Chapter 32: ch.32 [Why Now…]

The couch was too short for her.

Astrid sat at one end of it with her boots off and her knees drawn up, and the plush sat on the cushion between them like a chaperone.

Seth sat at the other end with the phone face-down on his thigh.

It had stopped buzzing an hour ago.

It had not stopped being loud.

"Why now?"

He asked it of the ceiling.

The ceiling did not have a position.

"Eleven years." He turned the phone over. Turned it back.

"Eleven years of notes. Rent paid. Rice in the cooker. Do not wait up. And she signs them. Like I’d think they were from someone else."

He wound the tail of the beige scarf around two fingers, and unwound it.

"She never asked me anything. Not how was school. Not are you eating. Not please."

He stopped.

His mouth stayed open a second on the word.

"Except once."

Astrid kept very still.

"When I got the contract. She called. First time in a year. Please, Seth. If you can spare something." He laughed, quiet and wrong.

"I sent two thousand. Three dots. Then nothing."

The moon had slid off the rug.

Astrid was a woman who said true things at the speed she thought them, and it had never once occurred to her that this was a flaw.

"It is strange," she said. "Eleven years of silence, then five messages within days of your face appearing on a broadcast. Something may have happened. Or she has seen what you now earn, and she sees you as a money bag."

The room went still.

She heard it a half second after it left her.

The sentence was accurate as a position.

It was also a knife.

Seth did not flinch.

He nodded, once, the way a person nods at a diagnosis they gave themselves a long time ago, and said nothing at all.

A splinter, she thought. Old. Deep.

And I have pressed on it with my thumb.

"That was imprecise."

"No. It’s fair."

"It is one possibility. I have no data."

"Yeah."

"I would like it noted," said Astrid, "that I am not a reliable source on mothers."

He turned his head.

"I have one," she said. "It is the same evidence."

Something loosened at the corner of his mouth.

It was small.

It was the first one in an hour.

"Noted."

Neither of them mentioned that it was past two.

Neither of them suggested a bed.

Somewhere around three, her head tipped against the armrest.

His slid sideways until it found the other one.

Two feet of couch between them.

A plush in the middle with its glasses on crooked.

A gray scarf and a beige one, still knotted at their throats, because nobody had thought to take them off.

The moon came through the sheer curtains in long pale bars and lay across both of them equally.

They slept.

Separately.

Next to each other.

? ? ?

Morning arrived without being invited.

Seth woke with a crick in his neck and a small round face pressed into his elbow.

For one second, he was nobody’s problem.

Then the day loaded.

The phone had fallen on the rug. He had no memory of letting go of it.

Five messages. Same five.

He picked it up in both hands.

"You are awake."

Astrid stood in the kitchen doorway with her hair in a white catastrophe, a cup in each hand, and her own phone clamped under one arm. She was glaring at it.

"Four hours and fifty-one minutes."

"Sorry?"

"I slept four hours and fifty-one minutes. In moonlight." She said it with the wounded dignity of a woman betrayed by her own body.

"It is a personal record. I checked it three times. It does not appear to be an error."

"That’s. Good?"

"It is unprecedented."

She crossed the room and handed him a cup.

Tea, made the way she made it, which was precisely and badly.

He drank.

It was sweet enough to stand a spoon in.

"I put in the sugar. You looked as though you needed it."

"Thanks."

"Have you replied?"

"No."

"Do you intend to?"

"I don’t know what to say."

"Then we will draft."

She sat.

Not at the far end.

Beside him, close enough that the couch gave a small, betraying dip, and her knee ended up an inch from his.

She set her cup on the floor.

She took a pen from the walnut table.

She turned the back of a utility envelope toward him, because it was the nearest paper, and the most Astrid object in the world.

"Write it here first. A phone is too fast. It sends what you feel before you have finished feeling it."

He opened the thread.

His thumbs hovered.

He typed what he wanted to know.

Why now?

Looked at it.

"Delete."

"It’s the whole question."

"It is an accusation. Ask it after she has had a chance to answer something easier."

He deleted it.

Where were you?

Deleted before she could say a word.

Eleven years.

That one he held a little longer.

