🌁 chapter eight: the woman in the window [let me be your ghost]
“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” -William Shakespeare, Hamlet
“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
-William Shakespeare, Hamlet
previous: about | chapter one | chapter two | chapter three | chapter four | chapter five | chapter six | chapter seven
I woke at dawn out of habit and spite, and that was how I saw her.
The fog had pulled back overnight, leaving the main house sharp-edged in the gray-gold light, and through my panoramic windows I could see straight down the hill into the kitchen’s wall of glass. A woman stood at the counter. Blonde, barefoot, hair loose and sleep-wrecked, wearing a man’s white dress shirt that hit her mid-thigh and nothing else that I could identify from four hundred yards.
She was drinking coffee out of a hand-thrown blue mug the size of a soup bowl, the kind potters sell at coastal art fairs. Comfortable. Easy in her skin. Standing in Ezekiel Crane’s kitchen at six in the morning like she lived there.
Like she’d come in late last night.
My stomach did something ugly and fast, like a fish flipped onto a dock.
The telescope stood in the corner of my room where I’d left it, pointed at the stars, all brass and patience. It would take three seconds to swing it down. Three seconds to know whose shirt that was, whose smile she was wearing over the rim of that cup.
I stood in the middle of my round room in my sleep shirt with my hands in fists, and I did not touch the telescope. Barely. The not-touching took actual muscle, like holding a door shut against wind.
It’s none of your business, I told myself. He’s your work. Your assignment. Assignments are allowed to have houseguests, and you are allowed to feel nothing about it.
I got dressed with the focus of a soldier and went down to breakfast to feel nothing about it up close.
…
The kitchen smelled like heaven had a griddle—browned butter, fried dough, dulce de leche warming in a pot. Tini was flipping something at the stove, and the blonde woman sat on the counter beside her—on the counter, in Tini’s kitchen, a territorial violation I’d have bet my Jeep was punishable by knife—swinging her bare legs and laughing at something with her whole chest.
Tini was laughing too. Tini, who had granted me, after a week of tribute and one felony, the right to stand near the doorway.
“—and he still has the scar,” the blonde was saying, “so no, he does not get to tell the story like he won—” She saw me and lit up like I was the person she’d come to see. “Oh my god. You’re the writer.”
“I’m the writer,” I said.
“Kira.” She hopped off the counter and crossed the stone floor barefoot, hand out. Up close she was worse—my age, maybe a couple years older, with an easy warmth that rich people almost never have, and big blue eyes—the same eyes from the museum staircase, the yacht, the midnight-blue tux photos I had spent a large number of unbillable hours not caring about. Her handshake was dry and certain. She smelled like sunscreen and vanilla and someone else’s vacation.
“Lola,” I said. “I thought you were in London.”
“I was. My client apologized his way off the front pages, so I caught the red-eye and came straight here to sleep in a real bed. London’s a panic attack with pubs—do you know what Whitechapel does to a person on a work night? I billed the hangover as a travel expense.” She stole a piece of fried dough off Tini’s plate and got her hand slapped, and grinned about it. “I hear I owe you an interview.”
“Your office keeps rescheduling me. I was starting to develop a complex.”
“My office thinks everyone’s a subpoena.” She bit the dough, studying me with cheerful directness over it. “So you’re the one writing him down. How’s he behaving? Actual answer.”
“He’s a dream client,” I said. “Punctual. Forthcoming. An open book.”
Kira barked a laugh loud enough to startle the pot lids. “God. You’re funny. He didn’t say funny.” She said it—he didn’t say funny—like there had been a briefing, like I’d been discussed over drinks in some warm room I’d never see, and my stomach tumbled again. In one sentence she’d told me she and Eze talked about me, and that she knew him well enough to receive his reports, and I hated the math I was doing—six in the morning, his shirt, a real bed. Whose bed?
“Sit,” Tini commanded me, sliding a plate onto the island. “Both of you. Eat before it’s sad.”
So I ate torta frita with warm dulce de leche across from the woman I’d spent a week resenting from photographs, and here was the problem, the real structural problem, which I identified somewhere around the third bite—Kira was impossible to hate.
She asked questions like she wanted the answers. She talked to Tini in half-decent Spanish and lost an argument about soccer on purpose. She had a crisis publicist’s gift for making a kitchen feel like a conspiracy of three, and when she mentioned Eze it was with the specific exasperated tenderness of someone who had known a man since before he was interesting—stories about a nineteen-year-old who read Rilke at parties, a twenty-five-year-old who bought a boat because a broker was rude to him and then gave the boat away.
Vacationing in someone’s affection. That’s what it felt like at that table. I understood, watching her butter Tini into a second round of tortas, that this was a professional charmer of a rank I had rarely encountered, and that I couldn’t tell where the charm stopped and the person began.
Neither could a killer, I noted, and the thought arrived like cold water down my back. Everybody likes Kira was a fact with two faces too.
