Page 31 of Power Play

“There’s a bed in the office.”

“There is a bed under a rowing machine in the office, which is a different piece of information.”

I tipped my head back at the ceiling.

“I wrote that clause for a fire,” I said. “I wrote it thinking about somebody getting Iris out of a house at three in the morning. I didn’t think it through past that, and you have been sleeping on my couch for eight nights and folding the blanket up every morning so I wouldn’t find out.”

“I wasn’t hiding it.”

“You put the pillow in the closet.”

“I put the pillow away.”

“The blanket was folded in thirds when I walked in,” I said. “Same as the day you got here.”

She had no answer for that, and she kept her face aimed at the pillow.

“I’ll move the rowing machine,” I said.

“You don’t need to move the rowing machine.”

“It weighs sixty pounds and I’m home for a few days.” I picked my suitcase up off the floor. “You’re not sleeping on a couch in my house.”

“It is a very good couch.”

“I know what I paid for it.” I got to the hall and stopped again. “Thank you for the week.”

“It’s the job.”

“It was more than the job and we both know it,” I said, and went to bed.

I moved the machine before midnight. It didn’t take long, and then I stood in the office doorway looking at a made bed with nothing on top of it.

CHAPTER 8

Delaney

I was taking dictation from a dragon when Iris’s father decided the record needed archiving.

Iris had Gerald propped against the sugar bowl with a strip of orange ribbon knotted around his wrist. She’d tied it herself before anybody was up and the knot was the size of a walnut. She didn’t explain it and I didn’t ask. I had a grocery receipt turned face down and a pen and my bare feet up on the rung of the chair.

“Gerald says forty-four is the right number,” Iris said.

“Gerald’s always right about that,” Eli said.

“He says you’re going to score tonight.”

“Gerald’s reliable on peas. Less reliable on predictions.”

“He went four for four on the road trip,” I said, without lifting my head. “It’s in the record.”

“There’s a record.”

“There is now.” I pushed the receipt at him. It had four lines in my handwriting, each one dated, each one initialed with a G in Iris’s block capital, all of it in pen. Nobody wrote in pen unless they planned on keeping it.

He got an index card out of the drawer by the phone, from the stack he used for the pickup schedule. He reached across me and laid it by my elbow, and his arm passed my shoulder on the way.

“Receipts go,” he said. “That ink’s gone by March.”