Chapter 81: Saturday Without a Calendar

By ten o’clock Lucas had cleaned the bathroom, taken out the recycling, and read the same paragraph of a library book four times without learning what happened in it.

Saturdays used to have a shape. Before the suspension there had been email on his phone by eight, a call from someone in Victoria’s office who needed a slide fixed before Monday, and a run along the river that he took mostly so he could tell himself he had done something for his own body. Now his work laptop sat in a drawer under a litigation hold, his badge was a line item in a review run by a firm he had never met, and the only calendar entry he had for the week was a Wednesday interview with a question mark next to it.

He put the book down and looked at the sweatshirt on the chair. He had told himself he would leave it there. He was still leaving it there.

[Daily Status Check.]

[Host: Lucas Vintage.]

[Current AP Balance: 6000.]

[Active Quests: None.]

[Advisory: Host’s legal position is stable but passive. Passive periods are when other parties move.]

"Thanks," he said to the empty kitchen. "Very helpful."

The overlay did not answer. It rarely did when he talked back to it, which he had come to think of as the closest thing it had to manners.

He made a second pot of coffee, threw half of it out, and decided that if he stayed inside another hour he would start reading the unknown number’s text again just to have something to look at. He put on his running shoes instead.

Reed had said chain at night. He had not said house arrest. Lucas still took the long way, down the back stair and out through the alley behind the laundromat, and he looked at every parked car on the block before he turned toward the river. None of them were dark sedans. One was a minivan with a car seat in the back and a sunshade shaped like a cartoon dog. He felt stupid for checking and checked the next one anyway.

The path was busy. Rowers on the water, a man with two greyhounds in matching coats, a group of women in their sixties who passed him at a walk and talked the whole time about someone named Pat who had ruined a book club. He ran slower than he used to. His lungs had gotten lazy during the month he spent in rooms with lawyers.

At the second bridge his phone buzzed against his arm. He stopped, breathing hard, and pulled it out of the band.

Camilla.

You up? Sister wants to know if the man who got me in the newspaper eats lunch.

He typed with his thumb, still catching his breath.

I didn’t get you in the newspaper.

You were adjacent to the newspaper. Lunch. 1 PM. She’s making soup. You can say no but she’ll be offended for a year.

He looked at the water for a while. Reed had not said anything about Camilla except that she was home and fine and that she had told his assistant not to call her unless someone else got arrested. She was not a director. She was not an officer. She was a woman who had spent two weeks at her sister’s place with a bat in the closet because she had answered the wrong phone at the wrong desk, and she was asking him to eat soup.

I’ll come. Text me the address.

Already did. Scroll up, genius.

He scrolled up. She had, six days earlier, in a message he had read at two in the morning and forgotten.

Camilla’s sister lived in a brick row house in Roxborough with a porch that needed paint and a kitchen that smelled like onions and bay leaves from the sidewalk. Her name was Denise. She was taller than Camilla, louder, and she shook his hand like she was checking it for weapons.

"So you’re Lucas," she said.

"I’m Lucas."

"You look tired."

"He always looks tired," Camilla said from the table. "It’s his face. Sit down before she starts asking about your intentions."

"I don’t have intentions," Lucas said.

"Everybody has intentions," Denise said, and went back to the stove.

The soup was chicken and rice with too much black pepper, which Denise said was the point. There was crusty bread from a bakery down the hill and a bowl of clementines nobody touched. A boy of about ten came through once, took a piece of bread, looked at Lucas with open suspicion, and left again.

"My nephew," Camilla said. "He thinks you’re a cop."

"Why?"

"Because every grown man who’s come to this house in two weeks has been a cop or a lawyer, and you don’t dress like a lawyer."

Lucas looked down at his running shirt. He had changed it, but not by much.

"Fair."

They talked about nothing for a while, which he had not realized he missed. Denise worked nights at a hospital in billing and had opinions about insurance companies that would have gotten her removed from most dinner parties. Camilla talked about her own apartment, the one she was back in now, and how the first night home she had checked the lock six times and then laughed at herself and checked it a seventh.

"Then I slept eleven hours," she said. "Like I told you. Best sleep of my life. Woke up and the world was still there. Rude."

"How’s the job?" Lucas asked, and regretted it before she answered, because he did not know what she was allowed to say.

Camilla put down her spoon.

"That’s actually why I asked you here," she said. "Not the only reason. Denise wanted to look at you. But part of it."

Denise took her bowl to the sink and ran the water loudly enough that it was clear she was giving them the room without leaving it.

"Pellman and Hoyt emailed me yesterday," Camilla said. "The outside firm. They want to interview me for the page-forty-seven review. Tuesday afternoon. They said I can bring a lawyer if I want, and that the company will pay for one if I ask."

"Are you going to ask?"

