Page 32 of Power Play

I looked down at the blank card. Then my chin came up and I met his eyes, and I didn’t look away for longer than an index card deserved.

“Okay,” I said.

I started copying the four lines onto it in the same handwriting, tongue caught between my teeth, with Iris supervising, her chin laid on the table. He stood at the counter with his coffee and didn’t say a word. He had morning skate at ten-thirty. I had the day, and I’d been awake since six anyway.

Maren picked the place, a coffee shop on Camelback with a patio nobody would be able to sit on until November.

Jenna Brooks came in with a laptop bag and set it on the floor where she could reach it with one foot. “Forty minutes,” she said, sitting.

Paige Lawson came in on the tail of that and took the fourth chair without waiting to be offered it. “Hi. Paige. I run the events. I’ve been meaning to get a look at you.”

“Delaney.”

“I know what your name is.”

Maren turned her cup so the handle faced her.

“So how’s it going?” she said.

“Great. She counts past ten now, and she’s decided bananas have a shape. Seven pieces. In a curve.”

“She does the child every time.” Maren didn’t take her eyes off me. “I have asked her about that man since August and I have heard about a stuffed dragon, a snack drawer, and the shape of a banana.”

“He’s my employer.”

“He’s six foot three,” Paige said.

“Those are compatible facts,” Maren said.

Paige had her elbows on the table by then and no apparent interest in working up to it. “Okay. The actual question, since nobody else here is going to ask it. Why aren’t you sleeping with him?”

I got a mouthful of coffee down the wrong way and the three of them sat there and watched me do it and not one of them handed me a napkin.

“I work for him.”

“That’s a job title,” Maren said. “Try again.”

“He has a kid.”

“Also a reason.”

“I’m thirty-six.”

Jenna sat up straight. “There it is.”

“I am thirty-six years old. I sleep one kitchen away from a twenty-six-year-old who carried his daughter, a bag of groceries, and a scooter through a doorway at the same time the other day. I make his breakfast. Every dollar in my checking account has his name on the other end of it. Take whichever one you want, they all land in the same place.”

“They don’t,” Maren said.

“They do from my chair.”

“You produced four of them in under six seconds.” Jenna drank. “I write statements for a living, Delaney. That was a prepared statement.”

“The thirty-six was the only one she said slow,” Paige said. She still hadn’t touched her drink. “The other three were sitting in the hallway waiting. That one she had to go get. I’m letting you have today.”

Maren walked me out. “He’s good to her,” I said. “He’s good to me. That’s it.”

Maren hummed through her nose with her eyebrows up and let me walk to my car.