Page 146 of Power Play

“I know.”

“You’ll leave the chat.”

“I always leave the chat.” He almost smiled. “He re-adds me. It’s our thing.” He tapped the glass of the trophy case beside us with two knuckles, once, the same tap he gave the boards at the end of a shift, and shifted Iris higher on his hip. “Go have your coffee. Over-order the pastries.”

“I always over-order the pastries.”

“I know you do,” he said, and that was the conversation, three and four words at a time, and it said more than every speech I’d made in his kitchen, which was what I’d been learning about this man since the day I knocked on his door and he answered before I’d finished.

The group chat, which I wasn’t in, lost its mind. I knew because Maren was in it and read it to me over cleanout-day coffee an hour later, in a booth at the place by the canal, with pastries I’d over-ordered on purpose so we could all feel bad about them as a team.

“Okay,” she said, phone up, delighted. “Kasperi, four seconds after it posts. Here he is.”

Kasperi: Eli said partner on camera

Kasperi: I have been asking him since August if he is dating the nanny and he answers the television

Cole: Finally. Finally!! I have been collecting evidence since October and he scoops me on cleanout day

Cole: I had a slideshow

Theo: Il a mis huit mois à dire un mot. On va lui donner ça.

Maren translated for me. Theo said it had taken Eli eight months to say one word, and they’d give him that.

Griffin: congrats to the dragon’s legal guardians

“And then,” Maren said, scrolling, trying not to laugh and failing, “Cole adds Eli, because Eli had left the chat again, and then—” She turned the phone around so I could see it.

Cole has added Delaney to the group.

Cole: And this time she stays. Motion carried. Nobody remove her. I will know.

Jenna, beside me, put her face in her hands. She came up out of them a second later. “Delaney,” she said. “You’re in the chat.”

“I’m in the chat,” I said, and I looked at the little screen with my name on it, in the thread where Theo dropped French that only half of them could read and Kasperi had no filter and Cole had run a campaign since October and re-added a man who left every single day, and I thought about August, about a woman who’d gotten here with a hundred and forty-one dollars and a professional face she’d been maintaining for most of her adult life, and I had to turn to the window at the canal for a second and let it pass.

“So,” Jenna said, gently, coming in through the side door, as Maren always did. “Teaching in the fall?”

“I have an offer.” I turned my cup around on the table. “I’ve had it since April. The district called yesterday for my answer. I haven’t said yes.” I hadn’t said no either. I’d asked for a few days in the voice I used on landlords, and hung up, and stood in the casita with the phone in my hand waiting to be happy about it, and I wasn’t. “And I write. In the mornings. Early.”

Maren went still, and it was a good stillness. “Write what?”

“A book.” I’d never said it out loud to anyone but Eli, a dragon, and a dark wall. “It’s a—” My hands opened. “It’s a long story about a woman who moves somewhere hot to start over and it does not go the way she planned, and I’m aware that’s not subtle, and I’m not doing anything with it. There’s no agent. There’s no plan. I’m not calling myself a writer, I’m a person who types at four in the morning, which is a different thing.”

“For now,” Jenna said.

“For now,” Maren agreed, and the two of them exchanged the look that I would spend the next several years pretending I hadn’t seen, over a great many more cups of coffee, which was its own story and not this one.

I told Eli that night, after Iris was down, across the kitchen island with the dishwasher running and the green mug already set out for the morning.

“The district called,” I said. “Yesterday. They want my answer. It starts in August.”

He was drying the big pan. He didn’t stop drying it, but his eyes came up to mine and stayed there. “Okay.”

“I haven’t answered them.”

“Okay.” He set the pan in the rack, hung the towel over the oven handle, and leaned on the counter across from me with the width of the island between us, which was what he did when he wanted me to have room. “What do you want?”