Chapter 6
Enzo Baranti’s office was at the end of the corridor on the thirty-fourth floor, opposite the glass conference room.
The man opened the door for her, then stepped away, and the door closed very softly behind her.
Enzo was sitting behind his desk. He said nothing. He only pointed toward the chair across from him.
But Mave didn’t sit down.
She walked to the desk and did the thing she had arranged in her mind during the entire elevator ride. She removed her employee badge from her collar and placed it on the desktop. Then she took the keys to her locker from her pocket and set them beside it. Then she took out her notebook, placed it next to the other two things, and opened it to a blank page.
She removed the glove from her right hand so she could hold the pen more securely, and she began to write.
She wrote slowly, the letters slanting unevenly, the pen held in the hollow of her palm. When she was finished, she turned the notebook around and pushed it toward him.
I didn’t take the money, but you need a name. I have no one left to lose. Use mine.
Enzo lowered his eyes and read. He read it all, then read it again from the beginning.
He said nothing for so long that Mave began to hear the air conditioning running above the ceiling. She stood straight, her arms hanging at her sides, and she waited.
She had waited like this before. Many years earlier, she had stood in a hospital corridor and waited for a man in a suit to come out and tell her that she would have to answer for something she hadn’t done — and she had learned that when those moments came, the only thing to do was stand straight and never let them see you tremble.
Enzo closed the notebook and pushed it back toward her. He didn’t touch the badge, and he didn’t touch the keys.
Then he opened a desk drawer, took out a sheet of paper folded in half, opened it, smoothed it flat with the back of his hand, and pushed it across the desk in front of her.
Mave looked down.
On that white sheet were six handwritten lines in six different hands. And every line said the same thing — her first name, her last name. Beneath each line was a signature. On the final line, something had been crossed out and written again, and beneath it were two signatures overlapping each other.
She read from top to bottom. Then she read it again.
She reached out to touch the edge of the paper, but her twisted fingers couldn’t hold it, and the sheet slipped slightly, so she pulled her hand back.
For three years, she had passed through that room every Tuesday morning, and not one person had ever asked her name. For the six years before that, the name had only been spoken when someone needed a person to blame.
And now it was here, written six times, by the hands of the very people who had raised theirs that morning. On a sheet of paper she hadn’t been present to see any of them write.
She didn’t cry because she had been accused. She had prepared herself for that from the moment she stepped into the elevator. She cried because something had happened in that room after she left, and she hadn’t been there to hear it — and because for three days she had gone on living without knowing there was anyone in this world who had stood up for her.
Her knees gave way. She reached for the edge of the desk, slid downward, and sat on the carpet before the desk of the most powerful man in the building. Her shoulders shaking, her damaged voice unable to make a sound.
Enzo didn’t help her up. He didn’t call anyone into the room. He rose, walked around the desk, brought over a chair, and placed it beside her. Then he sat down in that chair and waited. He waited a very long time.
Only after she had calmed herself and wiped her face with her sleeve did he speak — and he didn’t mention the paper, or the meeting, or ask whether she was all right. He said something she couldn’t understand.
“Pier 4. Three in the morning. The night the rain came down in torrents.”
Mave looked up at him and she didn’t understand. Enzo didn’t explain right away. He sat on the chair beside her, his elbows resting on his knees, his eyes lowered to the carpet, and he began to tell her.
He told her about a night in the fall of the previous year — the night his younger brother hadn’t survived an accident at the family’s own harbor. He said he had remained at the hospital until well past midnight, that he had signed whatever papers they placed in front of him, that he had called the people who needed to be told, and that when there was nothing left for him to do, he drove away.
He didn’t go home. He didn’t know where he meant to go. And in the end, he stopped at Pier 4, near the old freight yard where he and his brother used to sneak off to fish on the afternoons when their father was busy.
It began to rain. He didn’t get back into the car. He sat on an iron cargo crate, without a coat and without anyone beside him, because he had ordered all of them to remain at the hospital — and he sat there beneath the rain, unable to think of anything at all.
He said he didn’t know how long he had been sitting there. Then he heard footsteps on the wet concrete.
A woman was crossing the yard, her hood pulled up, a bag held against her chest, walking toward the night bus stop. She stopped. She looked at him, then at the car parked a short distance away. And he knew she thought he was some container-truck driver whose vehicle had broken down in the middle of the night, because at that harbor, at that hour, there was no other reason for a man to be sitting outside in the rain.
She came closer, opened her bag, and took out a thermos. She unscrewed the lid, poured it full, and held it out to him.
He took it. She didn’t ask whether he was all right. She didn’t ask whether he needed help. She set the entire thermos beside him on the cargo crate, then stepped back a few paces, sat down on another crate, and remained there with him in silence beneath the rain.
He said he couldn’t remember how much he drank. He only remembered that at some point he began to cry, and the woman remained still. She didn’t turn away, and she didn’t look directly at him. She simply sat there until he stopped.
Then she stood. Before she left, she said only one sentence to him, in a voice so hoarse and rough that he had to lean closer to hear it. She said that the person he had just lost had been deeply blessed — because someone was willing to sit outside in the rain like this for them.
Then she walked away. She didn’t come back for the thermos.
Enzo said he had been searching for her ever since that night. He said he had almost nothing to go on, because it had been dark, it had been raining, and the hood had hidden most of her face. He remembered only two things. He remembered the voice — the kind of voice that, once heard, could never be mistaken for anyone else’s. And he remembered the two hands that had held the thermos lid out to him. Hands covered in scars, with several fingers on the right hand curled inward and unable to straighten — hands he had assumed belonged to someone who had spent many years working at the harbor.
May you like
He had people question every night shift at the docks, every cargo-handling contractor, even the drivers on the night bus route that passed through the area. No one knew her. Months went by, and little by little he came to believe he would never find her.
And he said it had never once occurred to him that she might be working inside his own building — because he had never looked at the face of the woman who poured his tea every Tuesday morning.
