Chapter 15
Afew days later there was a baby and a bookkeeper in his kitchen, with coffee going and the radio playing something with a horn section. Rognar Stonebreaker was, at seven o’clock in the morning, so pleased with himself he could barely stand it.
He danced. Not well, but Charlie approved of it with the fierce approval of the very young, drumming her heels against his stomach and shrieking her one-syllable opinion of the horn section.
He spun her in a slow half-turn past the toaster and she lost her mind with joy.
Nora, at the table with her laptop, did not look up.
“You’re dancing,” she said.
“I’m a male in a good mood. It expresses itself.”
“It’s seven a.m.”
“It’s seven a.m. and I’ve already been to two houses this morning. Mine and yours. Some of us are productive.” He set her coffee down at her elbow, the right color, and she took it without comment, which he’d decided to treat as gratitude. “I’ve made eggs. I want that noted.”
“You always make eggs.”
“I always make you eggs. I’d like that added to your file.”
She set down the coffee, reached into the leather bag beside her laptop, and produced a folded piece of paper. She unfolded it and laid it carefully on the table.
“You wrote them down,” he said, delighted.
“I did.”
“You made a document.”
“There are four rules.”
“Of course there are four.” He pulled the chair around and sat with Charlie facing him, so the baby could gnaw contemplatively on his knuckle while the terms were read. “Go on. Read me my rights.”
Nora put on her glasses. This was for effect and they both knew it, and he loved it anyway.
“One. Nobody stays over on a game night. You need your sleep, I need mine, and I am not being blamed to a locker room full of orcs for a bad third period.”
“Reasonable. Go on.”
“Two. My office door closed means the door is closed. Not the door is closed unless you have coffee. Not the door is closed but here’s a baby. Closed.”
“That one’s going to be a problem for you, not me.”
“Three.” She looked at him over the top of the glasses, which he’d told her a dozen times was the most devastating thing she did and which she had therefore weaponized. “We do not tell your team.”
“That’s three.”
“Four is provisional.”
“Provisional.” He set his chin on Charlie’s head. “You’ve written a rule and left it blank. That’s not a rule. That’s a threat with a placeholder.”
“Four,” she said, folding the paper again, “is provisional.”
Rule one survived ten days.
It survived because Nora meant it, and because Rognar, to his genuine surprise, agreed with it.
A bad third period was a real cost. He had a daughter now, and a reason to be good at his job that had nothing to do with the joy of it.
That was new. He turned it over privately and didn’t mention it.
So on game nights he kissed her at the fence and went home to his bed and slept, and it worked, and he was insufferably proud of both of them.
It survived until an overtime loss in Cascade Bay, a five-hour bus ride, and a text at eleven at night that said only up?
and a reply that said only yes. And then the discovery, at four in the morning, that eight feet of wet grass is not a meaningful distance to a male with a monitor in his fist who has decided it isn’t.
“This isn’t staying over,” he said into the dark. “I left. I came back. Those are two separate visits.”
“You came back at four in the morning.”
“I came back at four in the morning from my own house, Nora, which is eight feet away. I’ve been over the paperwork. It’s airtight. There’s no clause about the middle.”
“There is now.”
“You can’t amend it retroactively. That’s not how documents work. Ask your clients.”
Rule two he never broke, because he found he didn’t want to.
A closed door in that house meant she was working.
He’d come to like the look of her working through the office glass—the frown, the glasses, the pencil she chewed and denied chewing.
He had no wish to be the kind of interruption that turned it off.
He left coffee outside the door instead.
She never mentioned finding it. He knew she found it because the mug came back rinsed.
Rule three did not survive Fen.
Rule three did not, in fairness, stand a chance against Fen.
He noticed things the way a metal detector notices things, indiscriminately and out loud.
He had already watched the pair of them across a bar room, and he drew the only possible conclusion.
It was the correct one. He put it in the newsletter.
There was, by then, a newsletter.
Mildred Prescott came on a Thursday. She had given him two weeks' notice this time, an hour-long window, and a short list of what she would want to see, and he had treated all three like a playoff opponent.
