What She Saw

We sit. The air is thick around us with anticipation which in this case, I could not identify of it was of something good or something bad. Either way, we are having this conversation.

He sits at the head of the dining table which feels much too official for this conversation. I am not even sure if official is the right word as I sit but I am sure he has a reason for choosing here.

It’s a twelve-man dining table and he sits at the head of the table at one end, and I, on the other end. The distance between us feels almost touchable but still somehow too close.

He is seated with a legal pad and a pen on the table in front of him, in total control of the atmosphere. Calm. Centered. Not giving any more than he desires to give. This is sort of how I imagine him at meetings. So stoic. Anna is nowhere to be found, having left fresh coffee and disappeared, which I suspect she does a whole lot of, giving who she works for.

I decide I am not speaking first. After what I have found, I deserve an explanation. So we both sit in silence. Both of us breathing, but outside that, no other sound was made. I wait for Marcus to speak.

Marcus breaks the silence. “I want you to start from the beginning. Every detail exactly. Tell me everything and don’t leave anything out, even details that seem unimportant."

So I tell him. I go through it more carefully than I did with the police, because he asks questions between every part. Precise, specific questions. Where were you standing relative to the wall. How many feet between you and the two men. Which direction was Holt's face turned when he fell. What did the shooter do with his free hand immediately after firing.

He writes in small, neat handwriting and his face does not change. He does not react to anything I describe. He does not wince when I get to the part about the sound. He does not look up when I describe the way Holt went down. He just writes, and asks, and writes again, and I start to understand that this is not indifference, but the discipline of someone who has heard difficult things before and learned to hold them at the right distance in order to use them.

"The shooter," he says. "Tell me again how he moved."

I think about it. "Like it was something he had crossed off a list. No hesitation. No pause after. He just … turned and walked."

Marcus looks up from the pad. Something moves in his eyes. "That's useful," he says quietly.

"A man is dead."

"I know."

"I just want to make sure we remember that while we sit here being clinical about it."

He sets his pen down. "Of course. Raymond Holt is his name. He has a daughter, Sophie. She’s nine years old. Her father was forty-four years old. Trust me, I remember.” He picks the pen back up. "What happened after the shot?"

I tell him the rest. I tell him about pressing into the wall. The footsteps. The car. The silence after.

And lastly, I tell him about the drive.

* * *

I almost do not mention it.

It is such a small detail. In the fear and the noise of that night, it barely registered. I had forgotten it completely until right now, sitting here in the controlled quiet of Marcus Vane's dining room.

"Wait." He says very quietly.

He has gone completely still, the pen stopped mid-word.

“Say that again.”

"Something fell when he went down," I say. "Small. Flat. Silver. It slid toward the drain on the left side of the wall."

"You saw it fall from his body."

"From his coat pocket, I think. When he …" I stop. I do not want to say slid down the wall again. "Yes."

His reaction is slow, measured. Like he is calculating.

He stands up and walks away from the table to the window. He faces the window, his hand on the glass, looking at the city below us. Or at least, that’s what it looks like from my point of view. I could swear his brain was just doing cartwheels at that point, trying to paint a picture and make sense of what I just said. He is quiet for a long time that the room starts to feel empty.

"The data drive," he says, mostly to himself. "We assumed the shooter recovered it. If it went down near that drain before he turned …"

"It might still be there."

He turns around. He looks at me now. But this time, his look is different. I can see it had taken a different turn. I was a problem to be managed before. A witness to protect. A loose end in someone else's story.

Right now, I am something else.

He starts to pace.

“I wish you led with this first.” he says.

I reply immediately. “I  didn’t know it was important. I barely remember it.”

"Everything you saw matters."

I look squarely at him.

Then keeping my voice calm as had been the case since we began this conversation, or meeting, if you prefer, I respond.

“You also should have not passed me a rulebook and kept me out of the room with my mother’s name in it.”

He looks at me straight and I could see his eyes weighing if I had a point. A long moment passes.

"Fair," he says finally.

One word. But his tone when when he says it, feels forced, maybe careful. That tells me he usually does not admit fault. Or even gets placed in a position where he needs to compromise. He comes back to the table, sits now, and I watch him. He does not attempt to explain or justify. Just sitting with it, which is somehow more disarming than any argument would be.

I pick up my coffee. It has gone lukewarm.

"When do we go for the drive?" I ask.

"Two days. Maybe three. I need to confirm who is watching the area and whether anyone has been back to the scene." He turns to a fresh page on his legal pad. "Until then, you stay here. You follow the house guidelines …”

"Except the east corridor."

He looks at me.

