Page 10 of Graceless

CHAPTER 4

CATE

Iopened the door on the chain, which gives you a gap about four inches wide, which is enough to see exactly one thing at a time.

The first thing I saw was the clipboard.

The second thing I saw was him.

Him. Fifth Avenue him. The jaw, the shoulders, the dark hair shoved back, the whole impossible architecture of him standing on Nonna's stoop under the dead bulb I kept meaning to replace, holding a clipboard, wearing the good wool coat I had grabbed two days ago on a street I still couldn't name. My heart did several things at once and none of them were on speaking terms with each other, and past his arm, across the street, the doorway of the Espositos' laundromat stood empty.

Empty. Same shape gone from it. I put it together at the speed your body puts things together when the things are about you: the man who had watched my window half the night was the man on my stoop, was the man from the bus, and every separate fear I'd been keeping in separate jars all evening poured into one jar, and the jar was four inches from my face.

"Miss Fontana," he said. "I'm here about the policy."

"The—" I had Nonna's rolling pin in my right hand, below the sightline of the gap, and I want it noted that I did not put it down. "The policy."

He held a card up to the gap. Then a laminated ID. Then the clipboard, angled so I could read it, in that order, unhurried, like a man who had done this a hundred times for a hundred suspicious women and thought all hundred of them were right to be suspicious. The card said MERIDIAN SPECIALTY UNDERWRITERS. The ID had his photograph — even his ID photo looked like something the Uffizi would fight you for — over a name.

"R. Barrett," I read. "Site assessor."

"The policy on the panel carries a security rider," he said. "Valuations over a certain line get a site assessment within twenty-four hours of delivery. You took delivery at six." He looked at his watch, which was old, and did something to my stomach that I set aside for later. "It's ten. I'm late. There was another appointment."

"It's ten o'clock at night."

"The rider says twenty-four hours. It doesn't say business hours." He said it the way the conductor says train traffic ahead of us — language from an institution, passed through a man, arriving with no person in it at all.

"Okay," I said. "Okay. Here's what's going to happen. You're going to stand there, and I'm going to ask you questions, and if I don't like the answers I'm calling the Six-Two, and you can explain the rider to them." Cops out loud, on purpose, so he'd hear the shape of it. He didn't flinch. Some part of me noticed how much he didn't flinch, and I told that part to be quiet.

"Ask," he said.

"Did you follow me?"

"No."

"You were across the street. Last night. Half the night. My tenant saw you."

"Yes."

The yes knocked me sideways worse than a no would have. A no I had a whole speech for.

"You stood in a dead laundromat and watched my house all night and your answer is yes?"

"You asked if I followed you," he said. "I didn't. I was ahead of you."

"That's — no. That is so much worse. Do you understand that's worse?" My voice was climbing and I let it climb; the whole block could wake up and be my witness. "Two days ago you pulled me off Fifth Avenue. Two days later you're on my stoop with a clipboard. Say coincidence. I want to hear a grown man say coincidence through my door."

"It isn't a coincidence."

"Thank you⁠—"

"You brought the painting," he said. "I follow the painting."

And there it was. The sentence sat in the four-inch gap between us with its hands folded, absolutely calm, true in some way I could feel and could not touch, like a word in a language you used to speak as a child. The Lombard angel — he'd been on Fifth Avenue the day I carried the Lombard. The church panel lands, and he lands. I follow the painting. The rational half of me said that's not an answer, that's a fortune cookie with shoulders. The other half — the half with the arm, the half that had not slept — believed him completely and was ashamed of itself.

"How do you know where I live?" I said, quieter.

"The address is on the policy."