Then he deleted it too.

Hi Mom.

He frowned.

Too cheerful.

A boy in a commercial.

Gone.

Mom?

"Better."

"It feels like knocking on a wall."

"Walls respond to knocking. Eventually."

He put it back.

Mom?

And under it, slower:

I got your messages.

He looked at that for a while.

I was surprised.

"True."

I didn’t know you wanted to see me.

"Also true."

"It sounds angry."

"Are you?"

He thought about it honestly.

"A bit. I think. I don’t know where I keep it."

"Then leave it in. A true thing will survive being read."

He nodded.

His thumb stopped over the last line, where a question should go.

"What do I ask her?"

"What do you want to know?"

"Everything."

"Choose the first thing."

A hundred things came up at once.

An empty chair.

A cold fridge.

Eleven years of rice.

He pushed them all down, and one came up through them, small and plain.

Did something happen?

He typed it.

He stared at it.

Is something wrong?

Astrid read it over his shoulder.

He felt her go quiet, the particular quiet she had when a move was correct.

"That is the right question. It does not blame. It gives her a door."

"What if she says no?"

"Then you will know she is able to say it."

Her voice was flat and careful.

Her fingers had closed on the edge of the envelope hard enough to crease it.

He pressed send.

The little word turned blue.

Delivered.

They both stared at it.

Neither of them breathed.

Under the couch, Astrid’s phone vibrated against the floorboards in a long insistent run.

A name she had decided she would not be reading until noon.

Read.

Three dots.

They appeared.

Seth’s entire body went still.

They vanished.

"No..." he whispered.

They appeared again.

They stayed.

The seconds were very long.

Then the reply came in a single line, in the same cold gray type he had known his whole life.

Come to my apartment. I just want to see you. – M.

An address followed.

Seth read it.

He read it again.

He read the word just.

"That’s it. That’s all she says."

"It is a full sentence."

"It’s a note."

"It also contains the words I want."

He turned.

She was not looking at the phone.

She was looking at him, steady and wide-eyed, with the care she gave to things that could break.

"I will go with you."

"You can’t. Your schedule—"

"Ingrid has moved nine items."

"Nine?"

"I told her it was a medical matter." A beat. "She did not ask whose."

"Astrid—"

"I will not go in. I will wait. It is yours." She stopped. Started again, quieter. "If it goes badly, I would prefer that you not be alone in the hall."

He looked down at the envelope.

At Mom? written four times, crossed out three.

He put the pen down.

"Okay..."

? ? ?

He remembered a walk-up.

Stairs that smelled of cabbage and wet coats.

A door the color of weak tea.

A fridge humming to itself in an empty kitchen, wearing a note.

This was glass.

Glass doors, and a doorman who looked at Astrid’s gray scarf and Seth’s beige one, and decided with real professionalism that he had seen neither.

Brushed brass. Pale hall carpet.

A potted plant in the lobby that was alive.

Seventh floor.

They rode up in silence.

Seth watched the numbers climb.

Elegant, he thought. But modest.

The home of a person who had worked every hour there was and spent none of them on herself.

He did the arithmetic without wanting to.

Every note on the fridge.

Every night he had talked to an empty chair.

He had paid for it with company.

She had paid for this with absence.

The same coin. He had just never seen the other side.

The thought did not warm him.

It did not chill him either.

It sat there, one fact with two faces, and let him look at both.

The corridor was long and carpeted, with a window at the far end and a bench against the wall beneath a framed print of a bridge.

"I will sit."

"You don’t have to—"

"I wish to."

She sat.

She crossed her legs and laid the black coat over her lap, and in the light of the hallway window she looked like a woman waiting for a train she had no intention of boarding.

Seth walked to 704.

White paint.

A brass handle.

No mat.

He lifted his hand.

Behind him, so quietly he almost missed it:

"Seth."

He turned.

"I will be here."

She did not say I believe in you.

She had spent that one at a claw machine.

She did not need another.

He turned back.

He knocked.

Twice.

Footsteps.

Then nothing, for long enough that he understood there was a person on the other side of the wood with her hand already on the lock, doing exactly what he was doing.

The door opened.

