“That’s very”—she searched for a word, came upon “thoughtful” and gave the sentence up for lost. “But I am using it. Mailbox, shower, washing machine ...”
He waved this off. “Mail can be delivered to your office. The facilities at the athletic center are open to employees. And there’s a coin-operated laundry a block from campus.”
Holy heck, he was right. And then she wouldn’t be living hand-to-mouth. For the first time inyears.
“Why didn’t I think of that?” she murmured.
“Perhaps if you spent less time obsessing over magic and more time focusing on your own life …”
Ouch.
Then he demanded she repay him with a week off from questions. Completely predictable.
What he did the next evening wasn’t.
He showed up.
Well-timed, too, because she was right in the midst of trying to lug her sleeper sofa down the stairs.
“I’m impressed that you took my obviously excellent advice so quickly,” he said, grabbing the other end just as the sofa was about to slip from her grasp. “But what the feck are you doing, moving this all by yourself?”
“I can’t ask my students,” she said, wiping her sweat-slick palms on her jeans and getting a better grip. “And my family’s at the other end of the state, as you probably know.”
He didn’t ask about friends, fortunately. He just helped her carry the sofa to the corridor that constituted her office and now, she supposed, her home.
The sofa was small enough that it fit in the corridor lengthwise, so she arranged it a few feet beyond the computer in a mirror image of Bernie’s setup. There—no one would suspect. Not, of course, that anyone besides Bernie, Hartgrave and the cleaning staff ever came down here anyway.
Hartgrave glanced around. “What’s next?”
“That’s everything, thanks.”
“Everything?”
She shrugged. Sofa, dresser, table, extra bookcase—what else did someone with crippling debt really need?
He eyed the bookcase, not the one with her academic tomes but the one she’d brought in earlier that day, packed to overflowing with her childhood collection of fantasy adventures.
“This,” he said, shaking his head at the books, “does not in any way surprise me.”
She snorted.
He loitered by her dresser, looking at the framed photographs of her parents, of her with her parents, ofher parents’ farm. All she could see of him was his back, but his usual slouch seemed almost melancholy. She couldn’t put her finger on why, exactly. His hands deep in the pockets of his long black coat, perhaps, or his silence.
“My mother took those photos,” she said, filling the disquieting quiet. “That’s my favorite on the end—I keep telling her she ought to sell prints.”
The barn, five years past due for repainting, had been transfigured into beauty by sunset. Her parents’ fields stretched to the horizon, a riot of shadow and light—the soybeans actually glowed. That picture was the perfect comeback to anyone misinformed enough to call the Midwest monotonous.
“Iowa,” Hartgrave said with feeling, “is so very, very flat.”
If he hadn’t just helped her, she would have thrown him out.
. . . . .
He reappeared the next evening. Probably his way of subtly taunting her, since she was forbidden from asking questions for five more days.
“Oh, good,” she said, retaliating. “I was just about to page you.”
He made a noise of deep aggravation as he glanced at her frozen computer. “What have you done this time, Daggett?”
