The Debt Collector’s Wife

CHAPTER 4: THE PERFORMANCE

She didn’t sleep well.

That wasn’t entirely new, but this was a different kind of wakeful than the kind she’d been carrying around for the past few weeks. Before, it had been anxiety with a clear source.The banks, the money, Danger’s voice on the phone. Things she could list and turn over and eventually exhaust herself with.

This was something else.

She lay in the expensive bed in the navy room and stared at the ceiling and thought about Spencer standing at the entrance to the east hallway, glass in hand, watching her at the locked door with absolutely nothing readable in his face. Not angry. Not warning her. Just watching, like he’d been expecting her to end up there and had simply come to observe it happening.

She thought about that for a long time.

The locked door itself almost mattered less than that.

Morning came in grey and quiet. She showered, dressed, and went to the kitchen to make coffee and found Spencer already there, standing at the counter reading something on his phone, a cup beside him that was nearly empty.

He looked up when she walked in.

“Good morning,” Mara said, because someone had to.

“Morning.” He set his phone down. Watched her move to the coffee machine with that same quality of attention she was starting to find both unnerving and oddly difficult to resent. “Did you sleep.”

“Enough,” she said, which was not really true but was the version she was offering.

He didn’t push it, which she appreciated.

She made her coffee and leaned against the opposite counter and they existed in the same kitchen for a minute without it being terrible. Outside the windows the city was doing its morning thing, grey sky and movement, the particular texture of a weekday beginning.

“Last night,” Mara said.

Spencer looked at her.

“The hallway.” She kept her voice even. “I wasn’t trying to get in.”

“I know,” he said.

“I was just looking.”

“I know that too.”

She waited to see if he’d say anything further about it. He didn’t. Just picked up his coffee cup and finished what was left in it and set it back down, and the subject apparently closed itself without either of them formally closing it.

She wasn’t sure if that made her feel better or worse.

“There’s an event Thursday evening,” Spencer said, moving on with the particular ease of someone who decided when conversations ended. “A dinner. Forty people, private room, business associates mostly. I need you there.”

Mara looked at him over her cup. “Thursday.”

“I’ll have everything you need by Wednesday. Who’s attending, context, what’s expected.”

“And what is expected.”

“That you’re my wife.” He said it the same way he said most things, level and unhurried, like it was simply the most accurate description of a fact. “Nothing more complicated than that.”

Mara nodded slowly. Thought about asking more and decided to save it for Wednesday when she’d actually have something concrete to ask about.

“Alright,” she said.

Spencer picked up his phone again, which she was learning meant the conversation was over. She took her coffee back to the library and spent the morning there, reading a book she actually managed to concentrate on this time, and didn’t think about the east hallway more than four or five times.

Which felt like progress.

Wednesday came with a garment bag.

It arrived in the morning, hung on the outside of her wardrobe door while she was in the shower, left by someone she didn’t see. Black bag, no note. She unzipped it and stepped back.

Deep navy, Long and simple in the way that very expensive things manage to pull off without advertising it. She checked the label out of reflex and immediately wished she hadn’t.

She texted Spencer.

I don’t need you buying me clothes.

His reply came in under a minute.

The event has a dress code, Consider it a costume.

She looked at the dress. Looked at her phone. He wasn’t wrong, which was the irritating part, so she hung the garment bag back on the wardrobe and went to find him.

He was in the main hallway, jacket on, about to leave for wherever he went during the days she didn’t ask about.

“The dinner,” she said. “You said you’d brief me by today.”

He reached into his jacket and produced a folded sheet of paper, handed it to her. She opened it to find a typed list, clean and concise. Names, roles, brief notes beside each one. Arthur Leith, senior partner, asks direct questions, responds well to honesty. Patricia Vane, corporate lawyer, conversational, not important. Seven other names with similar annotations.

She looked up. “You typed this yourself.”

“Roman typed it.”

“Did you tell Roman to include the personal notes or did he do that independently.”

Something moved at the corner of Spencer’s mouth. “Does it matter.”

“It tells me something about how you operate.”

“Then I told him to,” Spencer said, and left.

She read the list twice over coffee and felt, in spite of everything, marginally more prepared than she had twenty minutes ago.

Thursday evening she was ready at seven.

Spencer was in the main hallway when she came out, already dressed, charcoal suit with no tie, and he looked at her for just a moment before he looked toward the door.

“You’ll do,” he said.

“Warm words,” Mara said. “I’ll treasure them.”

The corner of his mouth did the thing again. She was starting to catalogue that small almost smile the way you catalogue things you know you shouldn’t be cataloguing.

Roman drove them. She sat on one side of the back seat, Spencer on the other, the city moving past the windows, and neither of them spoke much for most of it. She’d been braced for the silence to be awkward and it wasn’t, which told her something she decided not to examine too closely.

“Arthur Leith,” Spencer said as they pulled up to the restaurant. “He’ll come to you directly. He does it to take measure of people.”