"Come on. You cannot be surprised I want to know what’s in that file.” He stars to speak. I cut him short. “But not today if that is not the right order. Soon though."

A pause. He weighs my statement.

I wait. Heart practically in my mouth.

"Soon," he says.

It is not a promise exactly. But it is not nothing either.

"We need to go back for it," I say.

"Not tonight. Not until I know exactly who is watching that alley and whether the shooter reported back that the drive was missing." He taps the pen once against the pad. "If they do not know it is still there, we have time. If they do know, someone may already be waiting."

"So we wait."

"We plan," he says. "There is a difference."

He writes something else on his legal pad. I watch him and as I do, I catch the way his body moves. His shoulders are firm and his jaw, that jaw again, is clenched. This is a different mode.  I thought he was calculating before, I was wrong. He’s calculating now. This one is active. He’s filing our entire conversation away into a neat pile. Organized. Locked behind something professional and controlled.

I think: he is very good at that.

I think: I wonder how long it took to perfect that.

* * *

After some time in silence, he looks at me. Just looks. Not calculating. Not measuring. I do not look away because I realize now that I  simply cannot. Not when his eyes settle on me like he’s communicating and I am just deciding the language.

"You have something," he says.

I blink. "What?"

"You have a bruise. Just below your cheekbone. You keep touching it without realizing."

I had not noticed I was doing that. I press two fingers against the spot and my face tightens. I had forgotten. With all that happened recently, in my fear and anxiety, the living in Marcus’s house, the rulebook, the locked door and file or files with my mother’s name, I had completely forgotten about the bruise.

"It's nothing."

"Let me see."

"It's fine …”

He reaches across the table before I finish the sentence.

His fingers are warm. That registers first. The warmth feels good on my skin and I want to smile just from thinking that. He lifts my face slowly, carefully with two fingers on my jaw, then angles it gently towards the window light. His touch, I can feel it more firmly now, feels good on my skin for sure. He is not tender in that way that flows from a loving heart, just … careful. Like he is about everything else. Precise. Deliberate.

Then his thumb moves.

Just slightly. Just below the bruise, brushing the curve of my cheekbone in a motion so small it could almost be nothing. But it is not nothing. It is soft in a way that nothing else about him has been, and it moves through me like a current through still water. Quiet and immediate and impossible to pretend away.

I stop breathing.

He is close. Close enough to me that for the first time, I notice details about his face. The small scar along the edge of his jaw. His eyes that are not quite black but a very deep, very rich brown. But it’s his breathing that does it for me. It’s slow and measured. Like everything else about him is. But like other little things I saw for the first time, I realize that that stillness he moves with, it’s not actually calm but it is something else. Something older. Something he has been holding in check for a long time.

He finally speaks. His deep voice is even slightly deeper which just makes it sound so hot. “It’s nothing to worry about. Not deep, but you’ll need ice.”

"It's not deep," he says. His voice is lower than it was thirty seconds ago. "You'll need ice."

"Okay." I reply. But can barely hear myself as my voice chooses that time to sound like a pained whimper.

He still has his hand on my face.  

He does not move at all for three full seconds. At all. Not a muscle. I still feel hus fingers against my jaw. His eyes move from the bruise to my lower lip, then top lip, then slowly upwards on my face like he is memorizing every inch of it so as to never forget. His eyes land on mine and I feel it. Hot and deep and dark. Like something hovering just above the surface about to burst.

Then he tears his hand back.

He goes to write something in his legal pad, his expression back in that controlled, unreadable expression, like a door that has just been locked from the inside.

I tear my eyes away from him to look at the mug still in my hand. I need something to steady me from the outside as my heart was doing some dance I was not even ready to pay attention to. I wrap both hands around my coffee mug. That should do it.

None of us speak.

The world feels like it is standing still inside for a moment, but the world outside is fast, moving and ever-changing. Business. Trade. Transport. Life just doing life things. Normal things. Small things. The whole ordinary world going on without any awareness of this room or this table or the two of us sitting on opposite sides of something that has no name yet.

I think about the locked room. I think about my mother's name on that folder. About all the things Marcus Vane knows that he has not told me yet, all the truths or at least, facts sitting behind those locked doors in the east corridor, and I know my mind should be consumed with those right now. But… they’re not.

Instead, what consumes my entire mind right now is his thumb grazing my jaw. So gentle. The way his breath felt so close to my skin. How warm. How completely at odds with every single other thing about him: the rules, the locked rooms, the legal pad, the way he speaks like every word has already been decided before it leaves his mouth.

That gentleness did not fit. It didn’t.  And I am clear on what I should pay attention to. The things that do not fit.

How it did not feel like nothing.

Something we are both pretending, very carefully, did not just happen.