“Eighteen thousand,” Adam said. “Over three months. And expenses.”
Nina looked at him. She had expected a number to explain something. It was only a number, small enough for her to picture and too large to put anywhere in their life without changing the memory of it.
“To do what?”
“Make you want to stay here.”
For a second she thought he meant here, beside the car. She looked back at the room.
“In Baltimore,” he said. “Until the pilot was in.”
She closed her eyes. The client woman yesterday, smiling over the photograph of a deal renewed. We nearly lost her. The first pilot had mattered desperately then. Months of work, people on both sides trying to see whether the human reviews made the system better or only slower. The client had wanted Nina in the room because it was her method and they could make her explain it when it failed.
Vivian had wanted her there too.
“She offered me more money,” Nina said. “I said no.”
“I know.”
“A different title. A team. I said no to that too.”
He looked down. He had known all the things she thought she had brought into their life herself.
“What if I hadn't liked you?”
“Then it wouldn't have worked.”
“You'd have been paid anyway.”
“For the time. Yes.”
She looked at the tear in his shirt. Color had risen from his throat. He didn't look like a practiced liar now. She couldn't allow that to mean he wasn't one.
“Expenses,” she said. “Coffee.”
“Yes.”
“The place with the crooked booth. The waiter who remembered you.”
“The waiter was just a waiter.”
“You don't get to—” She stopped because her voice had gone so loud. The man with the mug looked out of the room down the walkway. Nina turned away from him.
Adam didn't touch her. Some part of her had been waiting for the reflex, his palm at her back. The absence made her furious too.
“Did you know about my dad before I told you?”
“Not everything.”
“What did you know?”
“That he'd been ill. That you'd been going back and forth. That you weren't sleeping.”
She pressed her fingers against her mouth. She'd told Adam about her father on their third date. Had thought he was the first man in years to listen without immediately searching for a way out of the conversation.
“I didn't report those things back,” he said.
She lowered her hand.
He shut his eyes briefly. “That doesn't help.”
“Did you?”
“I told her you weren't taking the other job. Before you told work.”
She remembered sitting cross-legged on his bed with her laptop on her knees. Two tickets she'd looked at: one outward journey for her, a second search she hadn't booked, trying to turn the move into a weekend together. Adam had been filling holes in the wall because his lease was nearly up.
She'd asked, lightly at first, “Would you come?”
He'd turned with the scraper in his hand. “To visit?”
“To live.”
He had put the scraper down and sat on the edge of the bed. She remembered that as consideration. He hadn't laughed at the idea. It was early, too early to ask, and he'd made it possible to talk anyway.
“I've got the buildings,” he'd said. “I can't leave them halfway through.”
She knew the buildings. He'd taken her to see them. Real dust, broken plumbing, a man shouting down a staircase because someone had disconnected the wrong thing. Adam had caught her sleeve before she put her hand on a wet rail. She had liked seeing him work. Liked that his days were nothing like hers.
“Not forever,” she'd said.
“No. Not forever.”
The rival had given her eight weeks to decide and make the move. That had seemed generous when the offer came. By that afternoon on the bed there were eleven days left. She could ask for longer. She could go alone. She could stop talking as though two months with a man settled everything she had wanted from a different life.
Instead she'd asked to see the buildings again.
“Was there a contract?” she asked now. “The refurbishment.”
“Yes.”
“A real one.”
“Yes. I couldn't afford to walk off it. The staging work was going under. I owed people.”
“And she knew.”
“She'd already used me. For places. Furnishing them. Getting people in.”
Nina rubbed the imprint the car seam had left on her palm. She remembered her relief after declining the rival. The embarrassment of telling people had been smaller than the relief. No new city assembled alone between workdays. She would have the job she knew and something outside it at last.
She had called Vivian to say it was her decision.
“I asked you to come with me.”
“I remember.”
“You let me think I was choosing between two real things.”
He wiped the blood from his ear. “The job was real. I wanted you to stay. I was being paid to want you to stay.”
She turned away from him. The man with the television had shut his door. She could no longer hear the applause.
“When did she stop paying you?”
“For that? After three months.”
“For me.”
“After three months. I stopped telling her about you.”
“You could have told me.”
“Yes.”
“When the buildings were finished. When we moved. Before we got married.”
He nodded. He offered no reason he couldn't have gone with her later.
“And the other work?”
He swallowed. “It didn't stop.”
She looked up.
