Wrong sister, Right man

chapter 13

**Mia**

I woke up in the passenger seat of his car with his jacket over me and no memory of getting there.

It was a little after seven, and the sun was just clearing the rooftops. The whole parking lot was wet and gold and empty. My neck hurt. My mouth tasted like thermos. And I was wearing a man's coat that smelled like cedar and machine oil and something underneath I refused to name.

My phone sat on the dashboard with a folded paper tucked under it.

*The inspector comes at 9. The controller passed its second test while you slept. Hector says to tell you he's never seen you cry from joy and he won't be bringing it up. I'm at the office. Eat. —D.*

I read it four times. Then I put my head on my knees and let out a very quiet scream.

*Cry from joy.* I hadn't cried. I was almost sure I hadn't. Except that around five a.m. my face had been against a warm shoulder and something wet had definitely happened, and Damian Blackwood had said nothing about it. Which, somehow, was worse.

We passed inspection at 9:40. Hector shook the man's hand for a very long time.

I returned the jacket that night. I'd had it cleaned, which was a mistake, because it didn't smell like him anymore, and I stood in the hall holding it and feeling robbed. In the end I folded it over the back of his study chair with a sticky note on the collar.

*As a blanket: 9/10. Two points off for the lapel in my eye. —M.*

I didn't stay to watch him find it. But the next morning at breakfast, the note was stuck to the edge of his tablet, and he was reading it, very seriously, with a cup of coffee going cold in his hand.

"Nine," he said, without looking up.

"Don't push it."

"I'm only saying it's the highest score I've gotten."

"It was the *only* score you've gotten, Damian."

He turned the tablet so I couldn't see his face. The back of his ears had gone slightly red.

---

I've never been good at not knowing things.

Give me a puzzle and I'll chew on it until it's solved. That's how I got Eastgate's wasted hours down from a hundred and four to fifty-one. That's why I was the only one in my family who read the whole contract. And that's why, three nights after the controller, at ten to two in the morning, I was lying awake listening to a house that wasn't quiet.

A creak. A breath. The slow shift of weight on old wood. It came from the west corridor, and I'd lived there long enough by then to know nothing happened in that corridor unless somebody made it happen.

I got up. I pulled on the cardigan from the chair. I told myself I was going for water.

I took the long way around.

He was sitting on the floor.

I stopped at the corner and went still. At the far end of the hall, under one low sconce, with his back against the wall and his legs stretched out, Damian sat on the bare boards in his shirtsleeves, a few feet from the locked door. His head was tipped back and his eyes were closed. In his open hand, loose in his lap, lay something small and gold.

A thimble.

Dented, old, worn so smooth on one side that it caught the light like a coin.

I should have gone. That's what a decent person does. I'd seen him at this door once already, the first night, with his palm pressed flat to the wood, and I'd gone back to bed and told myself it was none of my business.

But I'd also sat beside him on a dye house floor and felt his whole body go quiet when I said *I'd have told you everything.* And I didn't want to go back to bed.

So I walked down the corridor. I made sure he'd hear me.

His eyes opened. He didn't flinch. He looked up at me with a face so stripped of its armor that I almost stopped.

"Don't ask," he said, very low. It wasn't an order.

"I wasn't going to."

"Mia."

"I'm not asking." I sat down beside him with my back to the wall and my knees pulled up, close enough to feel the warmth of his arm. "I'm just sitting."

He looked at me for a long moment. Then back at the door.

We sat. The sconce hummed. The old house ticked and settled, and somewhere far off a pipe knocked twice, like someone politely asking to come in.

"It's not interesting," he said. "I just sit here."

"That's fine. I'm good at sitting."

A short breath that was almost a laugh. "You're good at everything."

"I can't make tea."

"No. You can't."

"You're not much better."

"I know."

It was nothing. A joke whispered at two in the morning between two people in a hallway. But something in my chest gave, softly, the way a knot gives when you finally find the right end.

He turned the thimble over in his fingers.

"My mother's," he said.

I didn't move.

I'd promised myself I wouldn't ask. I hadn't. He'd just put it down in front of me, plain, like a coin on a table. I thought of the weaver's hitch in the machine cabinet. A woman doing alterations at a kitchen table at night. A boy holding the thread.

"She died when I was nineteen," he said. "This was in her sewing box. It's all I took out."

"All you took out of what?"

His eyes went to the door. He didn't answer.

*Oh,* I thought. *Oh.*

The room behind it. The one he guarded, and listened at, and couldn't open. He wasn't hiding a woman. He was hiding a grief, and it was so much bigger than anything I'd made up that I felt ashamed of all the stories I'd told myself.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Thank you."

"I'm not going to ask about it."

"I know." He closed his hand around the thimble. "That's why I told you."

He leaned his head back against the wall. His voice, when it came again, was barely audible.

"She would have liked you."

I couldn't speak. I just reached over, very slowly, and put my hand on the floor between us, palm up, close enough that he could take it or leave it.

He looked at it for a long time.

