Page 45 of Power Play

“Thursday’s fine,” I said. It was out before I’d finished deciding, which told me how automated the machinery still was.

He didn’t take it. “I can find somebody else for Saturday if you’d rather keep it.”

He looked prepared to stand in my doorway until I gave him a true answer.

“Thursday,” I said. “It’s fine.”

“Saturday.” He shifted the backpack. “That’s what I need from you. If moving Sedona isn’t fine, tell me.”

I stood in my own doorway at the end of the side hall and thought about six years of yes I’d meant as I guess so.

“Saturday,” I said.

I said it because he’d put the room right there in front of me, and I was going to walk into it.

“Saturday,” he said. “Thank you.”

He turned back into the house. The exchange had taken less time than I spent afterward with my hand on the frame.

That’s what I need from you. It was six words in that voice, with no apology in them and no room left over for me to be clever in. It ran through me low and warm and kept running, straight down, and I was wet standing in my own doorway before he’d finished it. My voice had stayed steady, pitched right where I wanted it. Keeping it steady was one of my talents, and I’d paid for it where it didn’t show.

He was out in the house by then getting his daughter moving, and I was still holding the frame with my thighs pressed together.

Say it again, I thought at the empty hallway, as if hallways took requests. Go on. Tell me to do one more thing.

Gerald didn’t come to the table for breakfast. He had a sign now, propped against the doorway where he was sitting it out, which was the FRENDS drawing with a new element in green marker that Iris identified as a picket.

“What’s a picket?” I said.

“Cole told me.” She considered. “He said you gotta have a picket or it’s just sitting down.”

Gerald had stood his ground over a cat longer than I’d stood mine on anything in my adult life. I’d lasted about four sentences in a doorway.

That night I was forty pages in and I’d quit pretending I might stop. It was forty pages of a man with big hands who said what he meant and then waited for the answer, in a document named q4_budget.docx, because I had a sense of humor and no one to share it with.

The hero had a quality of stillness. I’d written that on page six, and it had turned into the load-bearing wall of the book. He said I need something, can you do it, and then shut up and took what landed in front of him, including no. Nobody had done that to me before this year.

The hero had Eli’s hands. I knew that. I was writing anyway. Forty pages was a draft, and a draft wasn’t a decision. They were bad terms, and I’d signed them with a flourish.

We went to Sedona on Thursday. Maren drove. North of the city the sprawl ran out, and eventually red rock rose up out of the ground. We ate on a patio. I ordered what I wanted instead of the first item I could say out loud, and the waiter didn’t die of it.

“So Ryan came home with more information,” Maren said. “Cole bought a cat bed and put it in Eli’s stall. In the locker room.” She was enjoying herself enormously. “Ryan says Eli looked at it for a long time and then got dressed and left it there. I’ve known Ryan’s team a while. Eli Kovac has come to every charity night, stood by a wall, said maybe forty words, and left at the first legal moment. Two years of that. Nobody has ever gotten anything out of that man.”

“He’s private.”

“He’s a vault.” Maren looked at me. “Ryan says he’s been different since the start of September.”

“He got a nanny in August.”

“Uh huh,” Maren said.

Different how? I wanted to ask. I didn’t.

“You’re doing the thing,” I said.

“I’m having breakfast.” She picked up a piece of toast, looked at it, and set it back down. “Fine. I’m going to stop doing the thing. The part where I say his name and pull a face and let you leave. I’ve done it four times since you took the job. You’ve said good employer four times. The fourth came out faster than the third did, Delaney, and I heard it.”

At book club I’d put more feeling into a novel with a bad ending than it required. There’s a difference between a woman who knows a thing and won’t say it and a woman who has arranged her entire life so she never has to find out. Nobody had said one word after it. Maren had been sitting four feet away.