COMMITTING TO THE LIE

"You want me to do what?"

Della said it flatly, sunglasses pushed up into hair that cost more than my rent, looking at me across the small café table like I'd asked her to rob a bank instead of sit on a couch.

"Sit in my apartment for two hours. Watch television. Say nothing. I'll work."

"And the moaning?"

"Speaker by the vent. Runs on a loop. All you have to do is laugh on your way out. Convincingly."

"You're paying me four thousand dollars to laugh in a hallway."

"I'm paying you to be seen leaving. The laughing's a bonus."

She studied me the way she studied everyone, like she was pricing my soul and finding it a little underweight. Della had been in exactly one real relationship in six years and ended it over a scheduling conflict. She didn't ask why men did the things they did. That was the entire reason I'd called her first. Hers was to act and get paid.

"This is about the woman downstairs."

"This is about logistics. I do not give a damn about anyone else."

"You've never once explained yourself to me, Adrian. Not in six years. You're explaining yourself now." She said, calling him by his real name.

"Take the money or don't."

“What if I do my thing and moan for real? Will it bother you? I might be naked too.”

“Anything you want is fine.”

“Good. Then we have a deal, Adrian.” She concluded and took the money.

“One more thing, it is Arthur. Not Adrian.” I added before she wiggled her butt away.

By the second week, I had four of them rotating through — Della, then Odalys, then a dancer named Coco who fell asleep on my couch every single time. But it was Freya and Della I kept coming back to, because Freya didn't perform. Della too never asked questions, she only sat with her dildo and vibrators until she was satisfied. Freya, on the other hand, let herself in, dropped her bag by the door, and read — actual paperbacks, one page at a time — like the money was for silence and nothing else. She never asked what was on the monitors. Never glanced twice at the cable running along the baseboard like a vein.

"You're going to give yourself an ulcer," she said one night, not looking up, while I traced a data packet through the fourth of six shell servers.

"I have deadlines, not ulcers."

"Same thing, different decade." A page turned. "Whoever she is, she's not going to believe you're a waste of space forever."

"This isn't about a woman."

"Sure." Another page. "Tell that to the door you keep staring at, as if awaiting a visitor, instead of your screen."

I didn't answer, because there wasn't a version of the answer that didn't make it worse. Twelve feet away, the sixth server resolved.

*Cole Dynamics.* Not a proof, but a shell company one hop removed from proof, carefully, and deliberately, exactly the kind of trail a man who'd mentored my father would know how to bury. But close enough that my hands weren't steady when Freya knocked her wine glass over on her way out and laughed, loud, exactly on cue.

I stood at the window after she left and watched the street instead of celebrating. Eleven p.m., and Ann Sterling came around the corner below, coat thrown over pajama pants, phone already in her ear, walking fast the way people walk when they're rehearsing an argument they didn't get to finish.

Once, around midnight, I caught her voice through the vent. It was not loud enough for words, just the shape of complaint, rising and falling like she was pacing while she did it. I turned my head toward the sound before I could stop myself.

"...every night! I don't even want to know what he's — " A pause, something clattering, maybe a mug set down harder than it needed to be. "...pay rent to hear a man's entire social calendar through a wall."

I turned back to the monitors and pretended the trace I was monitoring required my full attention, which it did, right up until Ann's voice cracked into something that sounded almost like a laugh at her own expense. 

“One more sound from him, and I will cut off his duck and feed it to the dogs. Silly joker and wasteful brat!” She hissed.

She thought I was a joke. Good. A joke was safe. A joke didn't get watched by Desmond Cole's people, didn't get a file opened on her, didn't end up a casualty of a war she didn't know she was standing next to. I told myself that was the only reason I kept listening.

I'd given her that argument. It was working exactly as designed — she thought I was exactly the kind of man worth despising, which meant nobody watching this building, Cole's people included, would waste a second thought on Room 4B. The lie was airtight.

It didn't feel airtight. It felt like something I was going to regret being good at. My phone buzzed on the counter. The burner — three people had that number, and only one used it after midnight.

The board's asking why you're "recovering privately." Cole's asking louder. You have a week, maybe less, before someone stops accepting the story. Careful.

I read it twice. Then a second message came through, half a second later, from the same number:

Also, Marcus keeps asking specifically about your building. Not the company. The building. Thought you'd want to know.

I set the phone down very carefully, like it had gotten heavier.

Marcus didn't know where I lived. Nobody in my company knew where I lived — that was the entire point of an alias, a burner, a building chosen specifically because it wasn't the kind of place anyone would think to look for me. Which meant either my cousin was guessing, or my cousin already knew, and the second option meant every precaution I'd built in the previous weeks had a hole in it I hadn't found yet.

Freya's wine glass was still dripping onto my floor. The waveform on my monitor pulsed once, twice, and held on the signature I'd chased for four months.

I had a name now. I had a week, maybe, before Cole realized I'd found it. And somewhere below me, one door and one flight of stairs away, was a woman who'd spent two weeks watching my apartment closely enough to notice the exact night the noise had started sounding annoying, and a cousin who'd just asked about my building by name.

I didn't know yet which one of them was going to bring the whole thing down first.