While she's working on the fourth problem with her full concentration on the page, I stand and move to the kitchen on the pretext of looking at the note on the fridge more closely. It takes me forty seconds, which is enough time for two of the devices I brought — small, clean, the kind that transmit clearly through walls — to find their positions. One inside the cabinet above the counter, one behind the small bookshelf in the living room. I sit back down before she's finished the problem. She doesn't look up.
"Done," she says, and pushes the paper across.
I check it. "Correct."
She allows herself the smile this time, small and real. "Can I ask you something?"
"Go ahead."
"Why did you come here?" She says it without accusation, just directly, with the matter-of-fact curiosity of a child who has decided she's owed honest answers and isn't interested in the alternative. "It's really early."
"I wanted to check on your mother," I say, which is true, as far as it goes.
"She's okay," Evie says, with the practiced certainty of a child who has been reassuring people about her mother for a long time. "She always is. She's really good at being okay." She says it like it's just a fact, reality. "I just worry sometimes. She works so much and she doesn't really tell me things." She picks at the corner of her paper.
"She doesn't seem like someone who scares easily," I say.
"She doesn't get scared about normal things." She looks up at me. "She gets scared about me. And about — other things.”
She stops there, like she's reaching the edge of what she's decided to say.
I look at her. She's gone back to picking at the corner of her paper, not looking at me, and her left hand is resting on the table and I can see the scarring on it from here — old scars, silver and faded, across the back of her hand and tracking up toward herwrist in a pattern that I know, immediately and completely, was not made by any accident.
I look at the paper. I don't say anything. But something in me has gone very quiet in the way that people who know me well would recognize. A very specific kind of quiet. The kind that comes before a decision rather than after one.
"You're good at math," she says, looking back up, the other thing set aside. "Did you go to school for it?"
"Not traditional school, no."
"Then how do you know so much?"
"I paid attention to the things that mattered," I say, "and I found people who could teach me the things I didn't know."
She thinks about this seriously. "That's actually really smart."
"It's served me well."
"My mom does that too," she says. "She figures things out. She learned how to fix the window lock in the bathroom because the building manager took too long. She learned how to do my hair from videos online because she said she wasn't going to let me go to school looking—" She stops herself, like she's shared more than she meant to. Then she looks at me with those assessing eyes and makes a decision. "She's going to be grumpy when shegets out of the shower, she’s always tired when she gets home. She always is after the late shift."
"I won't stay long," I say.
"You can come back," she says. "If you want. She doesn't really have many—" She stops again. Recalibrates. "You could come back," she says, more simply.
"I'd like that," I say.
She nods, satisfied, and goes back to her last problem.
I stay twenty minutes longer than I should.
I know I'm staying too long but I stay anyway, watching her work through the last of the problems with the pencil tapping and the focused eyes and the occasional small sound she makes when something clicks into place, and I think about the cameras she doesn't know I've placed and the scars on her hand that she doesn't know I've catalogued and the things she said about her mother with the particular mixture of pride and worry that children have when they love someone they can see is carrying too much.
When she finally sets the pencil down and stretches her arms above her head with the comprehensive full-body stretch of someone who has been sitting still too long, I stand.
"I should go," I say.
"You didn't even get to see her," Evie says.
"Another time." I take my jacket from the arm of the chair where I'd set it. "You did good work tonight."
