Wrong sister, Right man

chapter 7

Mia

I came downstairs at 6:58 out of pure spite, so I could say I'd been on time and still refuse to eat.

The kitchen wasn't white anymore. Somebody had been in since dawn and turned it into a place where people lived. A small woman in an apron was banging a pan on the stove with the confidence of someone who did it every morning, and the whole room smelled of butter and toast.

"You'll be the new one," she said, without turning around.

"Mia."

"Pell." She flipped something. "Sit. He's already through there with his tablet, stewing."

He was. The breakfast nook was off the kitchen, all glass and morning light, and Damian sat at the table in a gray shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, a black coffee beside him and a tablet propped against the sugar bowl. He looked at me, then at the clock on the wall, then at me again. Seven on the dot.

"You're on time."

"I never said I wouldn't be."

"You said you don't eat at seven."

"I don't. I'm here for the coffee."

On the counter by the machine, upside down on a dish towel, was my blue mug. The chipped one. Somebody had washed it. I looked at the mug, then at him, and he became very interested in his tablet.

I poured. Mrs. Pell put a plate of eggs in front of me without asking, and I ate them, because refusing would have been rude, and because they were unreasonably good.

"Your calendar," Damian said.

I put the fork down. "Ah."

"Ms. Adler has sent you the request three times."

"I know. I've been ignoring it with real commitment."

"I'd like it by the end of the day. Weekly, every Sunday evening. Meetings, locations, who you're seeing."

"Who I'm seeing."

"Professionally."

"Damian." I turned the mug in my hands. "I'm going to Eastgate at eight. I'll be there until the shift ends, which is usually six, but sometimes ten, because the dye house breaks down about once a week and then everyone stands around a vat of purple sludge swearing. Do you want to know about the vat?"

"Yes."

I stared at him. He wasn't joking. He said "yes" the way another man says "pass the salt."

"Why?" I said. "Why do you need to know where I am?"

"There are people who'd like to know where you are."

"Which people?"

"People."

"Are you going to tell me which people?"

"No."

"Then that's not a reason. That's a mood."

Mrs. Pell, at the stove, made a small noise that might have been a cough. She did not turn around.

Damian looked at me for a long beat. There was something in his face I couldn't read, a tightness at the jaw, like he was holding a sentence behind his teeth and had decided to swallow it. "It's a security matter," he said at last. "That's all I can say."

"That's all you *will* say."

"It's the same thing."

"It really isn't." I could feel my temper climbing, and I let it. "I'm not a parcel, Damian. I'm not going to be tracked like one. I signed a contract. I didn't sign a leash."

"Nobody said leash."

"A calendar every Sunday, who I'm seeing, where I am. That's a leash with better stationery."

He didn't flinch. He put his cup down, very slowly, and for a second I thought I'd gone too far and a lawyer was about to materialize from the wall. Instead he said, "What would you accept?"

I hadn't expected that. I'd expected him to dig in.

I thought about it. "I'll text you when I arrive somewhere and when I leave. Eastgate, Harlow Street, my father's house. That's it. You know I'm alive, you don't get a diary."

"Every time."

"It's a text. It takes four seconds. It's not a tracking collar."

His mouth did something small and complicated. "Fine."

"And no driver."

"No."

"Damian."

"You'll take the driver."

"I'll take my car. My own car. I've driven it for nine years and I'm not about to turn up at a dye house in a black sedan with a man named Ames."

"His name is Ames?"

"I assumed. He looks like an Ames."

I watched him fight it. I really did. The corner of his mouth went down, then up, then he got it under control and looked at the ceiling like a man doing sums.

"Park inside the gates," he said finally. "Not on the street."

"Deal."

"And you'll tell me if anything seems wrong."

"Like what?"

"Anything."

"That's not specific, Damian."

"It doesn't have to be."

I stood, finished my coffee in one go, and put the chipped mug in the sink, where Mrs. Pell took it out again immediately and dried it with the air of a woman who had her own system. I left him there with his tablet and his unexplained security matter and went out to find my car.

It was where I'd left it, a 2011 Corolla with a dented passenger door and a bumper held on by a clip, parked next to the garage between two vehicles that probably cost more than the Eastgate payroll. It looked like a stray dog that had wandered into a dog show. I loved it very much.

As I backed out I glanced up, and there he was in the window of the nook, with his coffee cup, not moving. Just standing there watching me go. He had the look of a man who'd mislaid something and couldn't think what.

I turned the corner, and he was gone.

At 8:41, in the Eastgate car park, I sent him a text. *Arrived. Alive.*

At 8:46 he replied. *Noted.*

I looked at it for a while. Then I typed: *Do you know any other words?*

At 8:49 I got his answer. *Yes.*

I laughed out loud, alone in a parked car, a real startled laugh that I hadn't planned on and didn't want. It scared me a little. I put my phone in my bag and sat there with my hand over my mouth, breathing.

It was only a joke. A very small one, from a very difficult man.

I went inside to find out whether anybody at Eastgate was going to let me do my job.

---

**Damian**

I typed *Good.* Then I deleted it.

I typed *Understood.* Deleted that too. It sounded like something you'd say to a customs officer.

*Noted* took four minutes, and I sent it.

"You could try a full sentence," said Ms. Adler, from the doorway of my office. She had a folder under her arm and the expression of a woman who had been waiting a polite interval to mention it.

"It was a full sentence."

"It was a word with a period on it."

"It was accurate."

"Mr. Blackwood." She came in and set the folder on the desk, squarely, the way she does when she's about to say something I won't like. "She asked if you knew any other words."

I looked at my phone. I had not told Ms. Adler that. She reads my screen from across a room. She always has.

"I do," I said. "Know other words."

"Then use one."

I typed *Yes.* and sent it before I could regret it. It wasn't a good answer. I don't know what a good answer is. I had never needed to know. For eleven years nobody had written to me to ask a question I wanted to answer.

Ms. Adler lifted one eyebrow and said nothing, which is her highest form of criticism.

"The folder," I said.

She opened it.

There were four photographs. A gray-haired man in a gray coat, standing across the road from the main gate of Eastgate Textiles. A second one, a week older, of the same man outside the Carter family house. A third outside her apartment building, the evening she'd moved out. In the fourth he was holding a camera, and the lens was pointed straight at the door of the church where we'd been married.

"Voss Industries," Ms. Adler said. "He's been following the Carters since the deal was announced. He's not subtle. I think he wants to be noticed."

"Does she know?"

"No."

"Keep it that way."

"Mr. Blackwood." She said it carefully. "She's going to find out. And when she does, she'll want to know why you didn't tell her."

I knew that. I'd known it at the breakfast table when I watched her put her fork down and tell me she wasn't going to be tracked like a parcel. She was right, and I couldn't say so. If I told her about the man in the gray coat, she'd look over her shoulder in every room for the rest of the year. She'd stop sleeping. She'd tell me she was fine and she wouldn't be.

I'd rather she was angry with me than afraid. It wasn't a good reason. It might not even be a fair one. But it was the only one I had.

"Then she can be angry," I said.

Ms. Adler closed the folder. "She texted *alive*," she said, in a gentler tone, and left it there.

I looked at the screen again. *Arrived. Alive.* Two words, plus a full stop for each. I read it more times than I'd like to put on record.

Then I turned the phone face down, and went to find out how much Voss Industries wanted for the Harlow Street land.