The Width of Glass

Chapter Seven — Same Time Tomorrow

Mara pov

I didn't sleep well that night, which was not unusual, but the reason was different from the usual reasons.

Normally when sleep didn't come it was because of the specific and persistent anxiety that had moved in sometime during the second year with Daniel and had not yet fully moved out, the low hum of it that lived somewhere between my sternum and my throat and activated in the dark when there was nothing else to occupy the part of my brain that had been trained, slowly and thoroughly, to stay alert. That anxiety had a texture I recognized. I knew its rhythms and its triggers and I had developed, out of necessity, a set of ways to manage it that worked moderately well most of the time.

What kept me awake on Tuesday night was different. It didn't have the texture of fear. It had the texture of something I hadn't felt in long enough that it took me most of the night to identify it.

I lay in the dark and went over the conversation the way I went over documents I needed to fully understand, methodically, section by section, pulling out the parts that required further analysis.

He had known about Artie. He had been watching the building super's Sunday phone calls and had drawn the correct conclusion from the duration of them, which was the kind of inference that required both the observation and the interpretive framework to make use of it, and he had both. He had been doing this for six weeks and had said so without apology or evasion, just the plain fact of it, yes, because anything else would have been a lie and he was, I was coming to understand, someone who didn't lie when the truth was available.

That was the part I kept returning to.

I had spent two years with a man who lied the way other people breathed, unconsciously and continuously, who had constructed a version of reality that was coherent and detailed and completely untethered from what was actually happening, and who had been so fluent in that construction that I had spent the better part of those two years doubting my own ability to read a situation correctly.

Eliot Crane had sat across my table and told me things that were difficult and had not tried to manage my reaction to them. He had told me about Sarah Fielding without softening it. He had confirmed my read on Daniel's escalation without suggesting I was misreading it or overreacting. He had said I'm sorry about Artie in a tone that was not performative and had not lingered on it.

I found this extraordinary. I was aware that finding it extraordinary said something about the preceding two years that I wasn't ready to look at directly.

I got up at six and made coffee and sat at the kitchen table with my notes from the night before spread out in front of me. I had written up everything after I got home, the way I would have written up a source interview, everything he had said and the order he had said it and the things he hadn't said and where the gaps were. The gaps were still significant. He had told me what Daniel was but not everything he knew about what Daniel had done. He had told me about Sarah Fielding in outline but not in detail. He had told me he had a contact running a background but not who the contact was or what they had access to.

These were the things I would ask about tomorrow.

The thought arrived with a small charge of something I noted and set aside.

I went to work. I sat at my desk and worked through the Gloucester correspondence with the part of my brain that could do that work on a kind of autopilot while the other part ran quietly in the background on its own project, and by lunch I had drafted a list of twelve questions in the margin of my notepad that had nothing to do with wartime correspondence and everything to do with the conversation I was going to have that evening.

Daniel called at two fifteen.

I watched the phone ring and thought about what Eliot had said. The frequency and the nature. I let it ring out and then I took a photograph of the missed call log and sent it to the number that had been on the third note, the one about the coffee shop, which I had saved without deciding to.

Three minutes later my phone buzzed.

A single message. Thank you. How many times this week.

I looked at the message for a moment. The economy of it. No preamble, no pleasantries, just the relevant question.

I typed back. This is the third time since Wednesday.

He replied immediately. Has he left voicemails.

I typed. Never. He doesn't leave records.

A pause, slightly longer than the previous ones. Then. That's useful. I'll explain why tonight.

I put my phone down and looked at the word tonight sitting in the middle of my screen and thought about the fact that I had a standing arrangement with a man I had met once, whose apartment I had been in for forty minutes, who had been watching me from across a street for six weeks, and that the dominant thing I felt about this arrangement was not apprehension but something that was closer, uncomfortably, to anticipation.

I finished the Gloucester correspondence. I caught the tube home. I changed my shirt, which I told myself was because the one I had been wearing all day was not a shirt I wanted to conduct a serious conversation in, and I did not examine this reasoning too carefully.

I crossed the street at seven on the dot.

He buzzed me in without the intercom again, which I was already starting to read as a kind of shorthand, a way of saying I know it's you, which required him to have been watching for me, which I filed away with everything else I was accumulating about Eliot Crane.

He opened the door before I knocked.

The apartment looked the same as it had the night before but I looked at it differently now, with the additional context of what I knew about him, and what I saw was a space that was functional and sparse in a way that wasn't minimalism as aesthetic but minimalism as practice. Everything in it had a purpose. Nothing was decorative except one thing, a small framed photograph on the shelf by the window that I clocked and decided not to ask about yet.

He had coffee ready. I sat down and put my notepad on the table and he looked at it and something moved briefly across his face that might have been amusement and then was gone.

I said, I have questions.

He said, I assumed you would.

I said, the contact who's running the background on Daniel. Who are they and what do they have access to.

He looked at me for a moment and said, someone I worked with. They still operate within the infrastructure I used to be part of. The access is significant.

I said, significant meaning.

He said, meaning financial records, communications metadata, travel history. The kind of picture that takes a long time to build through public sources and not very long through private ones.

I wrote this down. I said, and what has that picture shown so far.

He was quiet for a moment in the way he was quiet when he was deciding how much to say, which I had already identified as a tell, the only one I had found so far, a brief stillness that preceded disclosure.

He said, Daniel has done this three times. Not twice. Three times. Sarah Fielding was the most recent before you. Before her there was a woman named Claire Ashworth, seven years ago. Before that a woman whose name my contact hasn't been able to confirm yet.

I looked at my notepad.

I said, what happened to Claire Ashworth.

He said, she moved abroad. France, as far as we can tell. She hasn't returned.

I said, and the first woman.

He said, we don't know yet.

I wrote it all down. The writing was something to do with my hands while I processed the specific weight of what he was telling me, which was that Daniel had been doing this long enough to have refined it, to have learned from each iteration what worked and what needed adjusting, which meant that what I had experienced was not the uncontrolled behavior of someone acting on impulse but something closer to a practiced methodology.

I had known this. Some part of me had known this for a long time and had been unable to say it plainly even to myself.

I said, he's not going to stop because I moved.

Eliot said, no.

I said, he was never going to stop.

Eliot said, not without a reason sufficient to make stopping the more attractive option.

I looked up from my notepad.

I said, and are you going to give him that reason.

He looked at me across the table and said, that's what I'm building toward, yes.

Outside the window the street was dark and ordinary. I thought about Sarah Fielding leaving the city. Claire Ashworth leaving the country. The unnamed woman before her, unlocated, unaccounted for, a gap in a record that should have contained her.

I thought about my second suitcase, still half packed in the corner of my bedroom.

I thought about the lamp I had carried up four flights of stairs because it was the one thing I hadn't been willing to leave behind.

I said, I'm not leaving.

Eliot said, I know.

He said it simply, without surprise, as if it were a thing he had already understood about me, and I felt the specific and vertiginous sensation of being known that I had felt once before, standing at my kitchen window in the dark looking across a street at a lit window.

Except this time I was on the other side of the glass.