The table had come with six chairs, one of which was in the kitchen holding up a box of things Nina meant to take to work. Four years after buying it, she and Adam had finally agreed that neither of them knew six people they wanted to feed at once.
They were trying to get the extra leaf out.
“Lift your side,” Adam said.
“It is lifted.”
“Your other side.”
“I have two sides of a table?”
He ducked underneath. Nina could see the back of his head between the runners and, beyond that, the steep little hill of his shoulder beneath his shirt. There was a hole developing at the collar. She had watched it go from a pale place to an opening and was curious how long he would keep wearing it. She had a shirt like that herself, which was why she hadn't said anything.
“Pull now.”
The table shot apart. Adam hit his head.
She made a noise she hoped he might mistake for concern.
“Go ahead,” he said from under the table. “Get it out.”
She laughed until he started laughing too, which made it worse. Then she put down her end and crouched beside him, taking his face between her hands. No blood. He submitted to her inspection with his eyes shut.
“You'll live.”
“Can you put that in writing? I'll need it for work.”
She kissed his forehead. His eyes stayed closed for a second after she let go.
They had meant to make dinner before taking the table apart. Now there was nowhere to eat, the bag of spinach was sweating beside the stove, and Adam had discovered a bolt in his pocket that he couldn't account for. Nina stood the leaf against the wall. In the stripe it had protected, the floor was darker.
“We should move the whole thing over,” she said.
“After dinner.”
“It'll take a minute.”
He looked at the table in its two halves.
“You can say it,” she said.
“I'm growing as a person.”
She got the skillet down. He reached past her for the pan he'd bought to make something he had seen a man making outdoors on the internet. It was deep and heavy and had been used twice.
“That one takes an hour to wash.”
“I'm washing it.”
“You're leaving at seven.”
He stopped with his hand on the handle.
Nina took the skillet to the stove. It wasn't the pan she wanted to discuss. The kitchen was narrow enough that they had to tell each other when they were turning around, but there were evenings when she could almost feel the empty house pressing against its outer walls.
“I told you about tonight,” he said.
“You said maybe.”
“I have to let a family into a place.”
“Can't somebody else let them in?”
“They're coming a long way.”
“I know. There's always a reason.”
He put down the pan. For a moment he seemed about to give her the reason again. Instead he said, “Do you want me to stay?”
She hated that too, the question offered when it was too late to want the answer without being unreasonable. He watched her, his thumb resting against the little knob of the pan lid.
“I want you to know whether you're going to be home before I buy food.”
“Okay.”
“And I want a whole Saturday. Not Saturday until somebody loses a key.”
“This Saturday?”
“Next one. I have a thing this Saturday.”
He nodded gravely. She tried not to smile and failed.
“Put it in the calendar,” she said.
He got out his phone. A minute later hers chimed on the counter: Saturday. Food. No keys.
“You didn't invite me.”
“It's exclusive.”
She bumped his hip with hers and went to wash the spinach.
They ate standing at the counter. Adam had overestimated the amount of garlic it was possible to fry in a small pan without burning half of it. Nina picked the black pieces out of hers and dropped them on his plate. He ate them. She told him about a coworker's proposed team-building afternoon in an escape room, which she considered an unfortunate choice for a department already behind on its work. He said it would be a very funny way to fire them. Then he apologized because she was still trying to tell the story.
Her phone rang while he was scraping the pan.
She didn't recognize the number. She let it go.
He was putting water in the pan when the voicemail notification appeared. Nina touched it, expecting a reminder about an appointment she hadn't made.
The woman spoke slowly and gave her name twice. She was calling from Foundry Memorial Hospital. A patient had asked them to contact Nina Calder. He had given this number. He said she had reviewed a Threadline complaint concerning his family.
Adam turned off the water.
“What is it?”
“Somebody at the hospital.”
“Your dad?”
She shook her head before he finished. That was the first place both of them had gone, even now. Her father had recovered; her body was slower to learn it.
