PART 11:

You back it up, she said. Julian blinked. What? The file, the 40 seconds. She set her own mug down. You’re a man with a whole office. You’re telling me nobody’s copied it. You play it once more, very careful, into something that records it clean, and then you’ve got it forever.

a thousand times over. And June can wear out the cracked phone and it doesn’t matter because the real one’s safe in a in a cloud, in a vault, in whatever you people keep things in. You’re not choosing between her hearing it and keeping it safe. You set it up so it’s both. That’s not a pancake. That’s just somebody outside the grief thinking for one minute instead of being inside it.

Julian Hail stared at her. He stared at her so long the dove got through its whole five notes twice, and the light came up another shade, and the rainbows on the lawn went from rose to gold. And something happened in his face that she could not at first read because she had not yet seen it on him.

It was the look of a man who has been carrying a stone up a hill for 11 months and has just been shown by a stranger that there is a road around. No one, he said very quietly, in 11 months. Not the therapist, not my mother, not the $400 an hour grief specialist with the office on park. Not me. No one has said that to me. No one thought of it.

We were all so busy choosing which way to lose it that he pressed the heel of his hand hard against one eye. When he took it away, he laughed. The broken open version, the one with everything inside it instead of nothing. You’ve been here 3 days. It’s not because I’m smart, Marin said. It’s because I’m not bleeding.

You can’t read a label off the inside of the bottle, that’s all. Gloria says that about men who can’t see what’s killing their own restaurants. She heard the word and let it stand. It was just Gloria saying, “Get Sloan to set up the whatever today before anybody talks you out of it.” Sloan.

His face shifted and the warmth pulled back half a step. Not all the way, but enough that Maron noticed. Be careful with Sloan. She said the same about you. Said to ask about Thursdays. I know what she said. She tells me what she tells everyone eventually in the order that suits her. He picked his jacket up off the chair. Sloan Whitfield has run this family’s office for 9 years. She knew Cara.

She, there are things there you don’t have the shape of yet, and I’m not going to hand them to you across a kitchen at 6:00 in the morning any more than I was going to hand you Thursday. He stopped at the door the way he always seemed to, a man who did his hardest speaking with his back half turned. But you’ve done something this morning with your cloud and your vault that I won’t forget.

So I’ll trade you. Don’t go to Sloan about Thursday. Come to me Sunday when you go back to your glorers. I’ll drive you myself and I’ll tell you the whole of it in the car where June can’t hear. And you can decide then whether you stay past your week. All of it. Thursday. Cara the nannies.

Why my mother said you’d regret walking in everything. Will you wait until Sunday? It was Friday’s eve of a thing, a real offer, the most open he’d been. and Maron, who had every reason to take it, opened her mouth to say she would, and the kitchen door swung wide, and Sloan Whitfield came in on her three rooms early heels, dressed already at 6:00 in the morning, in another concrete gray sheath, tablet under her arm, and behind the pleasant glass of her face was something lit and certain and almost sorry. “Oh, good, you’re both up,” she

said. That saves a conversation. Julian, the board call moved to 8. I need you on the road by 7. Her eyes went to Marouin and held, and the sorry in them sharpened into something that was almost a warning and almost a kindness and entirely a blade. and Miss Cole, before you make any promises about Sundays. She set the tablet on the counter screen up and turned it so Maron could see, and her voice when it came was very gentle, which was the worst part.

I ran your references. The two you didn’t give me because you didn’t sign. So, I found my own. You should know what’s in your own file before you decide to stay anywhere this exposed because somebody else already has it and they’ve been waiting for a hail nanny to last longer than a Thursday so they’d have someone worth paying.

On the screen was a photograph. It was Marin, younger, hair longer, in a courthouse hallway she had spent 11 years not thinking about, a manila folder against her chest, and a face on her she’d hoped no camera had kept. Below it was a name that was not quite hers, and a date, and a single line of newsprint she could read upside down from across the counter, and her whole careful body went cold from the scalp down.

Where did you get that? Maron said, “That’s the wrong question.” Sloan’s voice didn’t lift at all. The right question is who else has it and what they offered me for your address and why I haven’t said yes yet. She slid the tablet one inch closer. Julian doesn’t know. He’s about to be on a board call.

You have until he’s out that door to decide whether I’m your problem or your only friend in this house. The morning dove called its five low notes through the window. So diner talk fast and Julian jacket halfon looked between the two women and the photograph he hadn’t seen yet and said what is that Sloan? What is that on your screen? And started across the kitchen to look.

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