Page 81 of Soft Erasure

Matthew was in the kitchen when I came back up.

He had not asked permission to enter a room I was in since the week I arrived, and nothing since had changed that. What was new was the stance. His weight forward, both hands braced on the edge of the counter, the way he stood when a thing would not resolve on its own. No folder. He had not bothered building the face he wore in elevators.

“You crossed under seventy last night,” he said. “Sixty-nine. The pool logs it automatically. I don’t have to check a readout to know that.”

“I noticed the sign.”

“I want to know what happened yesterday afternoon that cost you two points.” His voice had the flat, careful register he used for numbers he didn’t like. “I have not known since six this morning, and I am not used to standing in a room not knowing something about you before you tell me.”

“Marissa asked to see me. Three o’clock.”

He stopped, one beat too long, before he said it back. “Caleb’s wife.”

“I wasn’t given a reason. Penelope came to the door instead of using the panel. Bring nothing.”

“You went into that apartment.”

“I did.”

“Alone.”

“Cora let me out. Marissa let me in.” I kept both hands still on the back of the chair, in plain sight. “Caleb was there.”

He let the quiet run long enough that I noticed the tap I hadn’t shut all the way, one slow drip against the steel. Eight o’clock had come and gone. Somewhere under both of us three men with real names were hanging a lens over three feet of plaster the building had never had a number for, and neither of us said so.

“What did they want.”

This was the place I’d decided, two flights down with her paper folded in my fist, how much of the truth would leave this kitchen. I gave him the part that cost the least and was still true.

“Charles thinks somebody inside the family helped move money he can’t account for. Caleb wanted me to understand what I was protecting before I walked into a room with Charles and got it wrong.”

“That’s not two points, Amber. That’s a conversation. I’ve watched you sit through worse and read level.” His eyes went to my wrist, and then away from it, deliberately, a door he had decided not to open yet. “Something else happened in that apartment.”

I let the silence answer for me. He knew the practice, because he was the one who had priced it that way in the first place.

“Charles called me an hour ago,” he said, when I gave him nothing. “Not the assistant. Charles, direct line, seven fifty-five this morning. He’s done treating the transfer as clerical. He’s requested the full ledger back ninety days and he’s requested it from the account holder, not from me. That call I bought you on Monday is closed.”

I kept my face flat through it, an old reflex working faster than the shock could. He had come to ask me about two points and had not mentioned the work order once. He had walked into my kitchen and opened with my Adherence.

“Since when.”

“Since a name I don’t have yet decided the file was worth escalating.” He crossed to where I stood without hurrying, the same certainty he brought to every distance in a room that already belonged to him. “I let him think it was nothing for four days. I can’t sell nothing anymore. Whoever wrote that letter has a window that is closing by the hour, and you know who it is, and you are standing in my kitchen deciding not to tell me.”

“Yes.”

“Say that again.”

“I’m not going to tell you. Not because I don’t trust you with it. Because the day you know, you stop being a man who can tell Charles the truth and mean it, and I am not ready to spend that version of you yet.”

He watched me with the flat patience he had worn in the alcove, telling me he had not decided whether to correct Charles. A man who had stopped trusting what his own instruments told him. His hand found my jaw, unhurried, arriving before I’d finished turning toward him. I felt the old readiness come up in my chest before his skin ever reached it, the seventh waiting on a schedule neither of us had agreed to.

“I am asking you to understand what you’re costing me,” he said. “Not the money. The not-knowing. I built a year of not needing to ask anyone anything about you, and every day this week I have needed to ask you something and gotten a room instead of an answer.”

“I know what it costs you.”

“Do you.” His thumb went still against my jaw. He never let himself complete it. “Because from where I’m standing, you have a hallway full of people who know things about you that I don’t. Marissa. Cora. Whoever Callow is passing notes for. And I am supposed to stand in my own building and be the last one told.”

I didn’t tell him he was right. I didn’t tell him he was wrong either. I let the seventh arrive and pass, and felt him feel it happen under his own hand, in a kitchen with no hallway to hide in and no seam the schedule had forgotten to watch. I wanted his hand to move. I wanted it to stay exactly where it was and never ask permission again. Neither wanting was going to win, and the ache of not deciding was the closest thing to relief I’d let myself have all week.