No

Chapter 13

The blonde didn't run.

That was the thing that got me. Anybody else would've put the car in gear and gone. She sat there in the passenger seat of a silver car in a loading zone with the driver's door hanging open and her phone still up at her ear, and she watched me walk up the sidewalk like she'd been waiting for me all night.

"Hi," she said. She lowered the phone. "You're faster than I thought."

"Who are you?"

"I'm nobody." She smiled. It was a nice smile. That was somehow worse. "I'm just a woman who was in the neighborhood."

"You've been standing on that corner since before the car pulled up."

"I've been standing on that corner for about four hours," she said. "You didn't notice. You were busy."

Dani caught up behind me, out of breath. "Mia—"

"Four hours," I said. "Four hours on a corner in the cold."

"I had coffee." She held up the cup. "I had two."

The café crowd had followed us down the block. The woman with the phone was at the front of them, and the barista, and the guy with the coffee, and the man from the loading bay who'd come out to see what the noise was about.

"Are you her?" I said. "The harbor club. Twenty nineteen. The one he stood behind all night."

Her face didn't move. Not one muscle.

"Who told you about the harbor club?" she said.

"An account called harborgirl1987."

She laughed. It was a real laugh and it came out of her and she shook her head and said, "Oh my God," and then she put her coffee cup on the roof of the car and got out.

She was taller than me. Blonde, straight hair, no coat on under the beige one, a bracelet on her wrist that I didn't know enough about jewelry to price but knew enough to know was not from a mall.

"You're the dress," she said.

"Excuse me?"

"The dress." She looked me up and down, unhurried, like a woman reading a menu. "You're the one he put in Room 7."

"Room what?"

She stopped. Her eyes changed. Something behind them clicked shut.

"Forget I said that," she said.

"No. What room?"

"I said forget it." She picked her coffee back up. "You're not going to sign that folder, are you."

The café crowd went quiet. Dani's hand was on my arm.

"How do you know about the folder?"

"I know about the folder because I've known Adrian Voss for eleven years," she said, "and I've never seen him carry one. He doesn't do paper. He does phone calls. Somebody hands him a paper and he hands it back and says send it to my office. He's carried that folder in his coat for a week." She took a sip. "He wants you to sign it."

"You've been watching him."

"I've been watching you," she said. "There's a difference."

The barista said, "Miss—"

"Give us a minute," the blonde said, without looking at her, and the barista gave her a minute.

"Say what you came to say," I said.

"Don't sign it."

"Why?"

"Because a man like that doesn't hand you a page," she said. "He hands you a page and the page has a page behind it and the page behind that has a page behind it, and by the time you get to the last one you're not the one who wrote anything down." She looked at me. "He's done this before."

"He's never been married."

"He's never signed anything," she said. "There's a difference."

The café crowd had their phones up. All of them. The blonde looked at them and then back at me and lowered her voice just enough that only I could hear it.

"You should know," she said, "that he doesn't do this for the board."

"Then what does he do it for?"

She looked at me for a second.

"I don't know," she said. "That's why I'm here."

She got back in the car. She pulled the door shut. She rolled the window down about four inches — four inches, exactly four inches, the way he did — and she looked up at me and said, "For what it's worth. I'm sorry about Weller. That wasn't me."

"What happened at Weller?"

The window went up.

"What happened at Weller?"

The engine turned over. The silver car pulled out of the loading zone, unhurried, and went down the block and turned left, and the whole café crowd watched it go with their phones still up and their mouths still open.

The woman with the phone said, "Who was that," into her livestream, and the barista said, "Miss Brennan, do you want to come inside," and I said, "I'm fine," and Dani said, "You are not fine," and I said, "I'm fine—"

The black car came around the corner.

I saw it before I heard it. The headlights came around the block and swept the sidewalk and the café crowd turned around like a flock of birds, and the car pulled in against the curb exactly where the silver one had been, and Warren got out and opened the back door, and Adrian Voss got out onto the sidewalk.

He stood there with his coat open and his hands at his sides.

"Everybody," he said, to the crowd, "go home."

The crowd did not go home. The crowd got their phones up higher.

"Ms. Brennan," he said.

"No."

"You haven't heard—"

"No," I said. Loud. Loud enough that the loading bay guy looked up. Loud enough that the barista's apron strings moved. "No. No. No. That's my answer. That's the whole answer. It's one word and it's the only word I've got and I'm saying it in the street so that everybody with a phone hears it — no."

Dani stepped back. She knew the voice. She'd heard it before, in a car, in a bar, in a parking lot eight months ago.

"Say it in a room," Adrian said. "Say it in a room tomorrow, when you've eaten, when you've had a night's sleep, when there aren't thirty people filming—"

"You want me to say it in a room?" I said. "Fine. Then I'll say it in a room. Tomorrow, at ten, in my apartment, with the chain on the door. And when I say no in that room, in front of witnesses, I want you to leave me alone for the rest of my life."

He looked at me.

"Ten o'clock," he said.

"Ten o'clock."

"Wear shoes."

"Get out of my street."

He got in the car.

Then he did the thing. He got back out, and the whole crowd made a sound like a wave, and he walked around to the front of the car and set something on the hood.

The folder. Manila. Soft at the corners.

And on top of it a folded piece of paper — hotel paper, torn at one edge, the same as the note on the pillow — with a number in black ink.

"There's no name on it," he said, loud enough for the crowd. "You'll have to guess."

"Take your folder—"

"Ten o'clock," he said. "And Ms. Brennan — you're going to say yes."

"I'm going to say no."

"You're going to say yes," he said, "and you're going to hate yourself for it, and that's fine, because I'll be there."

The crowd made that sound again. The barista put her hand over her mouth. The woman with the phone was breathing like she'd run somewhere.

Adrian Voss got in the car and shut the door. It shut like a vault — that thick, expensive, final shut — and the window did not come down.

Warren walked around the front of the car, and as he passed me he stopped, and he did not look at me, and he said, in a low voice, barely moving his mouth:

"Let her cool off. She'll be down by Tuesday."

"Warren," I said, "don't."

But Warren was already getting in the car.

It pulled away from the curb and went down Weller and around the corner and was gone.

I stood on the sidewalk with a manila folder on the hood of a car that wasn't mine and thirty people holding their phones up and a woman from the café looking at her livestream and saying, "Oh my God, we're at forty thousand," and behind me the café door — heavy, brass bar across the middle — swung shut with a bang that came back off the buildings and rattled every window on the block.

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Chapter 13 Ends