Chapter 93: The Door
Bree came on the twenty-fourth. That was not planned by anybody. I know that now. She came on her own and she did not tell them, and it is the only wholly independent thing I have ever known her to do.
It was 5:20 p.m. and Marisol had gone to the courthouse and the office was me, the scanner, and forty-one bail files.
The bell over the door went and I looked up and she was standing on the mat in a grey coat.
Five feet two. One hundred and fifty-eight centimeters.
She had my mother's bangle on her right wrist. She was wearing it under the coat sleeve and the sleeve had ridden up.
“I'm not staying,” she said.
“Then don't take your coat off.”
She came about four steps in. “Dean says you wouldn't sign.”
“That's right.”
“It's a lot of money.”
“It is.”
“You have nothing,” she said. “You live in a house with eight women. Somebody told me you walk to work.”
“I did. I take the bus again now.”
She stood there. She had not planned past the first three sentences. I could see that, and I had seen it in her since she was nine years old, and it was the first thing about her that was familiar in six years.
“Why won't you just take it?”
“Because of what's on page seven.”
“I don't know what's on page seven.”
“No,” I said. “I don't think you do.”
That landed somewhere. Her chin moved.
She said, “I want you to leave us alone.”
“I haven't been near you.”
“There was a car.”
“Not mine.”
“Then whose?”
And there it was, the first question she had ever asked me that she actually needed the answer to.
I did not answer it.
She turned to go.
I have thought about the next eleven seconds more than I have thought about any other eleven seconds of my life, including the ones in the corridor.
I stood up from the desk chair. I took four steps. I put my back against the door and my left hand flat on the wood beside my head, and I let my weight settle. I am five feet seven and I weigh one hundred and forty pounds, and all of it was against that door.
That is all I did. I did not touch her. I did not raise my hand. I did not say anything for the first three seconds.
She stopped about two feet from me with her hand already out for the handle.
“Move,” she said.
“In a minute.”
“Cass, move.”
“How tall are you, Bree.”
She blinked. “What?”
“How tall are you.”
“Five two. Why?”
“That's what I thought.”
She looked at the door, and then at my hand on the door, and then at my face, and something in the second and a half between the second look and the third look came apart.
I have known Bree Halloway since she was born. I have seen her lie to two teachers, three boyfriends, a police officer, and me. She is very good at it. She has a face that stays exactly where she puts it.
It did not stay.
Her mouth went first, and then her eyes, and then she said one word, and the word was not “what.”
The word was “who.”
“Who told you.”
“Nobody told me,” I said. “Nobody on this earth told me. A machine did.”
She put her hand on the doorframe beside my shoulder to hold herself up, and the bangle slid down her wrist and stopped against the bone, and that is the closest I have ever come to breaking every rule I have set myself.
I counted to four.
Then I took my hand off the door and stepped left, and the space was clear, and it had been eleven seconds.
She did not run. That is the part I did not expect.
She stood there with her hand on the frame and she said, in a completely different voice, a young voice, the voice from the back seat of my car when she was sixteen and I was teaching her to check her mirrors:
“Cass, I was going to tell you. In the hospital. I came to the door and Mum was already in there with you.”
And then she heard herself.
I watched her hear it.
She pulled the door open and the bell went and she was on the pavement and gone in under three seconds, and I stood in the empty office with forty-one bail files behind me and my hand still slightly out from my side.
I did not follow her.
I wrote it down instead. Time, 5:34 p.m. Duration, approximately eleven seconds. No contact. Door not locked at any point. The office has no lock on the inside handle and never has.
I wrote the last sentence twice, because it was going to matter, and because it was true.