Page 20 of Graceless

I opened the door with the whole speech loaded.

"About last night⁠—"

"You locked the door." He looked at me for one second — one — like a man checking a seal. "Good."

And he came past me down the stairs and took the chair, HIS chair, eighteen inches left of everything, and opened the paperwork, and the speech died in my hand like a match in the rain.

I stood at the top of my stairs. I looked at St. Anthony, patron of lost things. "You seeing this?" I said. St. Anthony declined to comment.

I went down and worked.

But here's what was different, and I knew it by nine and stopped pretending by ten: I was watching him now. Really watching. Yesterday he was an infuriating piece of insurance furniture with a jaw. Today he was a man who had heard something on my empty street, and everything he did ran through that filter.

So I ran a test. I'm not proud of the methodology, but I was raised on verification.

I set up at the shelf behind him, made a show of reaching past the solvent jars, and knocked a brass jar lid off the edge. It hit the concrete like a cymbal.

Donnie would have gone through the ceiling. I flinched, and I did it on purpose.

Barrett did not move. Not a flinch, not a blink, not a shoulder. The lid rolled a full circle and wobbled flat and the basement rang with it, and the man sat in his chair like the sound was a thing that happened to other people.

Which sounds like a pass and is actually a fail. Because everybody startles. Everybody. Unless the body already knew what was falling and had decided it didn't matter before it hit the floor.

I was still standing there holding my elbows when he said, without looking up:

"Did the lid tell you what you wanted to know?"

Heat went up my neck. "I don't know what you're⁠—"

"You took it off the shelf, held it a moment, and dropped it." A page turned. "If the test has a next phase, I'd prefer to schedule it."

Busted. Completely. And here's the thing about being caught red-handed by a wall — you can deny it and lose, or you can put your cards down.

I put my cards down.

"No," I said. "It didn't tell me what I wanted to know. You were supposed to jump."

"I don't startle."

"Everybody startles."

"Yes," he said, and turned another page.

I stared at the back of his head. "Nina thinks you might be military. Special forces, one of those. Is that it? Is that why a cymbal goes off behind you and nothing happens? Should you have jumped, once upon a time?"

He was quiet long enough that I thought the wall had closed for the day. Then:

"I've seen battle."

Flat. No decoration on it. And it landed in the room with a weight that the words alone didn't explain, and I took it as confirmation — ex-military, there it is, mystery half-solved, wait till Nina hears — and filed the strange heaviness under case closed.

"Okay," I said. "See, that wasn't hard. That's one true thing. At this rate I'll have a whole biography by Christmas."

"Hm."

Around noon I made lunch, because it was noon and I'm Italian and the alternative is death. Pasta with whatever's in the pan — garlic, oil, the last of the good peppers. And here is a thing about my family, my whole family, going back to villages none of us have seen: we cannot eat in front of a person. It is not possible. It is genetic. Nonna fed the meter reader.

I put a plate on the arm of his chair.