Page 70 of Soft Erasure

“You wrote to Edward.”

“I wrote to my uncle.”

A silence he didn’t fill right away.

“That’s not what he’d call it.”

“He’s not the one who has to.”

He didn’t sit.

“You told him what the wire moves against.”

“I told him the truth.”

“You told him it moves against the family account. Not the clinic’s. Not Charles’s. The family’s.” His voice had not changed. His hand had. It was flat on the marble as Caleb’s had been the morning before, and it was not still. “Do you understand what that does to a man who has spent his whole life keeping his name off every ledger that mattered?”

“I understand what it does to a man who’s on a hallway camera for forty seconds, crying, because his signature got called a formality.” I kept my hands where he could see them, a thing he had trained into me without once naming it. “Edward’s had that file for ten years and used it to keep Caleb quiet. Thursday night it stops being Edward’s.”

Something behind his face moved and didn’t come back.

“You’d burn the family to protect a boy who isn’t yours.”

“He’s not yours either. That’s the part you keep getting wrong.”

The band was warm at my wrist. I didn’t look down. I didn’t have to. I knew the shape of what it was reading, because I had felt it charge me for the capitals, felt it every time I had said something true in a room built to price it.

He looked at my wrist before I did.

“You should sit down.”

“I’m not going to sit down.”

“Amber.”

He had never used it like that. Not the discharge name, not Sherry, not the count. My name, in his mouth, like the floor had gone out from under something he’d built to hold weight.

“Say it again.”

“Don’t.”

“You did it first.”

He crossed to the window instead of answering. For a moment the only sound in the room was the building doing what it always did, humming at a frequency I had stopped hearing months ago and had never stopped feeling. When he turned back his face had mostly reset, the elevator smile half-built. He was trying to find the readout he used on everyone else. He could not locate it in a room with me in it.

“Charles will call this leverage.”

“It is leverage.”

“You’re not supposed to say that part out loud.”

“I don’t work for you. I never signed the thing that makes silence part of the job.”

He almost smiled. It cost him something to stop it. “No. You never did.”

“Then stop looking at me like I broke a rule I never agreed to.”

His eyes went back to the band and stayed there. The number on it had not come back up.