Page 71 of Single Pucking Orc

CONSOLIDATION.

“How long have you had that?” he asked.

“A while.”

“Nora. How long?”

“You started it,” she said, which was not an answer. She opened the folder, and inside the folder were tabs, and the tabs had headings, and the headings had columns. “We’re already living together, Rognar. I want that acknowledged before we go any further, because I’d hate for you to think you’ve talked me into anything. We’ve been living together for approximately six weeks. We’re simply doing it appallingly inefficiently, across two heating systems and two sets of property taxes, and I’ve been sitting on the analysis for two weeks waiting for you to arrive at a conclusion I reached in the middle of the month.”

“You had a folder.”

“I have a folder for everything. This is not new information about me.” She turned a tab. “Now. On the merits.”

And then they worked it out. On the merits. He’d braced for a hard conversation and got a planning meeting instead. It turned out that a planning meeting run by Nora Bennett with a folder was one of the great pleasures of his life. Two people at a kitchen counter, dividing up their entire future the way she’d divide a shoebox of Rosa’s receipts.

“Your house has the back wall of windows,” she said, tapping a column. “And the nursery’s already built. Charlie’s whole life is set up in that room, and I’m not moving a settled eight-month-old to save myself a lawn crossing. That’s insane, and we established insane earlier.”

“So this house?”

“So this house. Your house has the room, the light, and the nursery. My house has the office and the quiet. The quiet is the only thing I actually need to protect, and the answer to that is the breezeway, which is already glassed in and currently contains—” she consulted the folder “—three boxes you have never once opened and an exercise bike you have used twice.”

“I’ve used it more than twice.”

“You’ve used it twice. It’s in the log.”

“You keep a log of my exercise bike?”

“I keep a log of everything, Rognar, this is still not new information.” She turned another tab. “The office goes in the breezeway. North light, which is correct for a screen, and it shares a wall with the garage rather than the nursery, which means my client calls and Charlie’s naps stop competing for airspace.”

"Okay."

She looked at him for a second. Then she got up, crossed the kitchen, opened the breezeway door, and stood there with her hand on the frame.

"There's a heater in here."

"There is."

"Since when?"

"Since I insulated it." He kept his eyes on her list, because he had been waiting for this and he wanted to take his time with it.

"You insulated the breezeway."

"It gets cold out there in January."

"You insulated the breezeway before I ever said the word office."

"Did I?" He turned the page. "Hard to say. I don't keep records.” Then, because she was still standing in the doorway with her hand on the frame and he wanted her back where he could see her, “And your house?”

She paused over that one. It was the only place in the conversation she paused, and he watched her do it. He watched the bookkeeper give way for half a second to the nine-year-old who’d called the power company from a payphone with an account number copied off a letter. To the woman who’d spent four years arranging a house so safe nobody could take it from her.

“Rent it,” she said. “Not sell it. You were right not to ask me to sell it—I wouldn’t have. But an empty heated house is exactly the kind of waste I bill people for, so we rent it. A good tenant with a proper lease which I’ll draw up.” A beat. “I’ll be extremely particular about the tenant.”

“I have no doubt.”

“I mean it. I’ll interview them like it’s a job. It’s my house.”

“It’s your house.” He looked at the folder, at the tabs, at CONSOLIDATION in her assassination of his handwriting. Something settled in his chest that had been standing up on its hind legs since the truck. He grinned, because grinning was still what he did. This time it wasn’t a deflection. He was just pleased. “There’s one more line item.”