Adam opened the passenger door. Nina walked around the car and stood by the driver's side.
“Keys.”
“You've had a drink?”
“Water.”
He gave them to her.
She drove as far as a lit parking area beside a closed shop. Then she stopped, turned off the engine and left both hands on the wheel. The silence in the car was so different from the party that she could hear a loose coin fall inside the door when Adam shifted.
“Who are those people?” she asked.
“Which ones?”
She turned her head. He looked away.
“The house is real,” he said. “They live there.”
“When did he go on the boat?”
“I don't know.”
“Who wrote down the neighbor's name for him? And the story?”
Adam put his hands between his knees. “It's easier if there's something they can refer to.”
She stared at him.
“What is?”
“Starting over.”
“He accused a woman of stealing his watch.”
“I didn't choose him.”
It was the first useful answer he'd given her all day. Nina leaned back. Outside, a paper bag rolled along the curb, caught on a drain and stayed there.
“You made his photographs.”
“Not the photographs. I arrange things. Places. People who'll say they've met somebody before.”
“People like the man with the beard.”
He nodded.
“Fieldspan.”
“Sometimes the work goes through them.”
“You supplied statements for my cases.”
“I didn't know they were yours.”
“Did you?”
He pressed his lips together. “Not all of them.”
She looked at the keys, still in the ignition. She could take them out. Make him sit here without being able to move anything to the next, more comfortable place.
“How many?”
“I can't tell you off the top of my head.”
“You could tell the host what kind of beer his friend liked.”
He flinched. “It's not—”
“It is exactly that. People have decided he's real because of things you arranged.”
“He is real.”
“Who is he?”
Adam looked through the windshield. He didn't give her a name.
“Somebody else gets told they're lying,” she said. “Somebody like Beth Rowan.”
His head turned quickly enough to tell her she'd finally reached the right question.
“What did you do to Beth?”
“I didn't do anything to her.”
“You just arranged things.”
He looked down. “She needed help getting away.”
“From Martin.”
“Yes.”
Nina's mouth went dry. She had been carrying his note as though it belonged to a warning given freely. The word family in the hospital message moved, changing shape without changing any of its letters.
“He was trying to find her.”
“Yes.”
“And my recommendation helped.”
“I don't know everything they did with it.”
“But you did the field work.”
“Some of it.”
She put her palm against the cold window. It felt good for a second. A physical thing to do that didn't ask her to decide what she believed.
“Show me,” she said.
“What?”
“What you did. Ansel Court. Those places. Show me something you haven't just decided to tell me.”
He took out his phone. For a while he searched without handing it over. She watched his face instead of the screen. He wasn't typing a message; his fingers moved through things already there. Finally he held it toward her.
An old property-work folder. Addresses, dates, attachments. She read the current Ansel visit schedule. He had been there two weeks ago. Not for a while, he had said.
“Keep going,” she said.
He sat back as she moved through the files. She didn't know what she expected to find. The bowl mentioned on an inventory, perhaps. A record of letting them in, some reason their own first home kept appearing in his work.
Then she saw the open-house invitation.
It was the right date. Six years ago. The morning they'd met. She opened it and read the time, the meeting details, the line telling invitees whom to contact if they were delayed.
No cancellation.
She looked at him. “Why do you have this?”
“I keep old property things.”
“It wasn't canceled for you.”
He was very still.
Nina took her own phone out and searched her messages. She had kept the cancellation for no sensible reason; at the time she'd sent a picture of it to a friend with a joke about the worst way to meet someone. The original was still there, far back in an account she barely used.
She put the two phones beside each other on her lap.
“Different lists,” Adam said.
“What?”
“There may have been—”
“Don't.”
He stopped.
She could feel herself making room for the explanation, the possibility of an admin mistake, a message that went astray. She had made a career out of recognizing that kind of thing. Now she wanted it so badly that she didn't trust herself to hear it.
“I can't do this in a car,” she said.
He reached toward her. She moved the phones instead of her body, and he let his hand fall.
“Beth,” Nina said. “Where is she?”