He cleaned the nursery. Then he cleaned the guest bathroom, which nobody had used since August. He put the recycling out on a Tuesday, which had never once happened in the history of the house.
On Thursday morning he stood in his living room and looked at it the way he looked at video of a team that had beaten him.
Deb had offered to stay for it. He'd told her not to. If Mildred was going to look at his house, he wanted it to be his house she looked at.
"You've moved the couch," Nora said.
"It was crooked. It's been crooked for a year and I never once noticed." He turned around. She was at the kitchen table with her laptop open and her glasses pushed up into her hair, and she had made no move at all to go. "You don't have to be here."
"I'm aware."
"She'll ask who you are."
"Then she'll ask." she typed something. "I'd rather be here than sitting in my kitchen at ten in the morning wondering how it went, which is what I'd be doing, and we both know it. So let's not."
Mildred arrived at ten exactly, in sensible shoes and a faded blue cardigan, and declined the tour.
"I don't need the tour, Mr. Stonebreaker. I've seen a great many tours." She stepped past him into the hall. "Where does she sleep?"
He showed her. She stood in the nursery doorway for a moment, looked at the crib, then put two fingers on the top rail and pushed. It didn't move. She made a note.
"Who assembled it?"
"I did."
"Hm," Mildred said, and wrote that down too.
In the kitchen she looked at the bottles, and the sterilizer, and the drawer he opened for her without being asked. Then she stopped in front of the refrigerator and stood there long enough that his stomach turned a slow, undignified somersault.
The schedule was on it. Deb's laminate, and underneath the laminate the paper one, the working copy, the one that got amended. Feeds and naps and a column of small pencil corrections in handwriting that was not his and was not Deb's.
"That isn't your writing," Mildred said.
"No."
Mildred looked over at the table, where Nora had stopped typing.
"And you're—"
"The neighbor," Nora said.
It was true, and it was correct, and he discovered that he disliked it intensely.
He had no complaint he could have made out loud.
The word was accurate and it was nowhere near the size of the facts.
He wanted to take it off the table and hand her a better one. He had no idea what the better one was.
Mildred wrote for a moment. Then she closed the folder, which he had learned in her office was the end of the business. She looked at him with the grey gaze that still reminded him of his third grade teacher.
"Are you sleeping?"
"Some."
"Are you eating?"
"I'm a professional athlete, ma'am. It's most of my job."
"That isn't a yes, but it'll do." She was already moving towards the door. "You've got a working smoke alarm in the hall. I'd like one in the nursery. Otherwise I've got nothing for you."
"That's it?"
"That's it." She paused with her hand on the latch, and for a second she looked almost kind. He'd rather she didn’t. "I told you in September you were allowed to say no. Are you still glad you didn't?"
"Yes," he said without hesitating.
"Good," said Mildred Prescott, and left.
She was gone before the kettle finished boiling. He stood in entry hall holding a speech he had rehearsed in the truck, about routines and support networks and the quality of his childcare arrangements. She hadn’t asked him for a word of it.
"Nursery smoke alarm," Nora said, already writing it down.
"I'll get one today."
"You'll get two. One for the nursery and one for your room." She capped the pen. "She liked you."
"She didn't say that."
"She asked if you were sleeping." Nora went back to her laptop. "Nobody asks that when they're building a case."
The next day he returned from practice, let himself in his front door, and stopped in the hallway. Because Nora was in the living room with Charlie, and she was talking to her.
“—and the trouble,” Nora was saying, in the entirely serious tone of a woman explaining something to an equal, “is that they’ve invoiced for the full retainer but only delivered against the first milestone.
Do you see the problem? You can’t bill for all of it when you’ve only done a third of it.
It’s called unearned revenue, and it sits on the balance sheet as a liability until you’ve actually earned it, which is a concept a shocking number of adults never grasp. ”
Charlie babbled something that had no consonants.
“Exactly,” Nora said. “So what I’m going to do is send them a very polite email. And in the very polite email I am going to use the word reconcile, which is a threat, and they’ll know it’s a threat, and everyone will keep pretending it isn’t. That’s business. Are you following?”
Charlie shrieked.
“Good,” said Nora. “You’ve got a better head for it than half my clients.”