“Yeah, I don’t really know the details,” Mara says. “She doesn’t talk to me about it much.”
Good girl. Vi told her to stop sharing and she listened. But Tommy doesn’t miss a beat.
“That must be hard,” he says. Sympathetic. Leaning in. “Being shut out like that. You came all this way to be with her and she’s keeping you at arm’s length.”
There it is. He’s not asking about Vi’s papers anymore. He’s asking about the distance between Vi and Mara, inviting her to vent. A different door to the same information.
This is where he’s going to fuck himself up.
Mara pauses. I can see her weighing it. She wants to talk about this. It’s been eating at her, the feeling of being kept outside Vi’s inner circle. Tommy is offering her the one thing she’s not getting from Vi right now. A willing ear.
“It’s fine,” she says.
She didn’t take the bait. Maybe she’s not such a liability.
Tommy nods and backs off. He’s smooth. There’s no pressure. He picks up his cup and takes a sip. Then: “Has she found anything that gives her some peace, at least? Sometimes knowing the truth, even if it’s hard, is better than not knowing.”
Persistent fucker.
“Not sure,” Mara says carefully. “I honestly don’t know any specifics. Not my business, really.”
Tommy raises his hands. “I hear that. No need to get involved in others’ problems.”
“Right?”
“Totally. I respect that.”
He’s losing ground. Mara’s not giving him what he came for. She’s being polite about it, but the door is closed. A lesser operator would push harder but Tommy does somethingsmarter. He drops it entirely, bringing up the hot-water situation, the work hub, something funny that happened in the supply room.
And then Mara does something I don’t expect.
“What about you?” she asks.
Tommy blinks. Barely. If I weren’t watching his face from twenty feet, I’d have missed it.
“What about me?” he says, easy and relaxed.
“You know everything about everyone here. You ask questions all the time. But you never talk about yourself. Where’re you from? What’d you do before the collapse? How’d you end up in the Rot?”
Three questions, direct and friendly. She’s not being suspicious, just curious about a friend she’s been having lunch with for weeks. She wants to know him the way he wants to know her.
But for Tommy, questions like this are land mines.
He recovers fast. Less than a second. The smile stays. The body language stays open. “Not much to tell, honestly. I was nobody before the collapse. Office work. Boring stuff. Came to the Rot because there was nowhere else to go. Same story as half the people here.”
“What kind of office work?”
“Administration. Filing. Numbers. Stuff that puts people to sleep at parties.” He laughs and Mara laughs with him.
Administration. Filing. Numbers. That’s not a lie, just a carefully edited version of the truth. A city development officer does administration, filing, and numbers. He just left out the part where the numbers were stolen public funds and the filing was done to hide them. Oh, and he signed lots of shit.
“You don’t have family?” Mara asks.
“Nope. Just me.” A flicker. Brief. Something crosses his face that’s either real pain or a very good performance of it. “Lost some people in the collapse. Most of us did.”
“I’m sorry,” Mara says.
“It was a long time ago.” He pats the table. The friendly gesture. The conversation-ender. “You’re sweet to ask, though. Most people in here don’t bother with the before stuff.”
