Who Is the 0 That Fights This Well

The first thing I noticed was the time. 6:12 a.m. Not because I was awake by choice, but because Julian's phone had buzzed itself off the nightstand and onto the hardwood floor of our bedroom. He was still asleep, one arm thrown over his face, breathing the deep, untroubled breath of a man who had never once worried about being caught. I had been awake for an hour already. I always was. The loft faced the harbor, and the fog in late October rolled in like a living thing, muffling the cranes and the distant ferry horns. I liked to watch it. It made the city feel like it belonged to someone else, someone with fewer obligations. The phone buzzed again. I slid out of bed, my feet cold on the wide oak planks, and picked it up. I did not mean to read it. I meant to put it on the charger. But the screen lit up with a message from a group chat called "The Regatta Boys," and the preview alone was enough to stop my hand. Drew: who is the 0 that looks like that and still fights like a bodyguard Then a second line, from someone named Marcus: not saying names but he was at the Anchor last night with J And then Drew again: no way. the fiancée doesn't know? I stood there in the gray light, holding a phone that was not mine, reading words that were not meant for me. The harbor fog pressed against the glass. Somewhere below, a delivery truck rattled over the cobblestones. The world kept moving, indifferent. I knew what a 0 was. I had grown up in this city, in its polite circles, where people spoke in codes and assumed everyone spoke them. It meant the bottom. The one who took it. It was a joke, in the way that jokes about other people's lives always are. But the words that mattered were the last ones. The fiancée doesn't know. I set the phone down. I did not wake Julian. I did not scream. I walked to the kitchen and made coffee, because my hands needed something to do, and because I had learned a long time ago that the people who fall apart in the first five minutes are the people who never get to choose how they leave. Julian Mercer was the kind of man who was described in profiles as "a fixture of the Easton philanthropic scene." His family had founded the Mercer Foundation, which funded a children's wing at St. Aloysius and a concert series at the Conservatory. He was thirty-four, handsome in a way that photographed well, and he had asked me to marry him on the deck of his family's house in Bell Harbor, with the lights of the city strung out behind us like a promise. I had said yes because I loved him. I had also said yes because I was tired. I was thirty-one, and I had spent my twenties building a career as a structural engineer for a firm that restored old buildings, and I had spent my evenings going to dinners where people asked me what my parents did and then lost interest when I told them. Julian's family did not lose interest. They absorbed me. His mother, Caroline, had taken me to lunch at the club and said, "You'll do," which I understood was the highest compliment she offered. I had thought that was enough. I had thought that being chosen by a family like that meant something. Now I stood in the kitchen, holding a mug, and I understood that I had been chosen the way a vase is chosen to fill a corner: because I matched, and because no one expected me to speak. At seven, Julian came out of the bedroom, rubbing his eyes. He was tall, with the kind of loose-limbed ease that came from a lifetime of being told yes. He kissed my cheek and poured himself coffee. "You're up early," he said. "Couldn't sleep," I said. He did not ask why. He opened his laptop and began scrolling through emails, and I watched him over the rim of my mug, and I thought about the Anchor, which was a bar on the waterfront where the sailing crowd went after races. I had been there once, with Julian, in the summer. I remembered the low ceilings and the smell of salt and beer. "Julian," I said. "Who's Drew?" He did not look up. "Drew Marchetti. You've met him. He's on the board of the sailing club." "And Marcus?" "Marcus Hale. Why?" "No reason," I said. "I saw a name on your phone." He looked up then, and for a fraction of a second, something flickered behind his eyes. Then it was gone, smoothed over by the expression he wore for donors and photographers. "Those guys are idiots," he said. "Don't pay attention to them." I nodded. I finished my coffee. And I made a decision, standing there in my own kitchen, that I would not ask him a single question until I knew the answers for myself. The first thing I did was call in sick. The second thing I did was drive to the Anchor. It was not open, of course. It was 8:30 in the morning. But the Anchor was on the same block as the harbor master's office, and the harbor master's office had a security camera that pointed at the front door. I knew this because I had worked on the restoration of the pier three years earlier, and I had spent a month arguing with the harbor master about load-bearing beams. His name was Sal Petrosyan, and he was sixty-two years old and had a mustache that made him look like a retired cop, which he was. He was also the only person in this city who had ever told me the truth about anything without being asked. "Sal," I said, when he opened the door. "I need a favor." He looked at me for a long moment. "You look like hell, Nora." "Thanks." "Come in." His office smelled like burnt coffee and old paper. He sat me down and poured me a cup of the burnt coffee, and I told him what I had seen. Not all of it. Just enough. He listened without interrupting, which was one of the reasons I liked him. "So you want the tapes," he said. "I want to know who was at the Anchor last night." He leaned back in his chair. "You know I can't just hand over security footage to anyone who asks." "I know." "But," he said, "I can tell you that the Anchor had a private event last night. The sailing club. And I can tell you that your fiancé was there. And I can tell you that he left around midnight with someone." I felt the floor tilt, just slightly, the way it does when you step off a boat. "Who?" Sal looked at me with something that might have been pity, and I hated it, and I made myself keep looking back at him anyway. "I don't know his name," Sal said. "But I've seen him around. Young. Dark hair. He works at the Conservatory, I think. He plays." I walked out of the harbor master's office into the cold white light of the morning, and I stood on the pier for a long time, watching the fog burn off the water. I had a name now, or almost a name. I had a place. I had a direction. What I did not have was a plan. But I was an engineer. I had spent my whole career taking broken structures apart, finding the load-bearing lie, and figuring out how to replace it without bringing the whole thing down. I knew how to do this. I just had never done it to a person before. I got in my car and drove to the Conservatory.