Chapter 3: Dani Knows Everything

But he didn't go straight home.

He walked first, down Atlantic Avenue, up towards the park, back, the long way, the long way which took twenty minutes, solved nothing, and which he'd been doing since he was seventeen, since the world had gotten too loud inside his head. The night was cool, the streets their usual late-night self, neither loud nor quiet, just the city always at some degree of hum, even at midnight, the bodegas lit up like little beacons, the buses rumbling by with their amber-tinted windows like something moving through deep water.

He'd left the bar with Alexander Reed's business card in his shirt pocket, his heart performing some complex calculation in his chest.

A proposal, the man had said. And then the kitchen had called last orders, Priya had needed him, he'd said he had to go, which was true, and Alexander Reed had simply said, Tomorrow, then. Read the card. Just like that. Like it was already agreed upon.

The card was matte black, heavy stock, the name embossed in silver: Alexander Reed, Reed Capital. A phone number. And nothing else.

He'd looked it up on the way to the subway, and spent the ride reading. There was a lot to read. Alexander Reed, thirty-four years old, self-made – that was the first adjective each article used, self-made, as if it was somehow crucial you grasp the framework was his alone. CEO of Reed Capital since he was twenty-nine years old. Son of Gerald Reed, who'd run his own company into the ground through a series of poor business decisions and worse moral ones, all of which were dutifully reported in a way that suggested it was something they'd all agreed was relevant information. Photos included – same one in each article – dark suit, grey eyes, the look of a man who knew the camera was there and was deliberately feeling nothing.

He'd stuck his phone in his pocket somewhere near Bergen Street and instead looked at his reflection in the dark window of the subway car.

A proposal, the man said. Quietly. Unhurried. As if he'd never in his life needed to raise his voice.

He let himself into the apartment at half past midnight, closed the door softly, the way you closed doors when you didn't want to wake someone, turned, and there was Dani, cross-legged on the kitchen floor in her nursing scrubs, surrounded by a circle of bank statements.

He stopped.

She looked up.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi," he said.

She waved, without irony, at the floor surrounding her.

"I found the shoebox," she said.

"Dani—"

‘I wasn't snooping. I was looking for good scissors.’ She held up a pair of scissors that were, objectively, the good scissors. ‘I found the shoebox. I started reading. I made tea.’ She pointed at a mug on the floor beside her, presumably for him. ‘Sit down.’

He sat down. On the floor, because that was clearly where they were doing this. He picked up the mug. It was the good tea, the kind she made when something required it, and the fact that she'd made it without him asking did something that he didn't look at directly.

She didn't say anything for a moment. Just let him drink his tea. She was good at that – at giving things room. It was why she was a good nurse and why she was his best friend and why, if he was being honest, he'd been dreading this conversation for three months.

"How long?"

"Since Dad died, basically."

She took this in. "The debt was transferred when you signed the estate paperwork."

"Yeah."

"And the lender is—"

"Not a bank."

She waited. Another beat. "How not a bank?"

"Private." He wrapped both hands around the mug. "Dad needed money fast and he didn't want to explain why to anyone he knew, so he went somewhere that didn't ask questions. It seemed like a good idea at the time, which I think is the origin story for most terrible ideas."

Dani picked up the final notice from the spread of papers. Read it. Set it down with the particular care of someone choosing not to make a face. "Forty-eight hours from when?"

"Yesterday morning. So." He worked out the math. "Thirty-six now, roughly."

She looked at him. She had a way of looking that had always made it more trouble than it was worth to lie to her. Dark eyes and completely, utterly unmoved by information she didn't want to hear. It was a rare quality in a person.

"Tell me the rest."

"There isn't really—"

"Elijah."

He told her about the bistro. The call in the alley. The man in the corner booth, who apparently had been sitting three tables away while Elijah's voice had done precisely what Reed had promised himself it wouldn't do. He produced the card from his shirt pocket and laid it on the floor between his feet. Dani picked it up and examined both sides.

"Reed Capital."

"He said he had a proposal."

"What kind of proposal?"

"He didn't say. He said tomorrow."

He looked at the card, lying in Dani's hand on the worn linoleum floor.

"He googled like a man who doesn't lose. I have no idea what that means for me."

Dani didn't say anything for a moment. She laid the card back on the floor. She looked at the bank statements scattered around them on the floor like the evidence of a small disaster, which is precisely what they were.

"You know what I'm not going to say."

"That it will be okay."

"Right. Because I don't know that." She looked him in the eye. "What I do know is that you have thirty-six hours and one option that hasn't been exhausted. So." She raised her mug. "Call him in the morning. Listen to what he has to say. And then come home and tell me everything."

"'Dani —'

"Every word, Elijah. I'm serious. I will find more bank statements."

He laughed. It wasn't as big a laugh as he would have laughed if he were in a better place and the floor wasn't covered in the evidence of just how thoroughly his life wasn't adding up. But it was genuine. Which was the thing about Dani: she was the only person who could get him to laugh even when the floor was covered in the mess of his life.

They sat there for a little while longer. The city went on outside. The low-level roar filtered in through the walls. She didn't say it would be all right. She didn't say his father would have known what to do. She didn't say things would work out. She just sat there. The good scissors in her hand. Elijah drinking his tea. The silence doing what it did.

He slept. Eventually. Not well. But enough.