“I need to make sure she's all right.”
“Then call her.”
He hesitated. “Not with you listening to everything.”
She nearly laughed. Then she thought of Beth's message. Call me. Use the number you used before. Not everyone asking for privacy was using it against her.
“Tell her I'm here. Tell her I signed the closure. Ask if she'll speak to me.”
He got out of the car and went far enough away that she couldn't hear. Nina stayed behind the wheel with his phone's old invitation copied to her own and the original cancellation open beside it. She could leave. Her car was at Iris's. Her sister had said to call.
Instead she found the officer's number and told him what she'd seen at the party. When she reached him, he asked whether anyone had threatened her. She said no. She described the man from the field statement, Adam's admission and the people rehearsing an apparent past. He asked her to preserve what she had and arranged to speak again. He didn't promise to make sense of it before she had to go home.
Adam returned while she was finishing. She didn't lower her voice. He stood by the passenger door until she put the phone away.
“She'll talk tomorrow,” he said. “Not tonight. She said she needs to get her son to bed.”
“Where?”
“She told me where to come. I'll take you.”
“Give me the address.”
“She didn't say I could—”
“Ask her.”
He looked tired enough to seem older, a man from somewhere other than their kitchen. He got his phone out and sent a message. A few minutes later it returned a reply. He showed it to Nina rather than describing it. Beth would let Nina come to the door. Adam was not coming in.
Nina copied the address. She didn't send it to Vivian.
They drove to Iris's in silence. Adam took the wheel after Nina got out. Iris's window was dark except for a lamp near the laundry rack.
“Are you coming home?” he asked.
She looked through the open window at him. The car made his face seem framed, held at a distance she hadn't managed all day.
“I need my things.”
He nodded. She got the keys to her own car from her bag. It was still parked outside Iris's, where she'd left it before the party. Adam waited until she was behind the wheel, then drove ahead. She followed him home without calling her sister again.
At their house she took a change of clothes from the bedroom and put it in her large bag. She could hear him downstairs, filling the kettle. The sound made her stop beside the dresser. He would bring tea, because tea was what you did after a difficult night. He would move a charger to her side of the bed. In the morning he would ask what she wanted to eat.
She opened the drawer for socks. A pair of his lay in her side, rolled together in the wrong way. She unrolled them, found hers underneath and put his back. Then she stood looking at what she'd done.
Adam called from the bottom of the stairs. “There's a clean towel in the blue bag if you need one.”
“What blue bag?”
“The one we took to your dad's.”
“I don't need a towel.”
“Okay.”
She had forgotten the bag existed. He knew where it was. He knew the case she kept her spare glasses in, the cable that only worked if it was bent against the plug, the way she could not sleep if a cupboard door was standing open. She took a sweater from the chair and folded it carefully enough to keep from doing anything else with her hands.
Her phone lit. Iris asking whether she was still coming. Nina typed yes and then deleted the explanation she'd begun underneath it.
On the dresser Adam had left his wedding ring while he showered that morning. He'd put it back on before leaving. There was only the little round dust mark now, beside a coin he'd been meaning to take downstairs. Nina touched the mark with one finger. She was furious with herself for checking, for the relief she'd felt in the absence of a piece of metal.
He appeared at the bedroom door, carrying a phone charger. “Yours is short. I thought—”
“Leave it.”
He put it on the dresser and stayed by the door.
“Were you going to tell me anything tonight if I hadn't seen that invitation?”
He looked down the stairs. “I wanted to get you home.”
“We're home.”
“I know.”
“What were you going to tell me here?”
He didn't answer. She waited long enough to be sure it wasn't only that she hadn't given him time.
Then she put the charger into her bag. “I'm taking this.”
“Yes.”
She carried the bag past him. He moved away from the door before she reached it.
Downstairs he set the empty mug on the counter.
“I'm staying with Iris.”
“Okay.”
“Pick me up at Iris's in the morning.”
He nodded. She didn't let him hold her coat. Outside, the light he'd replaced shone steadily while she unlocked her own car.