“Yeah. Noah. He wants to talk to you.”
My skips. “Oh.”
Andre pets my hair. “It’s okay. Noah’s … good. He just needs some information from you. But he understands that you’ll only say what you want to say.”
“Is he …” I almost say mafia, but he didn’t strike me that way, and I might say cop if it weren’t for the fact that he came to collect bodies. “What is he?”
“He’s, um, FBI. Former FBI.”
“A former FBI agent who disposes of bodies?”
“It’s … complicated.”
I want to push, but I can tell I need to stop, so I say, “Okay.”
And Andre notices that I’ve yielded. He relaxes. He presses his face against the side of my head, and I just fucking melt.
There’s a knock on the door. Andre grumbles and pulls away from me, getting up. He walks to the door, checking the peephole before he opens it.
“You were already in the building,” Andre says as the man I remember from last night walks in.
He looks around fifty. He’s wearing worn-out jeans and a flannel shirt. He’s handsome and fit, but there’s something haggard about him, and it’s not just the graying hair and beard.
“I would’ve left if you’d said no,” the man—Noah—says.
“Yeah,” Andre acknowledges.
Noah digs something from his pocket and hands it to Andre. Keys. “I replaced your door,” he says. “At the warehouse.”
“Oh. Fuck. Thank you.”
“If you want something else, I can put it in, or you can have someone else do it. I just didn’t want it open.”
“Yeah, I … fuck, I’d forgotten about it.”
“It’s fine for now,” Noah says.
“Yeah. Great. Thanks.”
There’s a lot of tension between them. They don’t know how to be around each other. And yet, this is the man Andre called for help—and he came. Noah called this morning too, clearly to check on Andre, and he fixed Andre’s broken door. And here he is now.But this time, it seems, he’s here to talk to me.
His head turns and he looks at me. I cringe slightly as I remember how he last saw me, naked in the loft of Andre’s warehouse apartment. With Andre, things feel natural, but seeing it from the outside makes me uncomfortable.
When Andre starts moving my way, so does Noah. He keeps a noticeable distance from Andre, never crowding or threatening. I noticed it last night too, and it’s very interesting because Noah is clearly confident and capable and even, I would say, dominant by nature. But he’s so careful with Andre. With me, too, I realize,as he sits in a chair at a good distance from me and keeps his eyes soft.
Andre sits beside me and says to me, “It would be helpful if you could answer some of Noah’s questions.”
“I’ll try.”
Noah doesn’t ask anything personal. It’s all about properties and people connected to my father. He brings up images on his phone, which he passes to Andre, who passes it to me, and asks for whatever details I can provide.
Though I have nothing from the last five years, I have more information than I realized. Noah fishes a small notepad from his back pocket when it gets to be too much for him to remember.
Everything relaxes as we get into the flow of question and answer. Andre is alert, but he clearly trusts Noah. He said that Noah was good. Noah’s vigilance eases as Andre shows that he’s not upset.
When I pass back Noah’s phone for the last time, he takes it from Andre and says, “Thank you, Elias, this is really helpful.”
“What are you going to do?” I ask.
