Page 19 of Buried Accounts

“Sleep,” he said. “I mean it. Nothing in this building needs anything from you for the next eight hours except that you stop holding yourself up. I'll be right here. The work I'm doing is your work, the keeping-you-alive work, and I do it better when you're not watching me do it, so go be unconscious somewhere safe and let me earn the thing you haven't decided to give me yet.”

She looked at him a long moment, and he let himself be looked at, as he had at the door, because he understood she was taking one more reading, the last one before she let herself be unconscious in a stranger's bed, and he wanted her to find whatever she was looking for. Whatever it was, she found enough of it. She stood and picked up the canvas bag that had not left her body since she walked in, and she carried it with her toward the back room, and at the doorway she stopped.

“Thank you,” she said. “For checking. For Shira. Nobody ever —” She didn't finish it. She didn't have to; he'd read the unfinished half off her at the door an hour ago.

“Go to sleep, Claire.”

It was the first time he'd said her name, and he watched it land on her as her own name had landed when she said it to him in the gray — a name said out loud by a person who meant her no harm, the most ordinary thing in the world and the rarest thing in hers — and she took it into the back room with her along with the bag and the whole weight she still wouldn't set down, and closed the door, not all the way, an inch short, the way she did everything, and Victor turned back to the monitors and got to work being the least frightening thing a man could be, while eight feet away the most unverifiable person he had ever believed in finally, for the first time in five years, slept.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

She surfaced once in the early part of it, as she always surfaced, all at once and listening before her eyes opened, the body up and reading the room before the mind had agreed to the day.

There was a sound. She lay still and took it apart as she took everything apart, for the threat in it, and found none, because the sound was typing — the soft uneven patter of a man working a keyboard, pause and run, pause and run, the rhythm of someone reading a thing and then setting down what he thought of it. It came through the inch of open door she'd left herself, along with a wash of pale light from the monitors, and it was the most domestic sound in the world and she had no file for it, because no one had ever worked quietly in the next room while she slept. For five years the only sounds in her nights had been sounds to flee. This was a sound that meant a man was awake and between her and the door, doing the keeping-alive work he'd said he'd do, and her body — which she had trained that whole time and did not entirely command — made a decision her mind would never have signed off on. It went back to sleep. To the sound of him. Before she could stop it.

She would think about that later, when she had room to be frightened by it. That the thing five years of discipline could not do, which was let her go all the way under and stay there, a stranger's typing had done in a night, because some animal part of her had listened to the rhythm of Victor Shaw working and concluded, without consulting her, that it was safe to disappear.

When she woke the second time, it was to light and to the particular wrongness of having slept too long, and she lay rigid for a moment in the unfamiliar fact of it before she understood that nothing was wrong, that the wrongness was only the size of the sleep, eight hours or near it, a thing her body had not done in so long it had registered as alarm.

She picked her burner phone off the little table next to the bed and read the time. Eight hours. She lay in a bed that was not hers in a room with no window and did the math of it and could not make the math frightening, which was its own kind of frightening. She had slept eight hours in a building with one door she could see, beside a man she had known for a day, and she was not dead, and nothing had come up the stair, and the canvas bag was where she'd left it within reach of her hand with the drive still in it, and the world had simply let her sleep. She did not know what to do with a morning that asked nothing of her. She'd forgotten the shape of one.

She got up. She was dressed, had slept in her clothes because of course she had, and she went to the door she'd left an inch open and looked out through it before she went through it, and what she saw stopped her with one hand on the frame.

Victor was asleep on the couch nobody sat on. He'd given her the bed and kept his word about the chair and then, at some point in the dark hours, the chair had lost and the couch had won, and he lay on it too big for it, one arm flung up over his head and the other fallen off the edge, a blanket pulled crooked across his chest and not nearly covering him, his sock feet sticking out the bottom where the blanket gave up. His glasses were folded on the low table beside him. Without them his face was different, younger and more undefended, the careful watchfulness gone slack, and the silver-gray hair was pushed up on one side where the cushion had it, and his mouth had come open the smallest amount in the deep part of sleep.

Claire stood in the doorway and looked at him longer than reading him required, because she'd finished reading him in the first second — no threat, deeply under, a man who'd worked until his body quit on him — and she kept looking anyway, and somewhere in the looking the purpose of it changed under her without permission. She wasn't assessing him. She was looking at him. At the gray coming in at his temples and the line of the close beard and how sleep had taken twenty years and all the wariness off a face that wore both heavily awake, and she thought, with a clarity that startled her, that he was handsome. Not useful. Not safe-or-dangerous. Handsome, the plain ordinary thought of a woman looking at a sleeping man and finding him good to look at, and she hadn't had that thought about a single human being in five years, because not once in all that time had she looked at a face for any reason but the threat in it.

