Iris drove Nina home for the car and the folder. Home, in this sentence, meant Iris's, and Nina disliked how quickly she had begun using the word that way. It suggested a decision she hadn't made and a favor her sister hadn't offered indefinitely.
“Tonight's fine,” Iris said as they went upstairs. “After that we talk about what you need.”
“I'm not moving in.”
“I know. I don't want you making plans around a thing I haven't said.”
Nina took the folder from the high shelf. The papers were exactly where they'd been put. No one had altered the words while she was gone. It felt almost indulgent to have an object remain as she'd left it.
Iris handed her a clean shirt from a stack waiting to be put away.
“You've got something on your sleeve.”
“I brought clothes.”
“Then wear yours.”
Nina went to change. When she came back she put the borrowed shirt down without unfolding it. Iris accepted that as easily as she'd offered it.
Adam messaged while Nina was finding her own car keys. His leg had been assessed. He'd been told what to do for it, had something to help him walk and wasn't planning to drive that evening. He was taking another hired car to the café Nina had named. His own car could remain in the district lot until they made a clear arrangement to move it.
Nina told Iris where she was going.
“You want me to talk you out of it?” her sister asked.
“No.”
“All right.”
It would have been easier if Iris had argued. Nina could have explained that she needed the references matched, that the words in her old notes meant something Adam could identify. Those were good reasons. They weren't all the reasons.
She took the folder and left.
At the café Adam had chosen a table with room for his leg. A walking aid rested against the wall. There was a cup of coffee in front of him, its lid splashed where he'd tried to drink before it cooled. He stood when Nina came in, then seemed to realize the gesture wasn't useful and sat down again.
She put her papers on the opposite side of the table.
“Have you eaten?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He nodded toward a paper bag. “There's something if you want it.”
“Later.”
She sat. He'd brought the limited copies from the material they had delivered, not taken the originals back. Nina set her own earlier notes alongside them. The restaurant's light was warm, terrible for small print. She moved one page out of a shadow cast by the sugar container.
Nina put two pages side by side and laid a pen between them.
“Show me which was Gavin.”
Adam bent over them. “This one.”
“And the other?”
“The same job.”
“I know the job. I'm asking which person.”
He gave the name from the coordination sheet. She wrote it below the second reference.
“Both received separate endings,” she said. “One visit, one household response. That was how I read it.”
“That was how it was meant to read.”
He said it quietly, as if there were people around. There were people around: a couple sharing a laptop, a man picking up an order, a child turning the cap of a bottle without managing to open it. Nina pushed the page nearer him.
“Say it where I can hear you.”
“We wanted it accepted as corroboration.”
“You'd just told the officer the field company knew. I thought you were saying someone changed your work after you sent it.”
“No.”
“You let me think that.”
“I didn't know you thought it.”
She almost asked whether he knew her at all. It would have taken them into six years, and she needed him here, under this ugly light, with his work in front of him.
“Put the visit on this side. The other contribution there. Start before the words were written.”
He drew the paper toward him. “You won't like what it looks like.”
“Neither will you.”
He drew a box, wrote the job reference inside it and added the two lines. Nina watched the top of his head. He'd cut his own hair badly during the winter they couldn't get anyone out to fix the boiler, had made her do the back, swearing she couldn't ruin what he'd started. She knew the small flat place at his crown better than she knew the signature on this sheet.
“Here,” he said.
He had drawn the second line back to the first box. No fresh source at its end.
“Gavin saw the place. We had the description. The other person confirmed what we supplied.”
“What did Gavin see?”
“People at an address. Enough to make a visit report.”
“Beth?”
“He couldn't establish that.”
“Then why does my note say the household was confirmed?”
Adam took her note. “I can't tell you why yours says it. I can tell you what I submitted.”
Nina snatched the page back. It surprised both of them.
He didn't raise his voice. “I'm not saying you made it up.”
She smoothed the page, which had bent under her thumb. “Find the sentence.”
He found it on his own contribution. The phrase was shorter there. Nina read hers again. Her note carried a description she couldn't trace to that sheet alone.
For a moment she wanted to put the papers away and call Helen with the answer she did have. One coordinated job. False independence. A competent account of where she'd been deceived. She could say those things in her own voice and other people would listen.
Instead she wrote the two descriptions on a clean sheet. Under them she left a space.
“What did the recipient actually get?”
“I didn't send it to Northreach.”
“Threadline did.”
“I assume so. You were there. I wasn't.”
She looked up sharply. He held her gaze for a second, then looked away.
“I shouldn't have said it like that.”
“You should leave it in.”
“What?”
“The part about what you don't know. I can't use your assumption as an answer.”
He ran a hand down his face. There was a little nick by his jaw, the kind he got shaving too quickly. She had put her thumb on those before. She picked up the pen.
