Page 103 of The Tiger in the Sack

“Since ‘I’d quit the game for you,’” Jules said, through the mask, not moving her face. “The doorway one. We were already sitting here. You came in hot. We discussed leaving.”

“We did not discuss leaving,” Fox said.

“Fox did not discuss leaving. I floated it as a courtesy. He muted his own crunching.” Jules turned her ghost face toward Clover, gentle, the field-general voice going soft at the edges. “For what it’s worth, and I know it’s not my worth to give, that was the best thing I’ve ever watched two people do in a living room, and I’ve seen Declan propose. He did it in a cabin in the snow on a mountain. This was better. There was no drone footage though.”

“I built him a whole speech to give you,” Fox told Clover, mournful, the mask cracking white at the mouth corners. “Weeks of material. He didn’t use one word of it. He led with real estate.”

“I led with the love part,” I said. “The love part was first. Then I committed several felonies of disclosure.”

“You led with the love part and then you said I own the building like you were confessing to a body in the brewery,” Fox said. “There is a body in the brewery, by the way. Literal true crime. I should star in the documentary. The place is probably haunted. I’ve made my peace with it.”

Clover made a sound.

I turned back to her fast, braced, because I didn’t know what the sound was, and the sound, it turned out, was Clover Freeman starting to laugh, the real one, the one that comes up out of her sideways and takes over, and she had a hand over her mouth and her shoulders were going and there were still tears on her face from before, the brave-about-the-yes tears, and now they were laughing-tears too, both at once, the whole thing breaking out of her in a mess because that’s how the real stuff comes out of her, at the worst time, in the worst shape, perfect.

“You’re my landlord,” she said again, into her hand, helpless. “And there’s a body in the brewery.”

“There is not a⁠—”

“And your sister has watched all of it from inside a face mask.”

“In fairness,” Jules said, “the mask only has six minutes left and I’m not wasting a twenty-dollar mask on your dignity. We were here first.”

Clover dropped her hand. She looked at me. The laugh was still in her, but underneath it the other thing had settled, the thing that had walked off the elevator already decided, and she was not running, her face was not finding an edge to stand at, she was standing in the middle of the floor of an apartment she’d just learned I owned, and she was looking at me like the building was just a building and the secrets were just things I’d been scared about and the only fact in the room that mattered was the one I’d said in the doorway.

“Okay,” Clover said. “We’re going to deal with the landlord thing. There’s going to be a whole conversation about the landlord thing. I have follow-up questions about the LLC. I want to know if you’ve been undercharging me, because if you’ve been undercharging me out of guilt I’m going to be furious in a way that takes weeks.”

“I would never tamper with market rate,” I lied.

“You absolutely tampered with market rate.”

“This is the way,” I said, which is not an answer, and she knew it wasn’t an answer, and she let me have it anyway.

“Jules,” Clover said, not looking away from me. “Fox. I love you both. I mean that. You’re about to be family, I can feel it happening to me in real time, it’s like a fever.”

“It is exactly like a fever,” Jules agreed.

“Get out of the apartment.”

There was a beat where nobody moved, and then Fox stood up off the couch in one motion with the popcorn bowl tucked under his arm like a football, peeling the mask off his face as he went, and Jules followed, and at the door Jules turned around, her own face pink and clean now and so young, and looked at the two of us standing there, and whatever she saw made her mouth go soft.

“Mom would’ve liked this,” she said to me.. “A loud love in a brewery. She’d have liked it.”

And then they were gone, the door clicking, the elevator carrying off the only two witnesses, and it was just me and Clover and Vito Catleone, who had observed the entire human drama from the top of the cat tree with the flat contempt of a creature who has never once been a coward about anything, and who now closed his eyes, having decided we were boring.

Oh, and look. There was Tig Bitties too. Under Vito.

I think we’d interrupted something more than face masks.

Clover took the two steps we’d put between us.

She didn’t come to me fast. She came the way she’d decided everything tonight, on purpose, one step she chose and then another one, and when she got to me she put both her hands flat on my chest, not pushing, just there, feeling my actual heart do the actual insane thing it was doing, and she tipped her head back to look up at me, and the careful list-keeping woman I’d met across a content shoot a hundred years ago was nowhere in the room. Just Clover. The one underneath. The one who’d driven across a city to find me and was now, deliberately, choosing not to find anybody’s edges, least of all mine.

“Sit down,” she said.

I’m a large man. The deep leather couch in the Broasis had been custom built to accommodate me and my legion of massive teammates and brothers. She steered me, two hands flat on my chest walking me backward like I was the one who needed handling, and I went, because I would have gone anywhere she walked me, and I sat.

She looked down at me for a second, taking the new geography of it — me below her now, my face tipped up to hers, the lit-up river behind her turning the edges of her gold.