PART 11:

Now they were two people who had said something true and were living in the neighborhood of it, trying to figure out how close to stand. They still made coffee in the morning. She still left his mug on the counter. He still made enough eggs for two on the mornings he was home before 9, though now she sometimes ate them at the table instead of taking them to her room.

Small shifts, the kind that only registered because he’d memorized the baseline. Cora came on Wednesday. She arrived with a drawing she’d made at school, a house with four stick figures in front of it, rendered in crayon, with the particular ambitious perspective of someone who understood what a house looked like, but not quite how to make the page agree.

Who’s this?” Victoria asked, looking at it. Cora pointed to each figure in turn. That’s Daddy. That’s Grammy. That’s me. And that’s you. Victoria looked up from the drawing at Ethan. He kept his expression neutral. That’s me, Victoria said to Ka. Not a question, not a performance, just confirming the fact. You live here, Kora said with the complete reasonleness of a six-year-old for whom this was sufficient logic.

I do, Victoria said. So, you go in the house picture. That makes sense. Ka appeared satisfied and went to find her book. And Victoria stood there holding the drawing with an expression that moved through several things in about 4 seconds. Surprise! Something softer than the recovery of the composure, and then something else underneath the composure that didn’t fully go away.

She put the drawing on the refrigerator with a magnet. He saw her do it. She didn’t look at him while she did it, which meant she knew he was watching and was making the choice anyway. He thought, “I’m in serious trouble.” He thought this clearly and without particular alarm, which was itself alarming. The call came on a Friday afternoon, 3 weeks after the party.

Ethan was under a kitchen cabinet in a brownstone in the West Village, running new wiring to a circuit that the homeowner had explained was behaving strangely, which was the word people used when the lights flickered. and they didn’t want to say the word fire. He had two wires clamped between his teeth and his phone in his chest pocket and he felt it buzz.

He finished what he was doing, came out from under the cabinet and looked at the screen. Victoria. She didn’t call during the day unless something was wrong. They texted brief and practical. The call meant something. He picked up. Hey, he’s doing it again. Her voice was compressed. The way a voice gets when someone is holding it together precisely because the alternative is not holding it together.

Marcus, he called my assistant this morning. Said he wanted to send a gift to the office. Needed my schedule to time the delivery. Sarah gave him my calendar for Tuesday. A pause. I was at dinner Tuesday with a board member. He knew that he always she stopped. He’s using her. He’s using someone who doesn’t know the history to get access to my schedule.

Ethan straightened up, wiped his hands on his work pants. Where are you? My office. Are you alone? My assistant is outside. Okay. Has he contacted you directly? Not yet. That’s not how he does it. He does it laterally through things around me, not directly at me. Until he decides to. He understood what she was actually saying. She was not frightened of anything specific.

She was frightened of the pattern. She recognized the feeling of being approached from angles, surrounded quietly before any direct contact. The particular dread of knowing a thing is happening before you can point to it in a way that sounds rational to anyone else. Call your assistant in, he said. Tell her that Marcus Webb is your ex-boyfriend, that the breakup was not amicable, and that under no circumstances is any information about your schedule to be shared with him.

Make it a policy, not a request. A pause. If I do that, she’ll know. But she’ll know you’re protecting yourself. That’s it. You’re the CEO. You set parameters. You don’t owe her an explanation for why. Another pause. Longer. Right. She said. Yes. Okay. You good? I will be a breath. I called you before I thought it through.

That’s fine. I don’t usually do that. I know, he said. I’m glad you did. A moment of silence on the line. Not uncomfortable. How’s the job? She asked. Cabinet wiring. The lights were doing something haunted. Were they? Previous owner put in the panels wrong. It’s fixable. Another hour. Okay. Another breath. Steadier. Thank you.

Call me if anything else comes up. I won’t. I’ll handle it. I know you’ll handle it, he said. Call me anyway. She said she would, which was not a promise, but was not nothing. He went back under the cabinet. He thought about the sound of her voice when she’d said, “He’s doing it again.” Not panic, not fragility, just the particular dread of recognized danger.

She was not a woman who scared easily, which meant the thing she was scared of had earned it. Whoops. Marcus called that evening. Not Victoria, Ethan. He still had the number from the night of the party. They’d exchanged cards in the way people do at those events, a reflex transaction that Ethan had forgotten until the name appeared on his phone at 7:45 while he was eating leftover rice and watching Kora argue with a math worksheet at the kitchen table.

He stared at the name for a moment, then he said, “Bug, I need to take this. 2 minutes and stepped into the hallway.” “Ethan.” Marcus’ voice carried the same easy warmth as in person. The performance so embedded now he probably couldn’t access anything underneath it. “Hope I’m not catching you at a bad time.” “You are,” Ethan said. “What do you need?” A brief pause.

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