Page 11

The video goes on and her eyelids go down. Her mouth opens a little. In ten minutes she's asleep with the tablet still glowing against her chin. Roman, without a word, gets up and slides it out from under her hand and turns it off. Tucks the blanket up to her shoulder.

He does it like he's done it a hundred times. He hasn't done it once.

"I need to make a call," he says softly, and goes out.

My wrist has been bothering me all day. It does that when the weather turns. The left one, the weaver's wrist, the one that curls like a bird's foot. I've been rubbing it for hours under the table. I don't know if he's noticed.

When I go to my office for the charger there's something on my chair. A small fat rectangle of flannel the color of oatmeal. I pick it up. It's warm. Smells like lavender and wheat and the barn store in summer. I stand there in the half-dark with the heat spreading into my palm and look through the glass at the conference room, where he's back at the table with his sleeves up and his head bent over a screen. Very carefully not looking at me.

The tips of his ears are pink.

I wrap it around my wrist. Carry it back up the forty-two stairs and sit down beside him. The warmth goes into the bone like a kindness. "You went into the barn store."

"It was unlocked."

"It's never unlocked."

"I may have asked someone to unlock it."

"Who?"

"A woman named Ruth, on her way out." He still hasn't looked at me. "She was extremely forthcoming about where you keep the good ones."

"I'm going to be talked about for a month."

"I'd say it's already scheduled." Now he looks at me. His eyes in the low light are the color of the river under the bridge. "You were doing this." He rubs a thumb over the heel of his own hand, slowly. "All day. I couldn't stop watching."

I don't have a thing to say. I put my wrapped wrist against my chest. Hear myself ask, "Who taught you to notice things?"

"My father."

He says it like a door closing. I wait. The window hums with the cold. Below us the empty floor ticks and settles.

"Caldwell and Sons," he says. "Marietta, Ohio. Oak tables, rocking chairs, the kind of furniture you buy once. Sixty people. My father knew every one of them by name and by what they were afraid of. There was a bowl of butterscotch candy on his desk that never ran out." His mouth tilts. "I was the only son. The Sons was aspirational."

"What happened?"

"Orders dried up. The big chains were selling cheaper. A sensible man would have cut fifteen people in the first year and kept forty-five. My father couldn't. He kept everyone. Took a second mortgage on our house to make payroll for two years." His voice is level and it's costing him. "I came home from school the Christmas I was nineteen and found him at the kitchen table at two in the morning with a pencil, trying to find forty thousand dollars that didn't exist."

The thrum of the building has stopped. I can hear my own pulse in the wheat bag.

"The factory closed in March. Sixty people lost their jobs. A third lost their pensions. Three months later he was dead." He turns his hand over on the table and looks at the palm. "At the funeral they all came. Every one of them. They brought casseroles. They stood in my mother's living room and told me he was the best man they'd ever worked for. Do you know what that does to a nineteen-year-old?"

"Roman."

"I decided I would never be loved like that." He says it lightly, almost wry, and then the lightness gives. "I decided to be hated early and right. Cut fast, cut clean, save the rest. If I'd been the one running that factory, there'd be forty-five jobs in Marietta today. I believe that. I've never stopped believing it."

I can see him now. The nineteen-year-old at the kitchen table, hidden for seventeen years under a coat and a tie and a smile built to win rooms.

My throat's so tight I can barely get the words out.

"I'm sorry," I say. It's inadequate. I say it again. "I'm so sorry."

"I didn't tell you for that."

"Why, then?"

"Because I wanted you to know I'm not doing it for sport." He looks up. "And because you're the first person who's ever said no to me and made me want to stay in the room."