Page 28 of Single Pucking Orc

He went, but he’d never been less pleased to hear his daughter cry.

CHAPTER 8

Nora was at the desk by twenty to seven, and she was not going to think about why.

She had slept badly. That was a fact. She’d lain awake watching the ceiling fan she didn’t run in winter and thinking about an enormous hand splayed across the small of her back. She had slept perhaps four hours, in pieces, and none of it had anything to do with anything, because she was a professional. And it was Saturday, and she had the Trombley quarterlies to reconcile before their nine o’clock Monday morning.

She opened the file. She squared the mouse to the edge of the mousepad. And then she put it into the only language she had for it.

Extraordinary item, she thought. Non-recurring. Does not affect the underlying trend.

There. Classified. An anomaly. A one-off. The sort of thing you noted in a margin and moved past. A spike in the data with an obvious external cause—fatigue, proximity, twelve months of low-grade fence-flirting compounding at an unsustainable rate—and no bearing whatsoever on the fundamentals. She entered a number. She entered another number. The numbers were correct. She was fine.

The duck sock was on her desk.

It sat by her monitor, small and yellow and appalling, a single tiny knit sock with a cartoon duck on the ankle, and she had not put it in a drawer. She had not put it in the little basket by the door where things-to-return-to-neighbors would go. If she were a person who had such a basket, which she was not. She was not a person who accumulated other people’s things. She had not put it anywhere. It sat where she could see it. Which meant that at some point last night, in the aftermath—her mouth still stinging, her nervous system in open revolt—she had picked it up off the grass where it had fallen. Carried it back across the lawn into her house. Set it on her desk. Instead of doing what any rational adult would have done, which was hand it over.

It was a filing decision she had not yet made.

She looked at the sock. The sock, being a sock, declined to look back.

She reconciled Trombley.

At 7:52 there was a knock. She knew who it was before she looked up, the way she knew a drop in pressure meant rain. She got up too fast, then made herself walk to the door at a normal speed.

Rognar filled the frame. Of course he did. Charlie rode against his chest in a pink sling he’d clearly watched a video to figure out, gnawing on a tiny green fist. Over his shoulder hung a diaper bag with a giraffe pattern that did unspeakable things to the aesthetics of a six-and-a-half-foot professional athlete. In his free hand he held two coffees.

“You’re up,” he said.

“I’m always up.”

“I know.” He held out one of the cups, and she took it. It was her order—the right roast and the right amount of oat milk and even the half-pump of vanilla she had never once mentioned to him. He didn’t say anything about knowing. He didn’t do the eyebrow. He just handed over the coffee like it was nothing, like knowing her order to the half-pump was the least interesting thing about the morning. “I’ve got a window before Deb’s woman shows up. Thought I’d inflict us on you.”

Charlie caught sight of Nora and produced a sound of pure delight, a wet gurgling crow, and pitched sideways in the sling towards her with both arms out and total confidence that she would be caught.

“She has opinions about you,” he said.

“She has opinions about everyone.”

“She really doesn’t. Ask Fen.” He glanced down. “She’s short a sock.”

She looked. Charlie’s left leg, in its striped legging, ended in a tiny bare green foot with tiny bare green toes, while the right one wore a duck. The duck’s twin was fifteen feet away on the desk in her office. Where she had carried it, out of the diaper bag, for reasons that would not survive daylight scrutiny.

“I have the other one,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“It’s—” She stopped. There was no version of this that ended well. It fell off in my yard was defensible. It fell off in your yard last night while I had my hands in your shirt and I carried it home and put it on my desk and looked at it was not. “I’ll find it.”

She didn’t go and get it. She stood exactly where she was, and felt him not asking, and suspected that he knew precisely where it was—because a male who packed a diaper bag down to the muslin cloths knew the whereabouts of a sock.

“Later,” she said, to the doorframe.

He said nothing, which the worse thing he could have done. A remark she could have parried. But he only stood there being quiet about it, and her face went hot.

He came in. She didn’t decide to let him in, and yet there he was, lowering himself onto the nest of floor cushions still in the corner of her office. He unclipped Charlie from the sling and settled her on his knee, facing out at the room, so she could survey her domain. From the giraffe bag he produced, of all things, a manila folder.

“You found it,” she said.