The Ice Between Us

Eight Inches of Ice

The text said, " Don't let her leave, so obviously, the first thing I did was leave.

I don't run. Running is for people who haven't spent a year being watched and learned that the trick is to move like you've got nothing to hide, slow, bored, a woman who finished her shift and wants a sandwich. I sign out at the front desk, I tell the security guy named Pavel that Volkov's not to ice the hip tonight and to remind him, I take the elevator down to P2 where the staff park, and the whole time my heart's going like I'm sprinting.

P2 is concrete and sodium light, and the smell of cold exhaust. My car's a 2009 Corolla with a cracked side mirror I've been meaning to fix since before Tom died, parked in the far corner because that's where they make the new hire park. I'm forty feet from it, keys already out, when a man steps out from between a black Tahoe and a pillar like he'd been poured there.

"Eleanor," Marcus Reyes says. "You changed jobs."

I stop. The keys go quiet in my hand.

He looks the same as he always looks, which is the worst thing about him, a man in a grey wool coat who could be a regional manager for a company that makes office furniture. Late forties. Reading glasses pushed up on his head, he never seems to use. He's never once raised his voice at me. He told me, the first time, in October, two weeks after the funeral, your brother's debt didn't die with him, Eleanor, debts don't work like that, in the voice you'd use to explain a parking rule.

"How are you in here," I say. "This is staff parking. There's a gate."

"I have a pass." He says it simply. "I've had one for a while."

And the floor of my stomach goes out, because a pass to the players' garage of a professional hockey organization is not a thing Marcus Reyes has because he followed me here. It's a thing he has because he was already here. The text on Volkov's phone, she's there, in the building, right now, and Reyes standing forty feet from my car holding a parking pass he's had for a while.

"You work here," I say. It's not a question.

"I do some work here. Security adjacent. Background checks, mostly. Risk assessment." He takes one step closer and I don't step back, because stepping back is the thing he wants and I learned in October not to give him the things he wants for free. "Imagine my surprise when a name came across my desk for a confidential vetting. New rehab specialist. Big salary. Discretion package." He smiles, and it doesn't touch his eyes, his eyes never have anything in them, that's the thing. "You. In a building I already have a badge for. Forty-one thousand dollars in arrears and you walk straight into the one place I'd find you. It's almost like someone wanted us in the same room."

"Nobody wanted anything. I needed a job."

"You needed forty-one thousand dollars," Reyes says. "Which, conveniently, is roughly what they're paying you. To the dollar, actually, with a little over for tax. Did you not find that strange?"

I had. I'd found it strange at 3 a.m. and shoved it down where I shove things, because a drowning person doesn't audit the rope. But hearing him say it, to the dollar, hearing that the number I owed and the number I was offered were the same number, something cold goes down the back of my neck that has nothing to do with the garage.

Somebody built this. Somebody knew exactly what I owed.

"The deadline's the thirtieth," Reyes says. "It was always the thirtieth. I'm not the bad guy here, Eleanor, I want you to understand that. I'm the last reasonable conversation. After me, it stops being a conversation." He says it kindly. "You finish the three months, you get paid, you make the wire, and you never see me again. That's the whole arrangement. I'm practically your colleague now. We'll wave in the hall."

"Don't ever talk to me in this building."

"I'll talk to you wherever I have a badge for." He steps back, finally, gives me the parking space, gives me the air. "One more thing. Whatever you're doing with the captain, the long sessions, the no-phones, the little tremor in your hands when he's under them. People notice things in a building full of cameras. I'd hate for the wrong person to start wondering why the new physio with the destroyed reputation can't keep her hands steady around a man worth two billion dollars." A beat. "You've got a lot to lose for a woman who's already lost everything. Funny how that works."

He walks to the black Tahoe. He gets in. He doesn't peel out, he just reverses smooth and slow and drives up the ramp toward the gate that lifts for his pass, and I stand in the sodium light shaking, and I have never in my life wanted to hit someone with a Corolla more.

I don't go home. I go back up.

I tell myself it's because I left my good resistance bands in room two, the Theraband CLX set I brought from my own kit because the facility's are garbage, and that's true, but it's not the reason. The reason is I can't be alone in my apartment right now with the number to the dollar going around my head, so I badge back in, and the floor's mostly dark, the day staff gone, and there's light under the door of room two.

He's still there.

Sasha's on the floor, not the table, doing the thing I told him to do and didn't think he would, the slow controlled hip CARs, controlled articular rotations, working the joint through its end range with the bad leg, jaw tight, sweat on him, and when I open the door he's mid-rotation and he holds it instead of dropping it, which a patient in real pain does not do unless he's stubborn enough to be a problem his whole life.

"You're guarding the bottom of the rotation," I say, because it's easier than everything else. "Don't muscle through it. Let the hip find the slack. You're recruiting your low back to cheat the last twenty degrees."

"You came back."

"Everyone keeps saying that." I drop my bag. I should leave. I cross the room instead and kneel down behind him and put one hand flat on his sacrum and the other on the front of the hip, the femoral head, guiding the rotation, here, slow, let me feel it, and he lets out a breath and the joint glides through the range it's been fighting, clean, the way it's supposed to, and he goes very still under my hands the exact way he went still in the dark eight months ago when I touched the scar.

He knows. Some animal part of him knows. It doesn't have words yet but it knows, I can feel it knowing through my palms.

"Eleanor," he says, low, not turning around.

"Don't."

"Who's Marcus Reyes?"

My hands go cold on him.

"He bade out of P2 forty minutes ago," Sasha says, still not turning, his voice that flat, even thin. "Pavel flagged it because the system logged him to a vendor account nobody recognized. I had them pull it." Now he turns, and his face is close, closer than a patient's face should ever be, and his eyes are doing the counting thing, the thing he told me about, the thing money taught him. "He logged in at 8:51 this morning. Two minutes before you get off the elevator. Every day this week."

The deadline's the thirtieth. Reyes has had a badge for a while. Two minutes before you get off the elevator. Every day this week.

"He's not following me," I hear myself say, and the floor I've been standing on for two days finally goes. "He's not following me, Sasha. He's already inside. He had a badge before I ever walked in."

And down the dark hall, a door I thought was locked clicks open, and a voice I trust more than I should says, "Eleanor? You're still here?"

Daniel.