The Reason

Chapter 12

I crossed the street in front of the whole café and knocked on the window twice.

The window came down four inches.

"Ms. Brennan," he said. "There's a woman behind you filming."

"I know."

"There's a woman behind you filming," he said again, "and you're standing in the road."

"I know that too." I put both hands on the door. The café door had swung open behind me and I could hear it — the shuffle of feet, the woman's voice going she's actually going over there, the barista saying ma'am, please — and I did not turn around. "Why me?"

"Get out of the road."

"Answer the question."

"Mia—"

"Why me?" I said it loud. Loud enough for the street. Loud enough for the woman in the beige coat on the corner under the streetlamp, though I didn't know she was there yet. "There's a hundred thousand women in this city who'd sign a page for thirty days with a man who owns a building. Half of them went to the right schools. Some of them have fathers with boats. Why me?"

The engine was running. The heat came out of the window and hit me in the face.

"Because you need a husband," Adrian Voss said, "and I need a wife for thirty days, and I don't have a hundred and twenty days to find one I can stand."

Behind me, the woman from the café said, "Oh my God," right into her phone.

"That's not an answer," I said.

"That's the answer that fits on a page."

"That's the answer a lawyer gives." I leaned down. "You want to know what I think? I think you were in my building on Tuesday. I think you had somebody reading my filings. I think you know my mother's doctor and my drawer and my landlord's name, and I think you stood in that lobby and let me call you Daniel for four hours because you already knew what I was going to say before I opened my mouth. That's not a man looking for a wife. That's a man running a play."

"I've run plays," he said. "This isn't one."

"What's the difference?"

"The difference is I'm not going to win."

The barista had come out onto the sidewalk. So had the guy with the coffee. There were five of them now, standing in a little line by the café window with their phones up, and the street was a dead end of parked cars and streetlamps and one black car with the window down four inches.

"You don't get to say a thing like that," I said, "in a car, on a Sunday, with witnesses."

"Why not?"

"Because it's not fair." My voice cracked. I hated it. "You don't get to say I'm not going to win and then drive away. That's not how it works."

"It's how it works tonight." He looked past me at the line of phones. "Ms. Brennan, there's a video of you screaming in a hotel lobby that has twenty-two thousand views. Every minute you stand in this street adds to it."

"Then answer the rest."

"There's no rest."

"There's a blonde."

The car went quiet. Even the engine sounded quiet.

The woman from the café said, "Girl, what," to her phone.

"Harbor club," I said. "Nineteen years ago—"

"Twenty nineteen."

"Twenty nineteen. A dinner. You stood behind a chair all night like a man guarding a door." I had both hands flat on the glass now. "The comments say she's real. That she came to your office and security walked her out. That you never married her. That in eleven years nobody's ever seen you with a woman."

Adrian Voss didn't move. The driver didn't move either, but his knuckles had gone white on the wheel, which told me more than either of their faces.

"Was she the reason?" I said. "Is that what this is? Is this — thirty days and a wife so your board stops asking, and a blonde in the background for eleven years—"

"Ms. Brennan." The driver said it, not him. The driver turned his head and said it like a man putting his hand on a wall. "Ma'am, please."

"Warren," Adrian said.

The driver shut his mouth.

The woman from the café said, "His name's Warren," to her phone, delighted.

"Ask one more time," Adrian said, "and I'll answer it. Right here. In the street. In front of the phones."

"Then I'm asking."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm asking."

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he turned his head toward the café line and raised his voice exactly enough.

"Because I've got a board meeting Thursday," he said, "and a chair who wants to know why I've never brought a woman to a table, and a family with opinions, and a company that trades on me being a certain kind of man. Because a man with no wife is a man who can be moved. Because I need thirty days of somebody standing next to me who isn't on my payroll and isn't on my mother's payroll and isn't afraid of me."

The phones were up. The barista's mouth was open. The street was dead quiet.

"And because," he said, "you're the only person in eleven years who ever grabbed my sleeve and told me a name that wasn't mine and made me want to be him for four hours."

I stood in the road with my hands flat on the window.

"That's not fair," I said.

"No," he said. "It isn't."

"Was she the reason?"

"Get in the car."

"Was she the reason?"

"Warren," Adrian said. "Now."

Warren put the car in gear.

"Don't you drive away from me—"

"Let her cool off," Adrian said, loud enough for the street, flat as a table. "She'll be down by Tuesday."

The window went up. The car pulled off the curb, and the wheels turned in the cold, and it went down Weller and turned right and was gone, and the back door — the one I hadn't seen come open — swung and shut somewhere in the dark and the sound of it came back off the buildings like a slap.

I stood in the road.

"Miss?" The barista had come out with her apron on and her hand up. "Miss, are you all right?"

"I'm fine."

"Miss—"

"I'm fine."

The woman from the café had come down onto the sidewalk with her phone still up, and she was smiling in a way that made my hands go cold, and she turned her screen around and held it out to me, close, so close I had to look.

"Look," she said.

"I don't want to look—"

"No. Look." She pushed the phone into my hand. "I wasn't filming the car. I was filming behind you. That's live. That's live, I'm streaming this."

I looked.

The video was from her angle — from the café window, from behind my shoulder — and it showed the street and the black car and me at the window, and behind me, past the parked cars, past the streetlamp, standing on the corner under the light with a phone at her ear and a beige coat over her arm like she'd been carrying it all night:

A woman. Blonde. Face like a movie star.

Not moving. Just standing there. Watching the car go.

"That's her," the woman from the café said, gleeful, urgent, straight into the microphone. "That's her, that's the blonde, she's here, she's been standing there the whole time—"

"Miss," the barista said, "miss, are you okay, you've gone white—"

"Excuse me," I said, and I handed the phone back and went up the sidewalk at a walk, and then at more than a walk.

"Mia," Dani said, running behind me. "Mia. Mia —"

The corner was empty by the time I got there. The streetlamp hummed. There was a coffee cup on the ground, still warm, and nothing else.

And it was not an empty street.

Parked in the loading zone with the engine off and the lights on and the driver's door hanging open, there was a silver car — and in the passenger seat, turned around to look at me, phone still up at her ear, was the blonde.

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Chapter 12 Ends