Bargain For Love

The Man Who Does Not Sit

Chapter 2

“Anna Charles. Supervising producer, Atlantic Broadcast Group. Joe requests go through me.”

Zera stood close enough to hear the pause on the other end. Sam didn’t rush. Men who worked for Austin Joe didn’t have to.

“Mr. Joe approved Smith,” Sam said. “Original draft. Sit-down on camera. Today at four. One correspondent. No extra crew. I’ll send the floor and the rules.”

Anna’s smile stayed on. “She’s an intern.”

“He said the name.” Still polite. Already finished. “If Atlantic Broadcast Group wants the first interview Austin Joe has given, it will be her questions.”

The call ended. Anna set the phone down carefully, as if it might mark the wood. The desk around them had gone still. People didn’t pretend they weren’t listening. Not with that name.

Austin Joe. Twenty-seven. Joe Group sat on building materials and the kind of loans that told a developer whether they still existed next quarter. Harborline was the piece the city liked to put on posters. He didn’t do interviews. The last person who pushed too hard left the business with a story people told in kitchens and never on air.

They said he closed companies the way other men closed tabs.

“You’re on it,” Anna said. The warmth in it was a leash. “I supervise. You don’t invent a tone. You don’t make him look like a saint and you don’t pick a fight the lawyers will kill. If he walks out, that’s your name on the failure.”

“If he walks,” Zera said, “it won’t be because I asked him how his childhood was.”

Anna looked at her a beat too long. “Charles and Joe have history. Don’t become the ugly line in it.”

Lisa waited until the office door clicked. “She said that like a warning and a wish.”

“I heard both.”

Emmy squeezed her elbow, quick. “Write the questions that get you thrown out. If they throw you out, at least you’ll know you didn’t waste the train fare.”

The day went thin and bright. Zera built the list with a pen so she couldn’t delete her own nerve. Invoices that sat too long. A block on the Harborline maps that still had laundry lines in the photos if you knew where to look. Joe credit, and how a private lender could smile while it took the air out of a smaller shop. She did not write *why me*. That one sat on her tongue and made her swallow too often.

At two she went home for a shirt that didn’t look like she’d slept in a chair at Atlantic Broadcast Group. Home still meant the eatery first. Her father’s place, even though the sign had always carried her mother’s name in smaller letters nobody noticed.

The eatery was in that dead hour between lunch and the evening rush. David sat at the little desk behind the counter with his glasses on. The notice wasn’t fully covered. A menu sat on top of it like a shy lie. He looked up as her father, not as a man explaining himself to a room.

“They asked for you,” David said. He didn’t need the details. “The Joe one.”

“They asked for the pages Anna threw away.”

He rubbed his thumb along the desk edge, the way he used to rub a pencil when a drawing wouldn’t sit right. “Rooms like that have a cost that doesn’t come on the bill. You keep your feet. You keep your name. You come back to us.”

Mary came from the kitchen with a container Zera wouldn’t open in time. She wiped her hands on her apron before she touched her daughter’s cheek, the same way she had when Zera left for college with two jobs already lined up. “Ask what you meant to ask. Then you come home. We are not a curiosity for a man who eats in places with three forks.”

Mike leaned on the counter, little brother written all over the way he tried to look older than the crate he used to sit on. “Is he as tall as they say? Because if he’s tall and rude I’m going to be annoyed for you.”

“You can be annoyed after I get through the door.” She kissed her mother’s cheek, promised her father she’d be exact, and told Mike not to open the lease paper if he found it. Then she went upstairs.

The apartment still smelled like onions. It always would. In the hall closet Mary kept a box of pictures from before Mike, from the years when the first eatery had a soup window and the street had names Zera only half remembered. She opened the box because her hands needed something that wasn’t the recorder.

Near the bottom: Mary younger, hair tied up, laughing at someone off the frame. A woman in a plain coat paying with change laid out in little piles. Beside the woman, a boy about ten, dark hair, standing like he’d been told not to take up room. No names on the back. Only a year that made Zera’s chest go tight for a reason she couldn’t use on a microphone.

She slid the photo into her bag, face down against the recorder, and told herself it was nothing. Old paper. Old street. Everybody in that neighborhood had stood in a doorway once. Her mother had fed half of them.

Joe Group’s building was the kind of glass the city pointed at. The elevator was quiet enough that she heard her own swallow. Sam waited on the top floor. Dark suit. Mid-thirties, maybe. A face that had learned not to show when his boss surprised him.

“He doesn’t wait,” Sam said.

Through the inner glass, Austin Joe was already on his feet.

Six feet. Dark hair. Dark brown eyes that didn’t wander the room looking for a place to land. He looked at the door as if he’d felt the elevator in his teeth. Not curious. Sure.

Zera’s bag strap cut into her shoulder. The photo’s corner pressed her knuckle.

Sam opened the door.

“Miss Smith,” Austin said.

Her name didn’t sound like he’d read it off a list two hours ago.