The Debt Collector’s Wife

CHAPTER 6: DANGER

She visited Danger on Saturday.

Spencer didn’t ask where she was going when she came through the main hall with her jacket and her bag, just looked up from whatever he was reading and looked back down again. She appreciated that. The not asking. She’d half expected some version of checking in, a requirement to account for her movements, and the absence of it was either genuine respect for her autonomy or confidence that she had nowhere to go that would surprise him, and she wasn’t sure which interpretation sat better.

She took the bus and also she needed the forty minutes to think.

Danger lived in a two bedroom in Crestfield, third floor walkup, the kind of building that had been almost nice about fifteen years ago and was now just functional and affordable and fine. She’d helped him move in eighteen months back, the two of them carrying boxes up the narrow staircase while he complained about the elevator being out and she told him the elevator had clearly been out since the building was constructed.

He buzzed her up before she’d finished pressing the intercom button, which meant he’d been watching for her from the window, which meant he was in the kind of mood where he needed her there more than he was saying.

She climbed the stairs and he was already in the doorway when she reached the third floor landing, leaning against the frame in the particular way he had, arms crossed, trying to look casual and doing about sixty percent of the job.

He was thinner than the last time she’d seen him. she noticed it and filed it and didn’t say anything about it because saying something would make him self conscious and she needed him relaxed and talking.

“You look different,” he said, studying her face as she came in.

“Different how.”

“I don’t know. Older maybe.” He stepped back to let her through. “Not in a bad way. Just different.”

“I’ve had a week,” she said.

“Yeah.” He closed the door. “I guess you have.”

His apartment was Danger in physical form. Comfortable disorder, things placed where they’d been last used rather than where they belonged, a bookshelf that was half books and half everything else, dishes drying on the rack, a jacket over the back of the couch that had probably been there since Tuesday. She loved it in a way she couldn’t have explained to anyone who hadn’t grown up the way they had, in rooms that were lived in and a little chaotic and warm with it.

She sat on the couch and he made tea she didn’t particularly want and brought it anyway because that was what he did, and for a while they just talked. Easy things. Their cousin Marcus and the car. A show Danger had been watching. A problem with his downstairs neighbor’s music.

She let it run its natural course before she got to it.

“Tell me about Naomi Park,” she said.

Danger’s hands went still around his mug.

Just for a second. Then he set it down on the coffee table and sat back and looked at her with the particular expression he’d been wearing since they were children whenever he knew she already knew something and was asking anyway.

“What about her,” he said.

“How did you meet her.”

“Through a friend. Marcus’s girlfriend’s friend, I think, some party about two years ago. Why.”

“What was she like.”

He was quiet for a moment. Not reluctant exactly. More like he was choosing where to begin.

“Normal,” he said. “She was just normal. Friendly, easy to talk to. She knew a lot of people.” He picked up his mug again. “We weren’t serious or anything. We went out a few times, she came here a couple times, it lasted maybe two months before it just kind of stopped.”

“Did she end it or did you.”

“It just stopped. Neither of us really pushed it.”

“And the loan. She brought it up or you did.”

Danger looked at her steadily. “She brought it up,” he said. “I mentioned I was in a hole and she said she knew someone who could help with short term cash, better terms than a bank, no big deal. I asked a few questions and the answers all sounded reasonable so I said yeah, set up the meeting.” He paused. “I know how it sounds now.”

“I’m not judging you.”

“You’ve got a look on your face.”

“I’ve always got a look on my face,” Mara said. “Describe her to me. Naomi.”

Danger frowned. “Why.”

“Because I’m asking.”

He gave her the look again. Then he shrugged and thought about it.

“About your height,” he said. “Maybe a bit shorter. Mixed, I think Korean and something else, dark hair she usually wore up. Quiet kind of pretty, you know the type, like you don’t notice at first and then you do. She had this way of listening to you that made you feel like you were the most interesting person in the room.” He paused. “She always asked a lot of questions. I thought she was just curious. She was interested in everything about me, my job, my family, what I was working on.” Another pause, longer this time. “She asked a lot about you actually. I thought she was just being friendly.”

Mara kept her face neutral.

She was thinking about a woman she’d met four days ago.

Thursday morning in the lobby of Spencer’s building, on her way back from a coffee run, a woman in the elevator who’d smiled and said she was visiting someone on the twelfth floor and wasn’t the city cold for this time of year. They’d talked for forty five seconds, the length of an elevator ride, easy and forgettable the way elevator conversations are supposed to be. Dark hair worn up. Quiet kind of pretty. A quality of attention that had felt warm at the time.

She’d thought nothing of it.

Now she was thinking quite a lot of it.

“She asked about me,” Mara said, keeping her voice conversational. “What kind of things.”

“Where you worked. What you were like. Whether you were seeing anyone.” He shrugged. “I told her about the job and said you were you, you know, smart and stubborn and you’d been on your own for a while. She seemed really interested in that last part actually.” He said it like he was only now connecting that detail to something. “The being on your own part.”

“Did she ever ask about money. Your money, my money.”

Danger was quiet for a moment.

“Yeah,” he said slowly. “She did. I thought it was just conversation.”

Mara nodded and picked up her tea and took a sip and said nothing.

The thing about Danger was that he wasn’t stupid. He’d never been stupid. He was impulsive and he trusted too easily and he had a persistent blind spot for people who paid him attention, but he wasn’t stupid, and she could see on his face the exact moment the shape of what she wasn’t saying became clear to him.

“Mara,” he said.

“Don’t.”