? ? ?

Astrid heard it.

She did not look up.

She heard a woman’s voice, low and level, a single word, flat as slate.

Seth.

She heard his answer, so small it barely carried.

Then the door closed.

The hall was suddenly very large and very quiet.

A clock ticked somewhere.

A radiator sighed.

The bridge in the frame above her went on being a bridge.

She took out her phone.

Eleven missed calls.

Ingrid, nine times.

She put it on silent without reading one.

She opened her photos.

The most recent was from last night.

A red sweater in a dark window.

A boy behind her in a blue jacket, grinning up at the moon.

Two scarves, one weave.

A plush with crooked glasses leaning against a can of something far too sweet.

She had not taken it.

He had, when she was not looking, and sent it at six that morning with no caption.

She looked at it for a while.

She said nothing about it.

To the hall.

To herself.

Her thumb moved to the next.

A claw machine, blurred in pink light. A bag of fish.

The next.

A floor. A galaxy carpet.

Her own white hair spread across it, her eyes shut, her mouth open in a laugh she could not remember making.

She went back.

She went forward.

She was a woman who had been photographed ten thousand times and had never once kept a picture.

She closed the album.

She opened the chess app.

The biggest in the world. Four hundred million accounts.

ASTRID_L

Bullet: 3421

She had stopped looking at the number years ago.

It was not a rating anymore.

It was a punchline.

The second-ranked bullet player on the platform was Arjun Voss. The Walking Fortress.

The only living man to have beaten her across a board.

He sat at 3021, four hundred points down, and on a site this size four hundred points was not a gap.

It was a geography.

Nobody else was within a thousand.

The rating system had long since stopped knowing what to do with her.

Against grandmasters, it had given up entirely.

A win paid her one point.

A loss or a draw cost her nothing, because the site had decided, in some quiet meeting, that nobody should be punished for sitting across from a title.

Everyone else was a tax.

A win paid one point.

A draw cost her.

A loss cost sixteen.

She paid it cheerfully, because the alternative was to stop playing, and she had never found out what else her hands were for.

She pressed play.

One minute. No increment.

The pool, at that hour, offered a nine-hundred.

LOL, he wrote, the instant the pairing loaded.

My friends will NOT believe this.

She moved.

e4.

He moved.

She played the first dozen moves without reading them.

Her eyes were on door 704.

Nothing came through it.

No voice. No footsteps.

Only the tick of the clock, and once, very faintly, the scrape of a chair across a floor.

Her thumb stopped.

A chair, thought Astrid.

One.

Then, after a pause that went on a long time, a second scrape.

She let out a breath she had not known she was holding.

Two.

She did not know how they had been set.

Across, or beside.

She was the strongest player alive, a woman who solved a thousand positions before breakfast, and she sat in a hallway with her coat over her knees and no way, by any means, to calculate what was happening behind that door.

Is he alright?

She turned the question over.

It had no variations.

There was no line she could run.

There was only the thing underneath it, plain and unfamiliar, with no notation at all.

She hoped.

It was a skill she had not practiced since she was nine.

She did it very hard.

On the screen, a small red flag fell.

You lost on time.

3421 → 3405.

She looked at it.

Sixteen points.

A nine-hundred was not a grandmaster. The site did not forgive that.

She would need sixteen wins to buy it back, and she had not moved in forty-one seconds.

A message arrived from the nine-hundred.

bro are you ok

Then, a heartbeat later, a notification in a color she knew.

ARJUN_VOSS has sent you a message.

Did the Queen just flag against a 900. Are you unwell. Blink twice.

A second one, straight behind it:

Do not worry. I will not tell anyone. I will only tell everyone.

Astrid looked at the screen.

She looked at the door.

Behind it, a woman’s voice rose by a single degree.

Not a shout.

A note, climbing, and then stopped.

Her thumb hovered above Rematch.

She did not press it.

She turned the phone face-down on her knee, folded both hands over it, and sat with her back very straight on a bench in a hallway under a painted bridge.

She was a woman who had never once asked the universe for anything.

She had a prayer, she discovered.

It was not in any language she had studied.

It had one name in it, repeated.