It frightened her more than the suits had. She made herself notice that. A woman could survive being afraid of men in suits; that fear had a use, it kept her sharp and moving. This other thing had no use at all. It was pure liability, the soft unguarded pleasure of looking at a man's face and wanting, absurdly, to fix the blanket that wasn't covering him, and she stood in the doorway and felt it rise and didn't entirely crush it, which was the second time in a day she hadn't entirely crushed a thing, and she was keeping count, and the count was going the wrong way, and she couldn't make herself mind.

On the low table by the glasses was a phone, face up, and on its dark screen, when the light caught it, the ghost of a photograph — a child, a girl, gap-toothed, holding up a fish off a dock somewhere, the picture worn to a screen-saver the way a thing got worn when a man looked at it more than he admitted and updated it never. Claire looked at it for as long as she let herself look at anything that wasn't hers, which wasn't long, and filed it as she filed everything: a daughter, young in the picture and surely not young now, a photo a careful man kept and didn't change, which meant a distance he hadn't closed and maybe couldn't, a loss with a face on it. He had read her exits without being told. She read his the same, off a worn photograph on a sleeping man's phone, and what she read was that Victor Shaw had someone he'd lost the slow way, the ordinary way that didn't leave a body, and that he carried it as she carried hers, quietly, and never set it down.

She didn't let herself feel what that did to her. She'd enough new feelings loose in the room already.

“You're awake.” His voice came rough with sleep and he was up before the sentence finished, the slack gone out of him between one breath and the next, the glasses on, the watchfulness back — but he'd seen her see him sleeping, she could tell, and he didn't pretend he hadn't, which she added to the column. “You slept.”

“Eight hours.”

“Good.” He said it simply, no congratulation in it, a man noting that a necessary thing had happened. He scrubbed a hand over his face and reached for the coffee that had gone cold on the desk and drank it anyway, and she watched him decide not to make a thing of the fact that she'd stood in the doorway watching him, and she was grateful for it in a way that was getting harder to keep cold. “I have to check in with my team this morning. I want to tell you that before I do it, not after, and I'm going to do it on speaker, with you right here, so you can hear every word of it, and know there's no version of my morning where I'm in a corner telling someone I found the woman they're looking for.”

“You don't have to do that.”

“I know I don't have to. That's why I'm doing it.” He picked up the phone — the daughter's face going dark under his thumb — and he dialed, and he moved to the table and set it between them, and watched her the way you watch a person you’re handing a thing to, to make sure they had it before you let go.

It rang once. “Tell me you slept,” said a voice she knew, the unhurried one, the one she'd never heard but somehow knew anyway, and her body braced before her mind caught up that this was the team, these were the people; the abstract danger of the room full of operatives made suddenly into a man's tired voice on a Tuesday.

“Some,” Victor said. “I'm on speaker. I've got someone with me.”

A pause that was the man on the other end recalibrating, and then, smoothly, with no surprise allowed into it, as if a courtesy: “Morning to whoever's with you. I'm Ronan. I won't say anything in front of you I wouldn't say to your face, which is mostly that Victor doesn't eat or sleep enough and someone should fix it.”

She didn't answer. She wasn't ready to put her voice into a phone for a stranger to keep. But the man — Ronan — didn't push for it, just moved on as though her silence were the most normal thing in the world, and that was its own small mercy, and she understood it had been done deliberately, a man making room for her not to speak.

“Give me where we are,” Victor said.

“The two suits are still working it, and they're getting loud about it.” Ronan’s voice flattened as she was learning these people’s voices flattened when the thing mattered. “Caleb watched one of them at the marina yesterday, and the man's frustrated, Victor. They've canvassed every desk in town twice and they've got nothing, because there's nothing to get — nobody's seen a single woman alone who pings for them, which is the one thing going right. But frustrated men get less careful and more aggressive. They started polite, asking. Caleb says the asking's got an edge on it now. They're leaning on people. Somebody who didn't want to talk to a polite stranger might decide to talk to an impolite one just to make him leave, and all it takes is one shopkeeper who half-remembers somebody.”

Claire sat still and listened to two men discuss the search for her as though she were weather, and found, to her surprise, that hearing it plainly was better than not hearing it, that the speaker between them was doing something to the fear, cutting it down to a size she could hold by letting her watch it instead of imagine it.

“How long do you make it?” Victor said.