Wrong sister, Right man

chapter 12

**Mia**

The first retool machine came in on a flatbed at 6 p.m. on a Sunday, which was how I knew the universe had a sense of humor.

It was a new Jacquard loom controller, a gray steel cabinet the size of a refrigerator. It was the first real piece of my plan, forty pages I'd written at my kitchen table and my father had shoved in a drawer. It had to be wired in, calibrated and tested by seven Monday morning, when a man from the insurance company would be walking through to decide if we were a safe bet.

"Twelve hours," Hector said, staring at it. "We can do it in twelve hours."

"We can do it in twelve hours if nothing goes wrong."

"Don't say that out loud."

"Sorry."

"Don't say *sorry* out loud either. This building listens."

By nine the crew had gone home, because I'd sent them. I'd rather work with two people I trusted than ten who were exhausted. By ten Hector had gone too, grumbling, because his wife had called twice and I'd told him if he didn't leave I'd tell her myself. That left me, a laptop, a wiring diagram the size of a bedsheet, and a very large silent machine.

And at 10:40, a quiet knock on the glass of the mezzanine door.

I didn't have to look up. "I told you not to come."

"You told me not to come to the dye house," Damian said. "This is the weave floor."

"That's a technicality."

"You're married to a lawyer's client. I'm allowed one."

He was in jeans and a dark sweater, with the sleeves shoved up. He'd never looked so ordinary, and it threw me. He was carrying a battered steel thermos in one hand and a paper bag in the other, and he set both on my desk as if they were evidence.

"What's that?"

"Dinner."

"I'm not hungry."

"You skipped lunch. Mrs. Pell told me. She was upset." He unscrewed the thermos. "I've been informed I'm not allowed to come home until you've eaten something."

"Mrs. Pell does not have that authority."

"You haven't met her when she's disappointed."

The bag had a sandwich in it, turkey and cheese on thick bread, and an apple, and a small, deeply suspicious piece of cake. I ate half the sandwich standing up, while he poured something steaming into the thermos lid and held it out.

I took it. I sniffed it. I looked at him.

"It's tea," he said.

"I can see that."

"I've been practicing."

"You've been *practicing.*"

"Twice. At the office. Ms. Adler timed me." His jaw tightened, a man who'd decided not to apologize for it. "Four minutes is the box. You said three."

I took a sip.

It was weak. It was lukewarm. It had a faint taste of the thermos itself, like pennies. And under that, somewhere, it was real tea, and it had been steeped for exactly the amount of time I'd told him.

I put it down.

"Well?" He was trying very hard to look as if he didn't care.

"Six."

"Six."

"It's a six. That's two points up. You'd have gotten a seven if it was hot."

"The thermos is broken."

"The *thermos* is broken."

"It's my mother's," he said, and then stopped, in a way that told me he hadn't intended to say it.

I looked at the thermos. Dented, old, the paint worn away on one side to bare metal. The kind of thing a person keeps for thirty years because throwing it out would be a kind of betrayal.

I didn't push. I picked the lid up and took another sip, slowly.

"It's a good thermos," I said.

"It leaks."

"They always do. That's how you know they're loved."

He looked at me, long and strange. I couldn't read it, and I'd stopped pretending I could.

"Show me the wiring," he said.

---

I'd expected him to stand behind me with his hands in his pockets, like a man at a museum. I didn't expect him to take off his watch.

But he did. He set it on the desk, very precisely, and rolled his sleeves another turn, and said, "Where do you need hands?"

"You don't—"

"Mia."

So I showed him.

I'd forgotten how much I like this part. The quiet of a plant at night, with the lights dimmed to half and the looms standing like sleeping animals in the dark. The smell of machine oil. The small private satisfaction of fitting a thing exactly into its place. I crouched at the back of the controller cabinet with a flashlight in my teeth and called out wire colors, and Damian, kneeling beside me, followed my voice.

And he was good.

That surprised me more than anything. He didn't fumble. He didn't ask the dumb questions an executive asks when he's pretending to be useful. He held a ribbon cable against the board for me without being asked, and he checked the contacts twice, and when I handed him a spool of thin gray thread to tie off a bundle, his fingers moved over it with a strange fast, practiced grace.

I stopped, with the flashlight halfway out of my mouth.

"Where did you learn that?"

"Learn what?"

"That knot." I pointed. A tight, flat, folded loop with a tiny hidden twist at the end. It was the kind of knot you only learn at a loom, or a sewing table. "That's a weaver's hitch."

His hands went still.

"I don't know," he said. "I just know it."

"Damian."

"My mother used to—" He stopped. Tried again. His voice was careful, like he was setting each word down on ice. "She did alterations. When I was a boy. At the kitchen table, at night. I used to hold the thread."

I didn't breathe.

"That's all," he said. "It's a small thing."

It wasn't. I knew it wasn't. I'd been married to a man for two weeks and suspected him of every cruelty I could think of, and he'd just handed me a piece of his life with his hands still on the wire.

"Thank you," I said quietly.

"For what?"

"For telling me."

"I didn't tell you anything."

"You told me about the thread."

He looked at his hands. At the little knot, perfect and small, in the dark cabinet. And something eased in his shoulders, the barest bit.

"You can have that one," he said. "It's free."

---

By two in the morning we'd finished the main wiring. By three we'd run the first diagnostic, and it had failed in a way I didn't understand, with a string of red codes I'd never seen. I sat on the floor in front of the machine, laptop on my knees, and swore at it in all three of Hector's languages.

"What does it say?"

"It says there's a fault in the second power rail."

"Is that bad?"

