One moment the careful softness was there, the downcast eyes, the slightly hunched posture, the whole constructed architecture of a woman without resources, and then it wasn't. It didn't fall away dramatically. It just stopped, like a machine that had been switched off. "Yes," she said. One word, clean, no apology in it yet.
Marcus released her wrist and sat back in the booth. He looked at his hand for a second as if he was checking to make sure it was still his. Then he set both hands flat on the table and looked at her. "Sit down," he said, "down." She sat.
For a long moment neither of them said anything. The diner was almost empty. Loretta's niece was wiping down the counter at the far end of the room, not paying attention to them. The rain was still going outside. Nothing had changed in the room except everything.
"How long have you known?" Evelyn asked. "First night," he said. She closed her eyes briefly. "And you didn't say anything?"
"No. Why?" He looked at her with something that wasn't quite contempt and wasn't quite respect and was in fact more unsettling than either one. "Because I wanted to see what you were actually doing out here before I decided what to do about you." She absorbed that.
"And what did you decide?" "I haven't yet," he said. "That's why you're still sitting there and I haven't called a reporter." Evelyn put both palms on the table. Her nails, he noticed, were bitten down further than the last time he'd seen her.
Whatever she was doing out here, it was costing her. I need you to understand something, she said. What I'm doing coming out here, the way I came out here, I know how it looks. I know exactly how it looks, but I am not here to perform. I am not here to get good press.
I came because someone sent me information that I could not ignore, and I needed to see for myself whether it was true. What kind of information? She hesitated. Don't, Marcus said sharply. Don't calculate right now.
Don't think about what's safe to tell me. You've been eating my food for 3 weeks, and you knew I recognized you, and you sat here anyway. So, we're past the part where you decide what I'm ready to hear. Something moved across her face. She made a decision.
I received documentation, she said, anonymous. Someone mailed it to a personal address, not the company address. Not my assistant. A personal address that almost nobody has. It was a package.