"I already did. Reed’s office gave me a name. Somebody who doesn’t work with him, so it’s clean." She turned her water glass slowly. "I’m not asking you what to say. I know we can’t do that. I know my statement and your statement are supposed to be two different pieces of paper. I just wanted you to hear it from me and not from a list somewhere."

"Thank you."

"Don’t." She shrugged. "You told me about Victoria yourself. I’m returning the favor. That’s all."

He thought about the system’s advisory that morning, about passive periods and other parties moving.

"Did they say anything else?"

"Just logistics. Room on the twelfth floor of some building on Market. Two lawyers from their side. A court reporter, which, apparently, is normal and not terrifying." She hesitated. "And they asked if I still had my old desk phone logs. I don’t. IT took them. I told them that."

Lucas could think of three reasons a firm reviewing page forty-seven would want her phone logs, and none of them belonged in her sister’s kitchen. He kept his face still. He did not ask anything else. Camilla watched him not ask it and gave a short, tired laugh.

"Look at us," she said. "Two people who can’t talk about the one thing they have in common."

"We can talk about soup."

"The soup is too peppery," Camilla said, loud enough to carry.

"The soup is correct," Denise said from the sink without turning around.

[Target: Camilla Verman.]

[Relationship Status: Wary Ally.]

[Trust Trend: Rising. Subject chose disclosure over silence on a matter she was not required to share.]

[Note: No reward assigned. Not every correct action is a transaction.]

Lucas read the last line twice. He was not sure if the system was being kind or making a point. Possibly both.

He stayed for an hour after lunch because Denise put a deck of cards on the table and said nobody left her house without losing at least one game of spades. Lucas partnered with the nephew, whose name was Andre and who forgave him for being a possible cop after Lucas cut a trump correctly. They lost anyway. Camilla and Denise played like people who had grown up in the same bedroom and had worked out a signal system by the age of eight.

"You’re cheating," Andre said.

"We’re sisters," Denise said. "That’s not cheating. That’s genetics."

When he left it was nearly four. Camilla walked him to the porch and stood on the top step with her arms crossed against the wind.

"She’s coming back tonight?" she asked. "Victoria?"

"I don’t know."

"You do know. You just don’t like saying it." Camilla looked down the street at the parked cars, and he realized she was checking them the same way he had that morning. "Be careful, okay? Not of her. Of everything else. When I worked that desk I used to think the scariest thing was getting yelled at. Turns out the scariest thing is people being polite to you when they want something."

"I’ll be careful."

"You say that like a man who’s going to do something stupid by Wednesday."

"I’m going to sit in my apartment and not answer my phone."

"Good. That’s the least stupid thing you’ve ever said to me." She went back inside. Through the window he saw Andre already shuffling for another game.

Victoria texted at six forty.

Board call ran long. I’m going home tonight. Detail is at the building and the chair asked me to sleep in my own bed so the logs look boring. I agree with him, annoyingly. Dinner tomorrow? I’ll bring something you can’t ruin.

He read it on the couch with his legs stretched out and the lamp on.

Dinner tomorrow. I can ruin anything. You know that.

I’ve seen the rice. I’m bringing bread and cheese and a bottle of wine you haven’t been staring at for a month.

He looked at the fridge, where the unopened bottle was still sitting next to the half lemon. He had never told her about the wine.

How do you know about the wine?

You look at your fridge like it owes you money. I’m observant. Goodnight, Lucas. Chain on.

Chain on. Goodnight.

He put the chain on. He did not need to be told, but he liked being told by her.

[Target: Victoria Sterling.]

[Relationship Status: Intimate Partner (Probationary).]

[Target State: Tired. Following counsel’s advice about appearances. Choosing a planned evening over an emergency one.]

He made pasta, which he could not ruin, and ate it on the couch watching half of a baseball game replay he did not care about. The neighbor’s television came on through the wall at nine and settled into its usual murmur. Outside the street stayed quiet. No sedans. No Suburban either, since she was home.

At ten past eleven he turned off the lamp and went to brush his teeth.

His phone rang on the bathroom counter.

He looked at it with the toothbrush still in his mouth. The number was the one at the top of his messages. The one he had not answered. The one Reed had told him to sit on his hands about.

It rang four times. Then five. Lucas spat into the sink and stood very still and did not touch the screen. His heart was beating harder than it had at the second bridge.

[Warning: Incoming contact from flagged number.]

[Recommended Action: Do not answer. Preserve all records.]

The ringing stopped.

He let out a breath he had not meant to hold. He picked up the phone to screenshot the missed call for Reed, and while his thumb was still on the button the screen changed again.

New voicemail. 0:41.

Forty-one seconds. Lucas stood in his bathroom with the light buzzing over the mirror and looked at the little red dot, and understood that whatever Philip Danner had wanted to say in ten minutes, he had decided he could say most of it without waiting for permission.