"It's very bad. It means somebody's wired something wrong." I rubbed my eyes with the heel of my hand. "Or it was shipped wrong. Or the old power system can't handle the new load, and I should have checked it three days ago, and we're going to fail the inspection and lose the insurance and the deal and—"

"Mia."

"—and my father's going to say I told you so, and it's going to be *true*—"

"Mia."

He'd sat down beside me. I hadn't noticed. He was on the concrete floor with his back against the machine, one knee up, an arm resting on it, and he turned his head and looked at me.

"Breathe."

"I'm *breathing.*"

"You're not. Do it with me."

"I'm not doing breathing exercises with you, Damian—"

"In."

I glared at him. He waited, perfectly patient, perfectly serious. And because I was tired, and my eyes hurt, and some small mean part of me was dying to see if he'd actually do it, I breathed in.

"Out."

I breathed out.

"Again."

We did it four times. It was the most ridiculous thing I'd ever done. But somewhere around the third breath, the bands around my chest started to loosen, and by the fifth, my hands had stopped shaking.

"Better?"

"A little."

"Good." He leaned his head back against the cabinet and closed his eyes. "I used to do it on the roof. When my mother was sick. I'd sit outside the hospital and count. It's the only thing that worked."

I turned to look at him.

I know I shouldn't have. It was the moment to stay still and let him have it. But his eyes were closed, and the lamplight fell on his face from one side, and he looked so tired. Not the cold tiredness of a man who works too much. A different kind, older, and deeper. The kind that has been carrying something heavy for so long that it forgets it's a burden and starts to think it's a spine.

*Who are you,* I thought. *Who are you really?*

"What about your mother?" I asked, softly.

His eyes opened.

"That's a past question," he said. But there was no edge in it. He sounded almost sorry.

"I know." I looked at my hands. "I wrote that clause. I'm sorry. I think I wrote it because I didn't want you asking *me* anything."

"Why?"

"Because I'd have told you." The words came out before I could stop them. "I think I'd have told you everything."

The silence after that was enormous.

Neither of us moved. The machine hummed faintly at our backs. The plant lay dark around us, a thousand yards of sleeping looms, and I was suddenly, painfully aware that I could feel the heat of him through two layers of cloth. That our shoulders were an inch apart. That if I turned my head, he'd be right there.

"Mia," he said, and it was barely a sound.

"Yes?"

"I'd like to hear it. Someday. When you want to."

"And what about you?"

He was quiet a long time. "Someday," he said. "I hope so."

It wasn't a promise. It was something stranger, and it was better. It was a door left open, a crack of light under it, and I looked at it and didn't say a word, because I was afraid that if I did, I'd walk through.

I turned back to the laptop. My hands were steady. My heart was not.

"The second power rail," I said, in a voice I barely recognized. "I'm going to check the fuse."

---

It was the fuse.

A single blown fuse, cheap and tiny, stuck deep in the back of the box. I'd have found it in an hour if I'd looked there first. I found it at 4:40 a.m., and I said a word I won't write down, and Damian laughed. A real laugh, out loud and surprised, and the sound bounced off the empty looms like a thrown coin.

"What?"

"Nothing."

"Don't laugh at me."

"I'm not laughing at you." He wiped his eyes. "I'm laughing because it's the best swear word I've ever heard, and I don't know what language it was."

"It's Portuguese. Hector taught me."

"I'd like to learn it."

"It's not polite."

"I gathered."

I swapped the fuse. I closed the cabinet. I flipped the switch, and the machine woke up with a long deep note, a lit-up row of green lights, like a small city coming on in the dark.

I didn't say anything. I couldn't. I sat on the floor with my hand on my mouth and watched it, my forty pages and my four years and the thing I'd been told I'd never get to build.

Damian didn't say anything either. He just sat next to me, close, not touching, and watched the lights with me, and let me have it.

After a while he reached over, very carefully, and pulled the thermos across the concrete. It was still half full. He poured a little into the lid and held it out.

I took it. It was stone cold.

"Seven," I said.

"It's cold."

"It's a seven because you brought it."

He didn't speak. He didn't have to. I'd said something I hadn't meant to, and we both knew it, and neither of us was going to touch it.

I leaned back against the cabinet. Somewhere in the next ten minutes, I stopped meaning to stay awake. My head slid sideways, onto something warm and solid and steady, and I think I heard a low voice say my name. I think I heard it say, *It's all right. Sleep.* I know I didn't argue.

---

**Damian**

She fell asleep on my shoulder at 4:52.

I know because I looked at my watch, and then I forgot to look at anything else.

She weighed nothing. Her hair was coming loose from its clip, and it was tickling the side of my neck, and there was a smear of machine grease across her cheek, and I'd never in my life seen anyone look so entirely at peace. I stayed where I was. I didn't move for an hour. My arm went numb, and then my whole side, and I didn't care.

At 5:58 my phone buzzed against my thigh.

I took it out slowly, with my free hand, so as not to wake her.

*W. Reyes.*

I looked at the name for a long time. Then I opened the message.

*She is a good girl. I saw it at the wedding. Tell her the truth, Damian, before someone else does. I won't be here forever, and I will not die with you carrying this alone.*

I read it three times. Then I turned the phone face down on the concrete, and I looked at the woman asleep against my arm, with her ring on her finger and a loop of white thread wound around it.

*Someone else already is,* I thought.

Somewhere across the road, beyond the glass and the dark loading bay, a gray shape stood under a dead streetlamp. It had been there, I realized, all night. Patient as a stone.

I held very still. I didn't wake her.

But I memorized the shape of him, and I counted the minutes until the dawn, and I promised, quietly, in the dark, that whoever he was, he would never get close enough to touch her.

---