“Your notes said he responds well to honesty.”

“He does.”

“So I just tell him the truth.”

Spencer opened the car door and looked back at her. “Within reason,” he said.

The restaurant was exactly what she’d expected and she was glad about the dress.

She’d read the list enough times that walking into the room felt less like entering unknown territory and more like arriving at something she’d mapped in advance. She spotted Arthur Leith within two minutes. Patricia Vane within four. The rest arranged themselves around the room in roughly the order she’d anticipated and that small accuracy settled her nerves more than anything else could have.

Spencer moved through the space differently than he moved at home.

At home he was contained. Here he was contained and somehow enormous, a quality of presence that other people arranged themselves around without quite realizing they were doing it. She watched it happen from across the room while she accepted a drink from a passing tray and thought about what JJ had said about men with nothing online, about how that kind of nothing was its own kind of information.

He kept her close without touching her. Just close enough that the positioning said everything it needed to say without requiring anything from either of them. She let it happen because it was the arrangement and that was what she told herself.

Arthur Leith found her at the drinks table about twenty minutes in, exactly as the notes had predicted.

He was older than she’d pictured, late sixties, with the comfortable authority of someone who’d long stopped needing to perform it. He stood beside her and looked out at the room.

“You’re not what I expected,” he said.

“What did you expect.”

“Someone more decorative.” No judgment in it, just an observation he’d already made and was simply reporting. “Spencer tends toward calculated.”

“Maybe he was calculated about this too,” Mara said.

Arthur looked at her sideways. Then he laughed, genuine and brief. “How long have you known him.”

“Long enough,” she said, and heard Spencer’s own words in her mouth and wasn’t entirely sure how she felt about that.

Arthur studied her for a moment. “He’s not easy,” he said. “I’ve known Spencer Cameron for fifteen years and I can tell you honestly that he is not an easy man to know.”

“No,” Mara agreed. “He’s not.”

“But you’re here.”

“I’m here.”

He nodded slowly, like she’d confirmed something he’d already suspected rather than simply answered a question. “Good,” he said, and moved away into the room.

Dinner was manageable.

She was seated two places from Spencer, close enough for appearances, far enough that they weren’t required to perform a continuous conversation. The woman on her left was Patricia Vane who wanted to talk about property markets and Mara let her, asking just enough to keep it going while she ate and kept Spencer in her peripheral vision without obviously doing so.

He was composed throughout. Attentive without performing attention. She watched him work the table without appearing to work it and found herself thinking, not for the first time, about the photograph in his desk drawer and how long a person would have to watch someone before they knew them well enough to engineer the circumstances of their meeting.

She was thinking about that when it happened.

A man she didn’t recognize, seated three chairs down from Spencer on the opposite side of the table, leaned in and spoke close to his ear. Brief. Quiet. The kind of thing that gets lost in the ambient noise of forty people having dinner.

Spencer went still.

Not his usual stillness. Something underneath it, a different quality entirely, like a current being cut at the source. His hand was resting on the table and it stayed exactly where it was and his expression didn’t change but something behind it did, moving through his eyes in the space of a second before it closed back down completely.

Then he turned and looked directly at Mara.

She looked back and didn’t look away.

He turned back to his conversation and resumed it so completely that someone watching from outside wouldn’t have seen any interruption at all. That was almost the most unsettling part of it, how fast and how totally he could do that.

Mara looked at the man who’d whispered to him.

He was already looking at her.

He smiled when their eyes met. Polite, pleasant, utterly eventless. The kind of smile that was designed to give nothing away and succeeded completely.

She looked away and spent the rest of dinner being perfectly agreeable to Patricia about property markets while her attention sat somewhere else entirely.

Roman had the car out front at ten thirty.

She waited until they were inside and the partition was up.

“The man who spoke to you at dinner,” she said.

Spencer looked straight ahead.

“What did he say.”

“A business matter.”

“You looked at me,” Mara said. “Whatever he told you, your first reaction was to look at me. Which means it wasn’t just a business matter.”

Spencer turned his head and looked at her in the dim back seat, the city sliding past outside, and she could see him deciding something, working through it behind that composed face of his.

“It’s being handled,” he said.

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s what I have right now.”

She held his gaze for a moment then looked away. Pushing him in a moving car at ten thirty wasn’t a battle she had the right tools for and she knew it.

They rode back in silence.

In the penthouse hallway, when she was already heading toward her room, he stopped her.

“Mara.”

She turned.

He was standing with his jacket over his arm, looking at her with that same quality from the car, still deciding, still measuring something she couldn’t see.

“The man’s name is Luca Mercer,” he said. “That’s all I’m telling you tonight.”

He went into his room and closed the door.

Mara stood in the hallway with the name sitting in her mind and thought about the way Spencer had looked at her across that dinner table in the first second after hearing it, before he’d closed everything back down again.

Like whatever Luca Mercer had said, her name had been somewhere in it.

She went to bed with that thought and it kept her company for most of the night.