Chapter 15
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
The Big Man at the Door
Jensen
It took me two weeks to build the words.
Not to find them exactly, because the things I needed to say were simply the truth, and the truth was available to me the moment I stopped defending myself against it.
What took two weeks was deciding that I was going to say them regardless of whether I was ready.
I went to her apartment on Carver Street on a Thursday morning. I knew the address from the months I had been going there and I had not thought, until I pressed the buzzer and nothing happened, to consider that she might no longer be there.
The man who answered the door was large and broad-shouldered, with the bearing of someone who had recently moved into a space and was still deciding whether it suited him. He looked at me with the mild suspicion that strangers at one's door generally merit.
"I’m looking for the woman who lived here before you," I said. "Her name is Aoife. Dark hair. She moved in sometime last year."
He thought about this for a moment. "Don't know that name. I moved in six weeks ago. Place was empty when I got here."
Six weeks ago. She had left the same week I had walked out of her apartment.
I stood on the pavement and looked up at the fourth-floor window, the window I had stood at many times looking out at the side of the building next door, and I understood that she had not waited to see what I would do.
She had made her decision immediately and she had acted on it, and the practical difficulty I was now facing was a consequence I had created entirely for myself.
I did not know her last name.
I stood on the pavement outside her empty apartment and I thought about what it said about me, the totality of what I did not know about her.
I had kept her at a specific distance in all the ways that mattered, never asking for the information that would have made her real in the parts of my life I kept separate from her, and now that distance had become physical.
You made this, I thought. This is exactly what you designed, and now you're standing in it.
I went to Mae's Diner that afternoon. The woman behind the counter looked at me with a professional neutrality that contained something beneath it that was not neutral at all, the look of a woman who had been briefed.
"I'm looking for Aoife," I said. "She used to work here."
"She doesn't anymore," the woman said.
"Do you know how I can reach her?"
The woman looked at me for a moment, unhurried, her expression giving away nothing. Her eyes were steady and sharp. "No," she said. "I don't."
She was lying. I was certain she was lying, with the certainty of a man who had run negotiations for fifteen years. She had decided before I finished my sentence that I was not going to find out from her.
I left. I came back the following Tuesday, and the Tuesday after that, and each time the woman behind the counter told me the same thing with the same expression.
On the third Tuesday a younger woman was finishing her shift as I arrived, collecting her coat from behind the counter.
She looked at me and something passed across her face before she arranged it into something more neutral.
She knew who I was. She had been told. She looked back at me with an expression that was not unfriendly and was entirely closed, and she did not say anything, but the look lasted long enough to say what she needed it to say.
It took me four months to find her.
?
It was a Sunday afternoon in early spring.
I was on the other side of the city after a meeting that had run over and I was walking, needing the air, and I turned a corner and saw, through the window of a diner called Harrington's, a woman carrying three plates with the specific balance of a person who has done this a thousand times.
I knew her immediately. I knew her before I had processed the details, in the way you know someone whose movement is familiar to you.
I stopped on the pavement. She was in the diner uniform, her dark hair pulled back, moving between tables with the brisk efficiency of someone managing a full section.
And I could see, even through the window, that something was different about her.
She was showing. Not dramatically, but visible, the gentle rounding beneath the apron, and I looked at it and felt something arrive in my chest that I could not name precisely, partly guilt and partly something more complicated that landed with a weight I had not anticipated.
I could also see, watching her through the window, that she was tired.
The hollows under her eyes were visible from fifteen feet away.
She had lost weight in a time when she should have been gaining it, and she moved with the efficiency of someone who does not have the luxury of moving slowly.
The smile she gave to a table near the window was the practiced smile of someone who has learned to produce it on demand regardless of what is happening underneath.
I stood there for a moment. She is working this shift because of me, I thought. She is this tired because of me. She is doing this alone because of what I said and did and left on her table.
I went in.