CHAPTER 5 -- CRACKS
1256 Words
She did not sleep again.
Mara lay in her small bedroom and listened to the rain slow down outside her window and stared at the ceiling and thought about four words.
Was it yours or hers.
Not an accusation. Not a threat. Just a quiet question asked in a warm car on a rainy evening by a man who was not supposed to notice her at all. That was the part she could not get past. Not what he had asked. But that he had noticed enough to ask it.
She turned onto her side.
Closed her eyes.
Opened them again.
She gave up at six fifteen and made herself coffee and sat at her small kitchen table and watched the city outside her window wake up slowly. Lights coming on in other buildings. The first buses moving through wet streets. The ordinary world doing what it always did regardless of what was happening inside her head.
She drank her coffee and got ready for work.
Thursday started quietly.
Mara was at her desk by eight twenty. Files open. Head down. Routine holding. She had decided somewhere between her front door and the office building that she was going to be sensible about this. All of it. The restaurant. The texts. The car. She was going to file it away in a part of her mind she did not visit often and she was going to do her job and go home and that was going to be that.
She managed to believe this until nine oh three when her phone buzzed.
The unknown number.
Her stomach did something she told it firmly to stop doing.
She turned the phone over.
You didn't answer my question last night.
Mara read it twice.
Then she put the phone face down on her desk and stared at her screen.
He meant the car. He meant was it yours or hers and she had said goodnight and walked into the rain instead of answering and apparently he had not forgotten about it.
She picked the phone back up.
Typed slowly.
It was mine.
She stared at those three words for a long moment.
Sent them.
She put the phone down and waited. Her cursor blinked at her on the screen. Someone across the floor laughed at something. The printer near the window hummed to life.
Her phone buzzed.
I know.
Two words.
Mara stared at them.
He knew. He had known before he asked. He had sat across from her in that car already knowing the answer and asked anyway. She did not fully understand why and she did not know what to do with the feeling that settled in her chest when she realised it.
She typed back.
Then why did you ask.
She waited.
A minute passed. Two. She was starting to think he was not going to reply when the phone buzzed again.
I wanted to see if you would say so.
Mara read it.
Read it again.
She sat back in her chair slowly and looked at the ceiling for a moment and thought about what that meant. He had been testing her. Not in a cruel way. In the way of someone who was paying attention and wanted to know what kind of person they were paying attention to.
She did not know whether to be unsettled or something else entirely.
She was still deciding when Rita appeared at her desk.
"You have that face again," Rita said.
"I do not have a face."
"You are staring at the ceiling. You only stare at the ceiling when--"
"I am thinking about a work thing."
Rita looked at her phone lying face down on the desk. Then at Mara. Then she sat down at her own desk without saying anything else.
Which somehow felt worse than if she had said something.
The morning passed.
Mara worked. She answered emails and updated three files and sat in on a forty minute call about a client account she had nothing to do with but had been added to by mistake. Normal Thursday things.
Vivian did not come near her desk.
That alone was enough to make her slightly nervous.
With Vivian the quiet days were never just quiet days. They were days when something was being arranged that Mara would find out about later in the worst possible way. She had learned that in month two and she had not unlearned it since.
She kept one eye on Vivian's office door for most of the morning.
Nothing.
At twelve thirty she went to the small kitchen to heat up her lunch. She had actually brought lunch today. Proper lunch, made at home, in a container that was not sad. Small victory.
She was standing at the microwave watching the container rotate when someone came in behind her.
She moved to the side to give them room.
"You don't have to move."
She turned around.
Damien Cross was standing in the kitchen doorway.
In eight months she had never once seen him in the third floor kitchen. The thirty eighth floor had its own kitchen. Its own everything. There was no reason for him to be here. None at all.
He walked to the coffee machine like he had done it a hundred times and poured himself a cup.
Mara turned back to the microwave.
The container was going around and around and she watched it like it was the most important thing she had ever seen.
The kitchen was small. Two people in it felt like four. She was very aware of exactly how much space existed between where she was standing and where he was standing and it was not very much.
"Ellison."
She looked at him.
He was leaning against the counter with his coffee. Looking at her with that expression she was beginning to think was just his face -- still, direct, waiting.
"The Albrecht account," he said. "It goes to review next week. Your name will be on the file."
Mara blinked.
"Vivian managed that account," she said carefully.
"Vivian submitted work that was not hers." He said it the way he said everything. Flat and simple like it was just a fact about the weather. "Your name will be on the file."
The microwave beeped.
Neither of them moved for a second.
Then Mara reached in and took out her container and held it with both hands and looked at him.
She did not know what to say. Thank you felt too small. Questions felt dangerous. So she said the only thing that was true.
"She will not be happy about that."
Damien picked up his coffee.
"No," he said. "She won't."
He walked out of the kitchen.
Mara stood there holding her warm lunch container and stared at the empty doorway.
Her name on the Albrecht file.
Vivian was going to be furious. Quietly, dangerously, very specifically furious in the way that tended to make Mara's working life very difficult for weeks at a time.
But underneath the nerves something else was happening. Something small and unfamiliar that she did not have a name for yet.
She walked back to her desk.
Rita looked up when she sat down.
"You're smiling," Rita said.
"No I'm not."
"Mara. You are literally smiling."
Mara opened her lunch container and picked up her fork.
"Eat your food Rita."
Rita grinned and turned back to her screen.
Mara took her first bite and looked at her files and said nothing.
But Rita was not wrong.
- Writer
