جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 6

I knew he was nervous before he sat down. Most people were nervous around me. I’d stopped finding it interesting years ago. Nervousness made people stupid and stupid people wasted my time, and the one thing I did not have patience for was the wasting of my time. I heard it in the way he walked. Slight hesitation at the door. Three seconds longer than necessary before his footsteps crossed the room. I noticed everything. People assumed that because I couldn’t see them, I couldn’t read them. That blindness had made me less. If anything it had made me more. Every shift of breath, every pause, every small change in someone’s voice when they were about to lie or collapse under pressure, I caught all of it. Noah Carter sat down. He did it without being asked twice. That was mildly interesting. “You applied for a position requiring full-time live-in availability,” I said. “You’re twenty-three, your last employer was a coffee shop in Queens, and your listed qualification is a literatur

I knew the sound of every person who had ever worked in this penthouse. Mrs. Hale walked like she was always running late, short quick steps, always slightly rushed even when there was no reason to rush. My previous assistant, Marcus, dragged his left foot slightly, a habit he was probably not even aware of. The one before him wore shoes that squeaked on the hardwood, which lasted exactly nine days before I told her to change them and she quit instead. I catalogued people by sound. It was practical. It was necessary. It was not, under any circumstances, something I did out of interest. Noah Carter had been in my home for four days. I knew his footsteps already. That was not unusual. What was unusual was that I had started to notice things beyond the footsteps. The specific way he set things down, careful, deliberate, never careless, like he understood that objects had places and those places mattered. The sound of him in the kitchen in the early morning, quiet and unhurried,

Three weeks. Noah Carter had been in my penthouse for three weeks and four days and he showed no signs of leaving. This was a problem. Not because he was bad at his job. He was, irritatingly, extremely good at it. He had learned my system faster than anyone before him. He anticipated things I hadn’t told him to anticipate. He moved through this space like he had mapped every inch of it. The problem was precisely that. The previous seven had been easy. Too eager, too nervous, too slow, too loud. They had all given me a reason within the first two weeks and I had used it and that had been that. Noah Carter had not given me a reason. I had waited. I had looked for one. The glass incident on day nine had come close but he’d absorbed it and kept going without drama. I didn’t know what to do with someone who kept going. At 6am I heard him in the kitchen. He brought the coffee at six twenty-eight. Right side of the desk. Two inches from the corner. “Good morning,” he said. He sai