He didn't take it. But after a while, his little finger moved across the boards and settled against mine, just that, one finger, no more, and we sat in the hum of the light with our hands touching like two people who weren't sure they were allowed.

He fell asleep sitting up. I put my cardigan over his shoulders and went back to bed, and I lay awake until dawn with my little finger held in my other hand.

---

The text came the next afternoon, at 3:20, in the middle of a meeting about spools.

Unknown number. Six words.

*I think we should talk. —C.*

I put the phone face down. I finished the meeting. I went to the bathroom and locked the door and read it again.

*Ask your husband where the Harlow Street money went.* That note. The name on his tablet. A man in a mirrored hall with his card in my hand. The pieces didn't fit together, and I was so tired of holding them.

I typed: *Where?*

*The Linden Street café. 5 o'clock. Please, Mia. I'm not going to hurt you. I just don't want you finding out the way I did.*

*The way I did.*

I drove there with both hands on the wheel and my heart going like a cheap clock. I told myself it was only coffee.

---

She was in the back corner by the window, with a pot of tea and two cups. Her hair was down, loose around her face. Gray sweater, sleeves pulled over her hands. No makeup. She looked about nineteen.

"You came," she said.

"I almost didn't."

"I know. I wouldn't have, in your place." She poured me a cup and her hand shook. "I'll say it plainly. I'm not here to take him back, and I'm not here to cause a scene. I did something to him a long time ago that I'm ashamed of, and I've spent two years trying to live with it."

"The fall."

"No. Not the fall." She shook her head fast. "I *did* fall, and I want you to know he didn't push me. I'm not going to tell you he did. But I'd begged him for an hour. And when I grabbed his arm he pulled free and kept walking. He didn't look back. I was on the floor, and he *didn't look back.*"

A cold line ran down my spine.

That was true. I'd seen it. It was exactly what I'd seen.

"I know," I said, before I could stop myself.

"You were there."

"I was."

"Then you understand." Her face crumpled, only a second, and I felt a stab of pity I didn't want. "I'm sorry you had to see it. Nobody should."

"Why did you want to meet me?"

"Because I saw you at the ball. And you looked at him the way I used to. Like you were trying to find the one thing that would make him open up." She looked at her hands. "Somebody should tell you what he's like."

"What's he like?"

She raised her eyes. Wide, brown, wet, honestly lovely. That was the worst part. I'd come in wanting to dislike her.

"Has he asked for your calendar?"

My stomach dropped.

"He did that to me. Every Sunday night. Where I was going, who with. At first I thought it was love." She wiped her cheek. "Then I stopped being allowed to see my friends. He never raised his voice, you know. He never touched me. It was all very, very quiet. Until I realized I was living in a beautiful cage."

I thought of the breakfast table. *Weekly, every Sunday evening.* I thought of the man who'd said *fine* when I told him no.

And I thought of the thing that didn't fit. A man in a gray coat. A folder I'd never seen. *There are people who'd like to know where you are.*

"He makes promises," Celeste went on, softly. "That's what he does. He promises people things, and he'd burn the world down before he'd break one. He never asks if the promise was a good idea. It's what he does instead of loving people."

"Promised who?"

The words were out before I could think.

Something flickered over her face, too quick to name. Then she looked down at her cup.

"Ask him," she said. "Or ask my father."

*Walter Reyes.* An old man's hand on mine. *Watch what he does.* A line of payments, every month, for years.

"One more thing," she said. "Then I'll go, and I won't contact you again unless you ask."

"What?"

"Ask him what he paid for the land."

The café went very still.

Not the same words. But the same shape. Voss, in a mirrored corridor. *Ask him who he's paying and why.* And now her, in a gray sweater, over a pot of tea.

"Why does everyone keep telling me to ask him that?"

I hadn't meant to say it aloud.

Celeste's face didn't move. But her hand on the table went white at the knuckles.

"Who else has said it?"

"Nobody."

"Mia."

"Nobody."

I stood. I left a ten on the table, too much, and my chair scraped the floor. I wanted out of that room more than I'd ever wanted anything. She watched me go with those big sad eyes and didn't try to stop me.

On the sidewalk, in the cold, I made the mistake of looking back through the window.

She was sitting exactly where I'd left her, with both hands over her face, her shoulders shaking. A woman at the next table had leaned over to touch her arm. She was crying. Really crying, I'd have sworn to it, in front of a whole room.

I stood on Linden Street until my toes went numb. I'd come in sure of one thing, and left sure of nothing. A girl who'd lied. A girl who'd told the truth. A girl who'd done both in the same sad voice, and I couldn't tell the two apart.

My phone buzzed.

*Damian: Where are you?*

The first time he'd ever asked outright. No *Noted.* No *Arrived?* Just three words and a question mark.

I thought of him on the floor of the west corridor. A single finger against mine.

I typed: *Harlow Street. Checking the loading dock.*

I sent it. That was the third.

Three dots appeared, and vanished, and appeared again, for a very long time.

*Okay,* he wrote at last.

And I thought, with a slow cold drop of dread, that I wasn't at all sure he believed me.