“Why leave the date when you knew it was only the schedule?”
“I wanted the job finished.”
He pulled his own page out from beneath hers and wrote: I supplied the twelfth from the schedule and left it as the date of the reported confirmation. He read it to her. Then he asked for the other page so he could identify the wording accurately.
Nina slid it across. “Did you believe she'd settled comfortably?”
“No.”
“Did you know she hadn't?”
“I knew we hadn't established it.”
The child at the next table finally opened the bottle. Water splashed across the table; the father caught the bottle and said, with startling fury, that he'd told her to leave it. Nina looked over. He was already blotting the spill, the child solemnly holding up the cap. Adam watched Nina instead of them.
“What?” she said.
“I used to think it was better you didn't know the details.”
“Better than what?”
“Coming home and telling you.”
She turned back to the pages. He reached for his own pen. For several minutes the only words they exchanged were numbers and requests to move a sheet.
At the end of his account he wrote that he had not known Nina would handle this particular review. She had already heard that from him. It still caught at her: the real distinction, insufficient and enormously wanted.
“Will you read it?” he asked.
She did. The last sentence said he would have stopped if he had known.
“How do you know that?”
“I would.”
“You recognized the case when I told you the name in the hospital. You gave me the company story at home.”
He kept the pen between his fingers. “I didn't know what had happened to him.”
“That isn't the question you wrote an answer to.”
He crossed out the sentence. Under it he wrote when he had first known she was involved and what he'd told her then. He stared at the amended ending a long time.
“I want something in there that isn't the worst thing.”
Nina felt it physically, the invitation to tell him what he had done for Beth. She had been in the car. His leg had given way. She knew.
“Put it in your account of what happened this morning. It happened.”
“And here?”
“Here is this.”
The waitress arrived with menus they had forgotten to open. Adam ordered soup, Nina a sandwich. While they waited, Nina wrote her own account of the two source references and the question the comparison couldn't answer. She included the warning she'd dismissed. At first she wrote, I accepted the purported corroboration in good faith. Then she drew a line through in good faith. Adam watched, his pen still. She left the words visible under the line.
He turned his page over to check the reference he'd written at the bottom.
“What does that say?” she asked, pointing at a cramped word.
“Attending.”
“That's not a word you've ever written before.”
He looked at it. “I ran out of space.”
She turned the page over. “There's more.”
He laughed softly, surprised. She did too. It was the old joke about his refusal to use the backs of things, letters she'd found squeezed into corners of shopping lists while an entire blank side waited. He looked at her for half a second too long afterward.
She put the page down. Adam was still smiling a little when he returned to his statement.
Their food arrived. Adam lifted the pages out of the way before the waitress could set a plate on them. Nina took her own sheets and laid them on her folder.
He finished eating first. His eyes went to her coat, then the folder.
“I can take that for you when we go.”
“I've got it.”
“It's a lot to carry.”
“Not as much as my bag was.”
“I'm sorry,” he said.
She pulled the folder onto her lap.
“Iris's tonight?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Tomorrow, I could—”
“I've arranged tonight. That's all.”
He put down his spoon. “You don't have to stay away from the house. I can go somewhere.”
It was a real offer. She didn't trust its ease, or the part of herself that wanted to take it and walk back into a kitchen arranged by his absence instead of his presence.
“I'll decide where I stay,” she said. “You can decide where you stay.”
“There's no point us both paying for a room.”
“I haven't asked you to pay for mine.”
He sat back. For a moment the familiar displeasure showed through, not cruelty, only the unhappiness of offering a thing that had always worked and finding it wasn't wanted. She was almost grateful to see it. He wasn't a patient saint waiting for her to stop being hurt.
“You need this work,” he said, touching the copy. “You need me to say which pieces came from where.”
“Yes. I do.”
“Then let me do something.”
Nina looked at his statement. He had written the date he'd supplied, who repeated it and what he hadn't checked. Not an apology. A thing another person could ask him about later.
“You have.”
He looked away. It wasn't enough for what he wanted. That didn't make the answer false.
They put their separate accounts into separate envelopes. Nina sent the agreed copies through the officer's existing channel and retained her own working notes, with the unanswered source question still circled. She didn't add Beth's annotated closure. She had been allowed to read it, not to circulate it.
Outside, Adam's hired car was still a few minutes away. Nina stood beside her own car with the folder beneath her arm. He looked at the passenger door, not quite asking.
“I have a ride,” he said.
“Good.”
He checked the car's arrival time and put his phone away.
The driver pulled in while she was still there. Adam got himself into the back, keeping his leg clear. Nina waited until the door was closed. She couldn't stop knowing where he was by deciding how little she trusted him.
He raised a hand through the window. She raised hers before she could turn it into a decision about the rest of their life.
Then she drove to her sister's with the folder on the seat beside her and the questions she'd written still questions.