, not the pediatrician, although the pediatrician is also fine.” He held up the ring for Charlie to reclaim. “Ninety-first percentile for length. Ninety-first.”
The pride in his voice was unbearable. It was genuinely unbearable, the naked stupid joy of it, a grown male reporting a number to her like it was a Cup.
“That’s tall,” she said.
“That’s very tall. They measure them lying down.” His mouth twitched. “She didn’t care for it. There was a whole—she has a look. She gave the tape measure the look.”
Charlie, on cue, gave the room a look.
Nora drank her coffee. The classification she’d built at twenty to seven was not holding.
It was going soft at the edges, the neat little non-recurring she’d stamped on it.
He was on her floor with a baby and a folder and her exact coffee order, being easy, being warm, being unremarkably, catastrophically domestic. And he hadn’t mentioned the kiss.
He had not mentioned the kiss.
And she had a position prepared. She had spent four broken hours and one entire early morning preparing a position.
It was a good position—dry and firm and closed, with subheadings.
And he was going to sign his folder and drink his coffee and leave, and she was going to be robbed of the opportunity to deploy any of it.
And the strange hot feeling rising in her chest wasn’t relief. It was offense. She was offended. She had subheadings.
He got up to go at 8:20, because Deb’s woman was arriving at 8:30 and he was not, he’d said twice, going to be late for a handoff involving his daughter.
He got the sling back on. He got Charlie back into it, up and settled against his shoulder, one hand cradling the small head with an ease that had taken him four days to achieve and would now never leave him.
He got the giraffe bag over the other shoulder.
He was a whole logistical operation, and he executed it, and he opened her front door.
Then he turned.
“You want me to say it, or you want me to not say it?” he said. “I can do either. Genuinely. I just need to know which one I’m doing.”
“Say what?”
“Nora.”
Just her name, low and quiet, and her stomach flipped. She ignored it, put her chin up, and deployed the position.
“Nothing’s changed.”
“Okay.”
She waited. He shifted Charlie higher on his shoulder and made no move to argue and every line she’d prepared that morning went straight out of her head.
“That’s it?”
“You said nothing’s changed. I’m agreeing with you.” One shoulder rose and fell. Charlie rode it out like a small green passenger on a gentle sea. “I’m agreeable. It’s my whole thing. Ask the team.”
And that was so much worse than an argument. Her throat went tight and she opened her mouth with no idea what was going to come out of it, and he came back up the step.
Slowly, leaving her the width of the doorway to escape through if she wanted it. Leaving room enough for a truck, room enough for her entire orderly life to fit through sideways and out the back and away. His free hand came up to her jaw.
“Tell me to go home,” he said.
She didn’t.
He kissed her. It was short this time, and it was different—not the accident of last night, not the collision they’d had to solve mid-fall.
This one he’d worked out. He came in already knowing the angle, tilting her chin the fraction that made it work without either of them saying a word about it.
It was unfairly good and completely deliberate.
Over in four seconds, maybe five, before her brain had finished filing a complaint.
Then he was off the step. He was halfway across the grass, Charlie bouncing sleepy against his shoulder, before she had even gotten her hand off the doorframe.
“Nothing’s changed,” he called back, cheerful as anything, not turning around.
She shut the door. Then she stood in her hall. It was the same hall she’d stood in four days ago, telling herself she wasn’t going to get involved. But she wasn’t the same woman standing in it, and she knew it, and she hated it, and her coffee was still perfect and going cold in her hand.
She went back to the desk. She looked at the file. Trombley. Nine o’clock.
Non-recurring, she’d written, in her head, at twenty to seven.
She was going to have to give it its own line.