I make tea I don’t drink and sit at the kitchen table and wait for Opal. When she comes home at three thirty with her horse drawing, I tell her the legs are much better, which is true. I watch her tape it to the refrigerator and step back and saygood, and go get a snack, and I sit with my cold tea.
Let Reggie see what it’s like to be scared.
I can’t bring myself to feel guilty for whatever Dario’s about to do. In fact, just wondering about it makes me smile.
TEN
DARIO
She shakes?I break.
The parking garage at Lena’s office building has no cameras. Good. Cost-cutting on the employer’s part, which is convenient tonight. Maybe if he paid people what they were worth, Lena wouldn’t be in her situation in the first place. I might look that bastard up when I’m done here.
I find a position near the stairwell with a clear sightline to the elevator bank, and I wait. Patience has never been something I’ve needed to cultivate. It came with the work a long time ago.
Reggie Millstone comes off the elevator at 6:12. Medium height, soft around the middle, the walk of a man who has never had a reason to watch his back. Near my age.
He’s unwinding from the end of his shift—jacket over one arm, tie loosened—and he clocks me near his car the way civilians do, which is slowly, with a half second delay while they decide whether to be concerned. “You here to pick someone up?”
“I’m a friend of Lena Swan.”
Something moves through his face fast. Guilt first, then its natural successor, aggression dressed as confidence. “I don’t know what she told you, but whatever it is?—”
I hit him once in the soft tissue below the ribs—extremely unpleasant, leaves nothing visible, takes the wind out in a way that communicates the full scope of the situation without any ambiguity.
He folds against his own bumper and goes down.
I give him a moment to get his breathing back, because what comes next requires him to process language. “Come on, Reginald. Get your shit together. It wasn’t even that hard of a hit.”
He coughs. “The fuck do you want?”
“I want you to listen carefully,” I say, crouching to his level. “You’re going to go upstairs. You’re going to go to Lena’s desk and pack up all of her belongings in a cardboard box. Every personal item. Every photo. The plant. You’re going to do it very carefully, and when you bring that box back down, I’m going to go through it item by item. If anything is damaged or missing, I’ll come back. And what I damage next time will be something you care about more than this sedan. Nod if that’s clear.”
He nods. His face is the color of old chalk.
“Take your time. Do it right. Make sure I don’t need to return.”
He gets up and goes. I lean on his car and wait.
Twenty-two minutes. I think about Lena’s face when she walked through the door—the way she was barely holding herself together. Jaw set, breathing controlled, not crying, and notgoing to. The strength of her conviction… how she managed her own emotions to the point of appearing to have none.
No matter what she says, it’s a fragile strength, and it will cost her if she doesn’t allow herself to react to being harassed. It always does.
That’s the detail that got to me more than anything else would have. She’s been running this solo for five years and has refined it to a science—managing alone, not reaching, absorbing the hit, and moving forward. That’s the type of thing that makes women have higher rates of autoimmune disease. A lifetime of swallowing bullshit, not being able to do anything about it, being forced to grin and bear it, all of that has a fucking big toll.
I refuse to let her pay it.
Standing in the garage, I realize that I haven’t done something for somebody else with this little calculation behind it in a very long time. Maybe not ever, if I’m being honest.
Every decision I make, every favor I extend, every call I take, and every one I don’t—there’s always a ledger. Something going in, something coming out, the balance tracked. This isn’t on the ledger. This is just a thing I’m doing because she came home shaking and I didn’t like it, and that is, as far as I can determine, the entirety of the reason.
I sit with that for a moment. Then I hear the elevator.
He comes back, box held out in front of him, not making eye contact. I go through it on the hood of his car—the small succulent, not a leaf disturbed. The framed photo of Opal, cracked corner exactly as she described it. Her notepad covered in her handwriting, her lotion, her cardigan folded neatly on top. And on top of everything, folded in quarters, one of Opal’sdrawings. A woman at a desk. Crayon sun in the corner. The tape still on it.
Everything intact.
I look at him. He’s been staring at the floor since he handed the box over.