She played the message again against her ear.
“A work thing?” Adam asked.
“I don't know.”
The woman hadn't described an emergency, only said that the patient had asked for her and that Nina could call the switchboard. Nina searched the hospital's number and called that instead of the number in her recent calls. While she waited to be connected, she watched Adam rub at a burned place in the pan with his thumb.
The patient was called Martin Reed. That meant nothing to her. He said he had a reference for the complaint. When the woman read it out, Nina recognized the beginning of it: an old support escalation, one of the ones she'd taken over when the review group was small enough for everything to end up on her desk.
“I'm not a relative,” she said.
“I understand. He's given your name as his emergency contact and asked us to call you.”
“He'd like to see you. That's entirely your decision.”
“Can you tell me what this is about?”
“Only what he's asked us to relay.”
Nina looked at the time on the stove. She could call work in the morning. She could ask who had handled the last contact. She could do all the things she usually did when somebody said the company had failed them.
“Is he able to talk?”
“At the moment. A visit would have to be brief.”
After she hung up, Adam dried his hands. “I'll take you.”
“You've got your people.”
“They can wait.”
“No. It's probably nothing.”
She heard herself say it. She put her phone in her bag.
He held out her coat, and she backed into it. His hands stayed on her shoulders while she found the sleeves. It was a familiar small delay between getting ready and leaving. Usually she leaned back against him. Tonight she was thinking about the complaint reference, trying to picture the face of the woman whose case it might have been.
“Call me when you're done,” he said. “I'll get you.”
“I'm taking my car.”
“Call me anyway.”
He took a bit of spinach off the front of her coat. She hadn't noticed it fall.
At the door she remembered the car keys and went back for them. They weren't in the bowl. Adam checked the pocket of his jacket, then hers, while Nina looked beneath the bag she had just picked up.
“Kitchen,” he said.
“I was in the kitchen.”
“Before that.”
She'd put them in the refrigerator beside the spinach. She took them out without looking at him. He had the decency to turn away.
“It's a system,” she said.
“I respect it.”
He followed her outside and stood on the step while she unlocked the car. The porch light had begun to flicker. She'd told him about it yesterday; now she remembered he'd come home carrying a bulb and she'd asked him to help with the table before he could change it.
“Leave that,” she said when he looked up at it.
“Wasn't going to do it with my teeth.”
She got into the car. Through the glass she watched him wait for the engine to start. He had started doing that after the battery died one cold morning and she'd called him from outside the house with a voice she disliked in herself, half helpless and half blaming. Now he would wait even in July. She lowered the window.
“Go eat something else. You barely had any.”
“You picked all the best bits out for me.”
She smiled. He came down the step and bent to the window.
“You're allowed to say no, you know. To the hospital.”
“I know.”
“It doesn't become yours because somebody says your name.”
She looked past him at the table leaf visible through the window, leaning against the wall where she had put it. “I'd like to know why he's saying it.”
He nodded, but he didn't move away at once.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing. Call.”
She waited until he'd stepped back, then reversed out.
At the first stop sign she turned the voicemail on again. The complaint reference sounded less familiar now that she was alone. She reviewed hundreds of cases. Sometimes the ones she remembered best were remembered wrong: a name attached to the wrong person's anger, an old address that belonged to two households who had never met. She had a habit of being certain before she had looked. At work she'd learned to keep the feeling to herself until she'd checked it.
She wanted Martin Reed to be mistaken. Not gravely, not in a way that would hurt him further. She wanted him to have remembered the wrong employee, to be asking a question that could be answered with a call in the morning.
At a light she caught herself rehearsing how she would explain what her department did. She stopped. A man was in the hospital. Whatever had happened to him, he was not waiting for a presentation.
Her phone lit in the holder. Adam had sent a photograph of the table, pushed together at last. The two useless chairs stood on either side of it like spectators.
Underneath he had written: Don't put the keys back with the vegetables.
She touched the little heart beneath the message before the light changed.