Her office intercom chirped, snapping her to the present. She didn’t answer it. Everyone, everything outside this office suddenly felt like a violation.
Anger stole through her, overcame her, because she knew above all else, that she would do exactly as he’d instructed.
Nothing would be allowed to come between the peace and happiness she and her husband and their family had found.
She would end this again, as she had ended it once before.
Six years earlier, in the same office, she had waited impatiently behind her desk, unable to get any work done before someone arrived, annoyed that these things took so long. It was suddenly as if, with her computer frozen, she had nothing to do. Though she knew this was untrue, that there was plenty on her desk that needed her attention, she couldn’t bring herself to it, her excuse the unresponsive screen in front of her and the resident terror that her data might be lost. She brooded, like a spoiled little girl, angry at herself for pouting instead of getting something done.
Finally, a knock on her door, and she looked up in time to see him enter. A kid in his mid-twenties. A little pale, but with sweet, intelligent eyes and a habit of pursing his lips between words as he spoke, as if everything he said held some secret irony for him. Dark hair and strong shoulders. She took him for a rock climber, or one of the army of twenty-somethings that headed into the surrounding forests on weekends in search of extreme outdoor experiences.
“I’m David. I.T.,” he said, referring to the bank’s Information Technologies department.
“Liz Boldt.” She held him in the same regard as she did a garage mechanic, or the guy who came to fix the refrigerator at home. “You want my chair?”
“I’d like to sit in it,” he said. “I don’t need to take it with me.”
A wise guy, at that. She stood behind and to his left, wanting to see what it was he did to her machine, wanting to step in and move him away if he restored the spreadsheet she’d been working on, because it contained figures such bank employees should not see.
He typed at a speed she thought reserved for only the highest-paid executive secretaries. It seemed at times his left hand typed while his right worked the mouse, navigating through a dozen screens so quickly that she failed to identify a single one.
“Control panel?” she asked.
“Very good.”
“You’re fast.”
“Typing, yes,” he said. “Not in everything.”
She thought him rude for the comment, but wasn’t about to say so, wasn’t about to piss off the one guy capable of getting her back to work.
“You were working a spreadsheet?”
“Yes.”
“You’d like the data back?”
“If possible. Please.”
“It’s all ones and zeros-anything’s possible.”
If only that were true, she thought. She and Lou had been nearly as frozen, as malfunctioning, as her computer.
David Hayes stopped what he was doing and looked back at her. Again, she wondered if she had spoken some of her thoughts aloud. Was there any other explanation for that inquisitive expression of his? Had he asked her something, and she’d missed it?
He returned to his work at the keyboard, but in that penetrating look of his she experienced both terror and excitement. Terror, because she didn’t know what she’d missed, excitement because from somewhere within her bubbled up a primitive urge born of flesh and nerve and the raw juices that pulsed through her. She dismissed this physical response as nothing more than an errant sensation, like being barefoot on a carpet and having a spark fly from fingertip to wall switch. A low-energy warmth flooded her entire body. She tried her best to ignore it.
He left a few minutes later, her data restored on the screen, but not before she’d made the mistake of calling out to him, “You’re my hero!” This offering of hers created the opportunity for him to connect with another of those looks. This time, as the door closed behind him, she felt herself shudder toe to head, her body warming as if after a shot of liquor, and she knew she’d crossed some forbidden line.
Liz skipped out of work early to make the 5 P.M. deadline. She drove through the nightmarish traffic that had come to own Seattle, the sun already sinking toward the green of the islands and the jagged, gray silhouette of the Olympics. She called home and left a message saying that if traffic allowed she would stop by the market, a cheat because she could have spoken to Lou by calling his mobile. Little tricks she had once played so well but that now unraveled her. Her work schedule had become so unpredictable with the approaching bank merger that Lou had taken on picking up the kids from after-school care. She still picked up Miles on Mondays, his music night, because it also happened to be Sarah’s ballet class and both locations fit perfectly into her later commute. But tonight there would be no time for the market.
She repeatedly questioned her coming here, as if practicing her own defense to Lou, knowing her keeping the date had nothing whatsoever to do with any feelings for David Hayes, long since over, but instead with something much more basic-protecting the family, preventing the past from contaminating the present. David was certainly capable of using their past as a weapon. So she came here out of fear, and she knew that was wrong. She had to preempt or co-opt any attempt on his part to compromise her, and she had to keep her guard up, for she knew David to be a notch smarter than most, and his wounded-hero charm disarming.
She pulled over, as directed, along a stretch of two-lane roadway bordered by a forest of cedar, pine, and fir. He’d chosen this time of day, no doubt, for the limited light of dusk’s gray wash. It was as if, for these few minutes, a fog had descended, enveloping her. The ground was spongy beneath the tires. She overheated, a result of nerves, and put down her window. A tangy pine scent, loamy and dark, filled the car, reminding her of their own family cabin on a lake. She stepped out of the car in a moment of anxiousness, hoping to cool off. Her shoes sank into the muddy grass, and she leaped back behind the wheel and pulled the door shut.
“Hey, Lizzy.” She jumped. “I wondered if you’d come.”
David Hayes stood just outside her window. His black Irish face was swollen and discolored with orange bruises, his green eyes sparkling as she remembered. By the look of the way the gray T-shirt held to him, jail time had been spent in the prison gym. He limped around the front of the van-blue jeans and a brown leather belt-and slipped through the passenger door, pulling down the visor and setting both the makeup mirror and the van’s rearview mirror to his liking. His eyes darted constantly between Liz, the windshield, and to both those mirrors, moving with the speed of a fly sensing the swatter.
A mathematician and programmer, David lived for calculation. She knew he already had a plan, that in his mind she was already a part of it. This she could not allow.
“It’s good of you to come.” He wore a single leather driving glove on his left hand. She made out a ring of medical adhesive tape on that same wrist.
“Was I offered a choice?” She stared a little too long at his bruises and cuts, and realized too late that he might take this as interest.
“I don’t remember forcing you.” He inspected her in a way that had once made her warm all over. Now it rippled fear in the form of gooseflesh. “I heard about you getting sick and all. That it was hard on you. But it isn’t true. You look incredible.”
“Don’t. You’re in trouble. I can see that. But I can’t help you, David.”
“You can, actually. If you want. If you don’t want… Then that’s another thing.”
Looking straight ahead, she reached for the ignition. “It was wrong of me to come here.”