“Some of it was moving people. Getting a place ready. Making sure someone would answer a door and say they knew them. Sometimes they needed it. Sometimes—”
“Did you know?”
He looked at her. “Yes.”
“That they didn't all need help.”
“Yes.”
She pictured the host, his watch back on his wrist, the way he'd thanked her for finding it while the young woman stood beside him. A man welcomed into a life other people would be punished for questioning.
“You married me,” she said.
“Yes.”
“You stood in front of my family.”
His eyes filled. He wiped one with the heel of his hand, awkwardly, like a tired child. Nina wanted him not to cry. It was a fresh, astonishing thing she could hate him for.
“I wanted to marry you.”
“And you thought that settled it.”
He didn't answer quickly enough.
She pushed away from the car. He caught himself beginning to reach for her.
“I was going to tell you.”
“When?”
He looked at the ground.
She waited until he looked up again. There was no answer she hadn't already heard in smaller forms: after this job, when things settled down, when they could have a Saturday.
“Don't say you did it for me.”
“I didn't.”
She nodded once. She didn't mean anything by it. Her head had moved.
The room door opened. Beth stood in the gap with her phone in her hand.
“Your sister's here.”
Iris parked near the walkway and came toward them without looking at Adam. Nina went down to explain which room, found herself beginning an account of what had happened since they last spoke and stopped when Iris held up a hand.
“I spoke to Beth. I know.”
“Not everything.”
Iris looked at her properly then. “Are you hurt?”
“No.” Nina glanced at her own wrist. “Not badly.”
“We'll talk later.”
She meant it. Nina stepped aside.
Theo emerged with the camera strap wound around his wrist. His foil people were in the shoebox, and the paper tower stuck out of his coat pocket. Beth followed him to the stairs. She smoothed his hair. He ducked away, then stood while she tried again.
“Call when you get there.”
“I will.”
“Not a message. Call.”
He looked at Iris. “Can we go?”
“I was hoping you'd ask.”
He moved past her toward the car. Nina noticed he was carrying the shoebox as carefully as if something inside it were alive.
“What are you making?” she asked.
He looked back. “A street.”
“For the camera?”
He nodded.
“Does something happen in it?”
“Nothing much yet.” He adjusted the box against his hip. “People move in.”
She had no idea what to say to that. He hadn't meant it as a message for her. She let him go.
Beth remained beside the car after he got in. Iris waited with the driver's door open until Beth had finished speaking through the window. Then she said something that made Theo smile without quite meaning to, got in and drove away.
Beth watched until they turned out of the lot. Nina stood beside her. Neither woman spoke.
Inside the room, Theo's place on the bed was a rumpled hollow. His second battery lay on the table. Beth picked it up, looked at the door and put it in her pocket.
“He'll want that,” Nina said.
“He'll say he won't.”
Beth sat on the edge of the bed. Nina remained standing by the table.
“Martin was his father,” Beth said.
“Adam told me.”
“Adam told you Martin was looking for us. That's not the same thing.”
Nina took the other chair. She didn't want Beth to have to look up at her.
“He could make a whole room think I was being unreasonable,” Beth said. “Never shouting. Not in front of people he needed. He'd say he only wanted to know where his son was. Who could object to that?”
“You could.”
“I did.”
She let the answer stand. Nina felt the urge to apologize for having supplied another sensible thing Beth had already thought of.
“I didn't make up my name,” Beth said. “Or Theo's. I've used Bell sometimes, where I didn't need to use anything official. I didn't buy a whole new person. I wanted a room he couldn't come to.”
“I understand.”
Beth regarded her. “Do you?”
Nina looked toward the window. Adam sat outside near the car, visible through a gap in the curtain. He wasn't trying to listen. Or he knew how not to look as though he was.
“Less than I thought.”
Beth drew a folded sheet from the flat pouch beneath her sweatshirt. She didn't offer it yet.
“He wanted the connections,” she said. “The names people used in public and where they actually slept. He told me once that having a name wasn't the same as being able to find someone. He thought that was very clever.”
“Was that why he went to them?”
“He went to people who said they could do things. He always did. Later he'd find out something they didn't want known, and suddenly there would be a bargain.”
Nina thought of Martin holding out the note, too weak to keep his arm raised. She had accepted the truth in his fear as though fear made the rest of him safe.
Beth unfolded the paper on her knee. The creases had become pale lines.
“This,” she said, “is what they said you had sorted out.”