“Was she. Was Naomi—”

“I don’t know yet,” she said. “I’m still figuring it out.”

“If she set me up intentionally, if this whole thing was—” He stopped. Ran a hand through his hair. “Jesus, Mara.”

“Danger.” She put her hand on his arm. “Look at me.”

He looked at her.

“You’re okay,” she said. “That’s the part that matters. Whatever happened before, however it happened, you’re okay and the debt is gone and that’s what I need you to hold onto right now.”

He looked at her for a long moment. “You’re not okay though, are you.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re living with a man you don’t know because of a debt I created, and the woman who introduced me to him might have done it on purpose, and you’re sitting here telling me you’re fine.”

“Danger.”

“That’s not fine, Mara. That’s you doing the thing you always do which is carry everything and call it fine.”

She opened her mouth and closed it again because he wasn’t wrong and they both knew it and arguing would waste time she didn’t have.

“I’m handling it,” she said instead.

He looked at her for a long moment and then pulled her into a hug, abrupt and tight the way his hugs always were, and she let him and stared at the wall over his shoulder and thought about the woman in the elevator and the folder on Spencer’s desk and Luca Mercer’s smile across a dinner table and the specific arithmetic of all these separate things adding up to one number she didn’t like.

“You don’t have to handle everything alone,” Danger said into her shoulder.

“I know,” she said.

She didn’t know.

She was quiet on the bus back.

The city moved past the window in the late afternoon, people with shopping bags and pushchairs and the ordinary accumulated weight of a Saturday, and she sat with her hands in her lap and thought.

Naomi Park had dated Danger for two months and asked questions about Mara the whole time.

Naomi Park had engineered an introduction to Spencer Cameron’s world.

A woman matching Naomi Park’s description had been in the elevator of Spencer Cameron’s building four days ago, visiting someone on the twelfth floor, showing no recognition whatsoever.

Mara pressed her fingers together slowly.

The thing about the elevator was this. Either it had been a coincidence, which was possible but required her to believe in a coincidence so specific it bordered on insulting. Or Naomi Park had been there deliberately. Had seen Mara, recognized her, chosen not to show it.

Had looked at her and smiled and talked about the weather.

The bus stopped and started. She watched a woman outside trying to fold a pushchair with one hand while holding a toddler with the other and a man walked past without stopping to help and the toddler laughed about something and none of it had anything to do with her situation and she watched it all anyway because it was easier than sitting with what she was thinking.

By the time she got back to the penthouse she had one clear thought.

She needed to get into that office.

Spencer was reading in the main sitting room when she came in. He looked up.

“Good visit,” he said

“He’s well,” she said.

Spencer nodded and looked back at his book and she stood in the entrance for a moment and looked at him, this man who had a folder with her family name dated three years ago in his locked office, and thought about how to say the thing she’d come home decided to say.

“Spencer.”

He looked up.

“Naomi Park,” she said.

Something happened in his face. Small and fast and completely controlled but she was watching closely enough to catch it, that fractional shift, the one that told her the name had landed somewhere real.

“Where did you hear that name,” he said.

“From Danger.” She kept her eyes on him. “She was the one who introduced him to your operation. You know that already, don’t you.”

There was a pause….

“Yes,” he said.

“Who is she.”

Spencer closed his book slowly. Set it on the arm of the chair. Looked at her with the expression she was starting to know as the one that meant he was deciding not how to answer but how much of the answer to give her.

“Someone I’m aware of,” he said.

“That’s not enough.”

“It’s what I have right now.”

“Spencer.” She said his name the way she had in the kitchen three days ago, direct and deliberate, and watched the same shift move through his face. “She was in your building four days ago. Thursday morning, elevator, said she was visiting someone on the twelfth floor.”

The quality of Spencer’s stillness changed.

It wasn’t the dinner table stillness, the brief arrest of a moment. This was something deeper, something that went through his whole body in the space of a second, and when he looked at her his eyes were different, sharper in a way that had nothing to do with her and everything to do with what she’d just said.

He picked up his phone.

He called someone, one ring, and when the line connected he said three words.

“Check the twelfth floor.”

He hung up and looked at her, he looked like something had happened that he hadn’t planned for.

“You’re certain,” he said.

“Dark hair worn up. Quiet kind of pretty. Very good at making you feel listened to.” She paused. “I described her to Danger before he described her to me. We got the same person.”

Spencer stood up from the chair.

He walked to the window and stood with his back to her and she watched the set of his shoulders and thought about the folder and thought about Thursday morning and the easy smile in the elevator and the cold quiet fact that Naomi Park had been inside this building four days ago and Spencer Cameron, for all his precision and all his planning, hadn’t known.

“Spencer,” she said quietly.

He turned around.

“Whatever’s in that office,” she said. “Whatever’s in those files that has my name on it. I think it’s time you showed me.”

He looked at her for a long moment.

She looked back and didn’t move and didn’t fill the silence.

“Not tonight,” he said.

“Then when.”

“Soon,” he said. And then, quieter, in a different register entirely, like the word was being pulled out of him rather than offered. “I promise.”

Mara looked at him standing at his window in the last of the evening light and thought about how much a promise was worth from a man like this.

She thought about Danger’s thin face and his tight hug and the way he’d said you don’t have to handle everything alone.

She thought about the woman in the elevator and her easy weather conversation and her dark hair worn up and the way she’d smiled at Mara like she’d never seen her before in her life.

“Soon,” Mara said.

She went to her room.

The locked office door sat at the end of the hall behind her like something waiting for its moment.

She had the feeling, low and certain in her chest, that the moment wasn’t far off now.