Say It Where They Can Hear You

Chapter 16

The reporter got one question out before Luis had the door.

"Ms. Brennan—"

"Luis."

"Sir, you're on private property—"

"Ms. Brennan, the Post is running it tomorrow morning whether you talk to me or not, and right now the story is a woman who got paid to go to a dinner and a man who's paying her mother's doctors. That's the story. That's the story with no comment from you in it."

I came out from behind the lobby table.

"Miss Brennan," Luis said.

"It's fine."

"Miss Brennan—"

"It's fine, Luis." I stopped at the door. The woman with the camera had it up already. "You want a comment? Here's your comment. Nobody paid me to go to that dinner. I paid. I paid two thousand two hundred dollars out of my own account, which you can check, because my bank will be thrilled to hear from you. And the man who showed up wasn't the man I hired, so if you want to write about somebody getting cheated, write about that."

The reporter's pen had stopped.

"Then who is he?"

"Ask him."

"We can't. Nobody can. That's the whole thing, Ms. Brennan — there's no photo of Adrian Voss in eleven years that isn't a corporate headshot from before he was thirty."

The camera was up. The stoop. The two women from the fourth floor behind me in the doorway with their mouths open.

"Then I guess you've got nothing," I said. "Write your story with nothing in it."

I turned around and went back inside and Luis shut the door, and the door came to in its frame with a thud that shook the glass.

"That was good," the delivery kid said.

"Kid," I said, "go deliver your groceries."

He went.

And then I sat down on the bench by the mailboxes and put my head in my hands, and Mrs. Delgado came and sat down next to me without asking, and we sat there for a while.

"He knows about Weller," I said.

"Mm."

"Morgan knows about Weller, and somebody called his office and asked about the parking lot, and there's a reporter on my stoop asking if Morgan Hale knew about the marriage before I did." I looked up. "There isn't a marriage. There's a folder."

"There's a folder," Mrs. Delgado agreed.

"Mrs. Delgado, what do I do?"

Mrs. Delgado thought about it.

"You go to work," she said. "You go to work, and you eat something, and you stop calling men on speakerphone in a lobby, because it's not good for your reputation and it's not good for the marble."

The phone rang at eleven-forty.

I was at my desk. Not the lobby. My desk — because Mrs. Delgado was right, and because I had a job I hadn't been fired from yet, and because sitting in my apartment waiting for a knock was a way to go crazy.

Morgan Hale.

I put the phone down on the desk, face up, and looked at it. Three people from my floor were at the printer. The guy in the corner had his headphones on.

I picked it up.

"Morgan."

"Mia. Thank God." His voice was different now. Not the warm-down voice. Fast. Tight. "Are you alone?"

"No."

"Mia."

"I'm at my desk. There are three people at the printer and a guy with headphones. Whatever you want to say, say it."

A pause. Then a door shutting on his end.

"Somebody sent me a package," Morgan said. "This morning. A courier, no name, no return address. There's a note in it and there's a photograph, and the note says you should know what you were part of, and the photograph is a picture of the parking lot on Weller."

My hand went cold on the desk.

"From what night?"

"From that night. There's a timestamp on it. Eight months ago. There's a car in the corner of the frame and I know that car and I'm not going to say it over the phone."

"Morgan—"

"Mia, I need to see you."

The guy at the printer picked up his pages and walked off.

"No," I said.

"Mia."

"No, Morgan. Eight months ago I sat in a parking lot behind a restaurant on Weller and you told me something I didn't understand and then you left in your car, and I have spent eight months not knowing what that was, and now you want to meet me somewhere because somebody sent you a photograph?"

"Because somebody sent me a photograph," Morgan said. "Because it came this morning and there's a reporter on your stoop and there's a man paying your mother's doctors, and I think —" He stopped.

"You think what."

"I think I did something," Morgan said, "that I didn't know I was doing."

The printer hummed. Somebody's phone rang across the floor. The fluorescent light over my desk flickered once and stayed on.

"Say it clearly," I said.

"Not on the phone."

"Say it clearly."

"Then meet me," Morgan said. "Tonight. Eight o'clock. Same place."

"No."

"Mia—"

"I'm not going to a parking lot behind a restaurant at eight o'clock at night to meet a man who already left me in that parking lot once." My voice was going up. The guy with the headphones took them off. "You want to see me? You come to me. You come to my building, and you come to my lobby, and you stand in front of my doorman and my neighbors and you say what you came to say where they can hear it."

Silence.

"The lobby," Morgan said. "You want me to say it in a lobby."

"I want you to say it where there are witnesses."

"That's not — Mia, that's not how this works. This isn't a thing you say in a lobby, this is a thing I need to tell you in a room—"

"Then I don't want to hear it."

"Mia—"

"No," I said. "No. I've had a folder in my hallway and a man on my stoop and a video with forty thousand views. Every single thing that happened to me this weekend happened in a room I wasn't in and in front of people I didn't know. So you can come to my lobby, tonight, at eight, and say whatever it is in front of Luis and Mrs. Delgado and whoever else is standing there — or you can keep it. Those are the options. Take one."

The line was quiet for a long moment.

"You've changed," Morgan said.

"No," I said. "I've always been like this. You just always got to pick the room."

The printer hummed. The guy with the headphones was staring at me.

"Eight o'clock," Morgan said.

"Eight o'clock."

"Mia." He said it fast, before I could hang up. "One thing. Before tonight. Don't tell the man with the folder."

I sat back in my chair.

"Excuse me?"

"Don't tell him," Morgan said. "The photograph's in my hand and it's got a car in the corner of it and if he sees it before I get to say what I have to say, this goes somewhere I can't pull it back from. You want a room full of witnesses? Fine. But don't put him in it."

"Morgan, what's in the photograph?"

"Eight o'clock," he said. "And Mia — wear something you don't mind a room remembering."

The line went dead.

I sat at my desk with the phone in my hand and the fluorescent light flickering and the guy with the headphones staring at me with his mouth open.

"Ma'am," he said, "are you all right?"

"I'm fine."

"You don't look fine."

"I'm fine," I said, and stood up, and my chair went back and hit the desk behind me, and I picked up my bag and walked to the elevator, and the elevator came and I got in and I went down.

The lobby of my office building was full — a lunch crowd coming through the revolving doors, two guys with sandwiches, a woman with a stroller, a man in a gray suit with a phone in his hand.

The man in the gray suit from my stoop turned around when the elevator doors opened.

"Ms. Brennan—"

"Not here," I said, and pushed past him to the doors, and went out onto the sidewalk, and the revolving door came around behind me and banged shut, and a woman on the street turned to look.

He caught me at the corner.

"Ms. Brennan, I want to give you a chance to respond to one thing before we run it."

"Then say it."

"The Post has learned that Morgan Hale and Adrian Voss were in the same parking lot on Weller Street eight months ago." He held up his phone, screen out. "Is that why you hired a date for the Brennan dinner? Was the whole thing a set-up?"

The sidewalk was full of people. Two guys with sandwiches. A woman with a stroller. A man on his phone. A woman waiting for the light, and another woman behind her, and another.

I looked at the phone.

There was a photograph on it. Black and white, grainy, a parking lot at night. A car in the corner of the frame.

And standing beside the car, in the flash of a security camera, in a long dark coat with his hands at his sides:

Adrian Voss.

"There it is," the reporter said. "Ms. Brennan, is that the man you married?"

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Chapter 16 Ends