Chapter 130: The Eleven Days

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 130: The Eleven Days

Day two.

Vesper started with the easy part, which was Marek.

"At Halloway's. You were closest."

"Yeah."

"What did he say to the council man?"

Marek did not answer for long enough that she knew.

"I didn't catch it," he said.

"That's not what I asked. I asked what he said. You've answered a different question."

"Vesper—"

"I'm not going to tell him you told me."

"That's not the problem." Marek put the mug down. "The problem is I've got a thing in my head that isn't evidence and if I say it out loud it becomes a thing you've got too, and then it's two of us, and then it's a conversation, and I've watched what happens in that kitchen when something becomes a conversation."

"So it's bad."

"I don't know what it is," Marek said. "That's the whole reason I'm being careful."

Day four.

She did not go to Dana, which she thought about for a day and a half.

Dana would build a file. That was what Dana did, and it was the correct instinct, and once a file existed it would have to be either acted on or hidden, and Vesper was not ready to do either.

So instead she got the notebook out and did the thing she had been avoiding since October, which was reading her own handwriting from the last two years in order.

It took four hours.

It was worse than she expected — not the drawings, the dates. Eleven entries she had no memory of making. Three in a hand that was hers and slightly wrong, the way your signature goes wrong when you're tired.

She laid them out on the bed in date order and looked at them for a long time.

The three wrong-handed ones were April last year, September, and the first week of December. She could account for her whole life in all three of those months. There was no gap, no missing evening, nothing she had to reach for. She had simply written three pages at some point and had not been present for it, in a life that had otherwise been continuous.

And on a page from February of the year before — before Halvern, before the alley, before she had ever heard the name Cole Vale — a single line in the middle of a ring diagram:

he does it in the doorway.

She sat on the floor with her back against the bed for about half an hour after that.

Then she put the notebook away and went down and made toast for Dov, who was awake, because Dov was always awake now.

Day five.

"Can I ask you about Ray," she said to Halloway.

He was in the safe flat with a window that had a car park behind it, and he had asked three times whether he was putting anybody out and had been told no three times and had not believed it once.

"You can ask."

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from NovelPhoenix. Please report it.

"You said in ninety-six there was a man at your gate."

"I did say that." Halloway looked at his own hands. "And then I said it didn't matter and I was eighty-three and it had been a long day, and both of those were true and neither of them was the reason."

"Why was it the reason?"

"Because Ray asked me not to."

He told her anyway, which surprised them both.

"There was a man at the gate in April of ninety-six. I don't know who he was. Ray went down the path and I stayed in the doorway because Ray told me to stay in the doorway, and he talked to him for about a minute and the man went."

"And?"

"And Ray came back up the path and he stood in my kitchen and he said, 'Peter, make me a cup of tea and don't talk to me for two minutes.'" Halloway's hands were very still. "And I made him a cup of tea and I didn't talk to him, and for those two minutes there was a man in my kitchen that I had never met."

Vesper did not move.

"He came back," Halloway said. "You could see it arrive. He drank the tea and he apologised and he said 'that's not going to happen again while you're in the room,' and it didn't, and he came back in 2011 and it was just Ray, and we talked about the garden."

"Did you ever ask him?"

"Once. In 2011."

"What did he say?"

Halloway got the sentence out on the second attempt.

"He said, 'It's the part of me that's better at this,'" he said, "'and I'd rather it did the difficult things than you ever had to.'"

Day seven.

She told Cole she'd been to see Halloway and did not tell him what about.

She noticed herself doing it — the exact shape of the thing she had been counting him for — and she did it anyway, and sat with what that meant for most of an evening.

It was not the same, she decided, at about eleven o'clock.

It was not the same because she was going to tell him, and because the delay had a purpose, and because she needed to understand the thing before she handed it over.

Then she lay in the dark and worked out that those were, word for word, the three reasons Reeve had given in a kitchen a fortnight ago, and that everybody in that house had agreed they weren't good enough.

Day eight.

She almost told Dana twice and stopped both times, and the second time Dana noticed and said, "Whenever you're ready," and went back to her laptop, which was the worst possible response and which Vesper was fairly sure was deliberate.

Day nine.

Dov found her in the kitchen at two in the morning.

He did that now. He had eight months of nights to rebalance and had decided to do it by being awake for most of them, and nobody had the heart to say anything.

"You're doing the notebook."

"I'm doing the notebook."

"Can I see?"

She let him, which she would not have let anybody else do, because Dov Vossberg had spent eight months in a bed being looked at and had never once looked at anybody the same way.

He turned pages for a while.

"This one's not you," he said.

Her stomach dropped. "Which one?"

He pointed at a page from last April. Rings, dense, overlapping, and in the middle in small letters: not yet.

"That's my handwriting."

"It's your handwriting," Dov agreed. "It's not you."

"How can you possibly—"

"Because I've been hummed at by a room of people writing things down for eight months," he said, "and you learn to tell when a thing's being written at you instead of by somebody. That page is a message. The rest of them are a person thinking."

Day eleven.

She told Cole on the fire escape and she did it badly, on purpose, because she had decided somewhere around day six that doing it well would be a kind of management.

"Halloway says Ray had something in him that wasn't Ray."

Cole did not react.

That was the first thing. There was no flinch, no beat, nothing — and Vesper had been watching for it so carefully that its total absence told her more than any of the alternatives would have.

"Okay," he said.

"That's it?"

"What do you want me to say?"

"I want you to be surprised," Vesper said. "That's the whole thing. That's what I've been sitting on for eleven days. I've come out here to hand you a frightening fact about your father and you've received it like the weather."

Cole was quiet for a while.

"I'm not surprised," he said.

"No."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Sorry's a way of ending it." She pulled her sleeves down over her hands. "Are you going to tell me?"

"No."

It was so immediate and so completely without apology that she actually laughed — once, badly.

"Right," she said.

"I'm not saying no forever."

"You're saying no tonight, and I'm going to have to decide what to do with that, and you already know that I'll decide to stay, and that's the part I'd like you to feel bad about."

Cole turned to look at her.

"I do," he said.

She stayed.

They sat out there another twenty minutes and talked about Dov's sleeping and whether Aldric was allowed to cook, and at some point her shoulder came to rest against his arm the way it had for a year, and neither of them said anything else about it.

Somewhere around the twentieth minute she said, "For what it's worth, I held it for eleven days. I'm not on high ground here."

"I know."

"I worked out on day seven that I'd given myself Reeve's exact three reasons."

"Yeah," Cole said. "Everybody's got the same three."

Below them, in the kitchen window, the lamp was on.

It had been on for thirty-one days.

[End of Chapter 130]