Harbor Crest opening, wasn't it? You were doing electrical work. I was, Nolan said. Good response time on that fault, Victor said. I heard the panel was in bad shape.
Transfer switch, Nolan said. Phase reversal. Somebody signed off on an inspection they didn't complete. Right. Victor nodded as though filing this away.
He looked at Nolan with the pleasant curiosity of a man who had already decided what he was looking at. How long have you been working with Leona's properties? The phrasing was precise. Working with Leona's properties, not for Oralene, not even for her. It placed Nolan one tier below contractor.
I don't work for her, Nolan said. Victor's smile did not waver. Of course. He turned back to Leona and began asking her something about a reszoning variance in Pioneer Square, and the moment slid past smooth and apparently harmless. Leona watched Nolan's face while Victor spoke.
He was not embarrassed. He was not angry. He was simply present in the particular way he was always present, fully aware of what had just happened and unmoved by it. Later, in the elevator going down, she asked him how he was. Fine, he said.
Victor was I know what he was doing, Nolan said. It doesn't bother me. He paused. What bothers me is that it bothered you. She looked at him.
You've been watching me since he walked over, he said, checking to see if I was rattled. I don't need you to manage that. I wasn't managing. You were, he said, not unkindly. I know what I walked into tonight.
I'm not going to fall apart because some guy in a $2,000 suit tried to remind me what I do for a living. She said nothing. I do good work, he said. I know I do good work. That's enough.
The elevator opened. He held the door. She thought walking out into the night air that she could not remember the last time someone had told her to stop worrying about them and actually meant it. She learned his rhythm slowly and he learned hers. And somewhere in that process, the precise nature of what they were doing became harder to categorize.
He took her to a dim sum place in the international district on a Saturday morning, a cashonly room with laminate tables and a line that started before 9. She wore jeans and a coat she had bought specifically for occasions when she did not want to be recognized. And she ate pork buns standing at a counter and did not check her phone for two hours, which was, she realized afterward, the longest she had gone without checking it on a weekend in roughly 4 years. He showed her the workshop. It was smaller than she had imagined a converted garage space in an industrial block south of downtown with two lifts, pegboards hung with tools organized by size, and a white board covered in job schedules written in different colors.
It smelled like machine oil and coffee. A small electric space heater ran in the corner. The radio played a classic rock station with more static than signal. She sat on a metal stool and watched him rewire a commercial control panel for a building whose facilities manager had called that morning in a low-grade panic. He worked with a methodical efficiency that was entirely unlike the way she worked.
She moved fast, made decisions quickly, corrected course in real time. He did not move slowly exactly, but he completed each step fully before beginning the next one. And he did not appear to experience the particular anxiety of things left unfinished. She asked him once how he'd gotten into electrical work. "My uncle ran a shop," he said without looking up from the panel.
"I spent summers helping him when I was 15, 16. I was decent at it. Decent felt like enough at the time. Was it? He considered the question with the same care he gave everything.
It turned out to be more than enough, he said. Most things do if you're willing to actually do them. She thought about that more than she wanted to. The afternoon she met Sadi was not planned. Nolan's usual after school arrangement fell through at 2:30 on a Wednesday.
His neighbor, who picked Sadie up on days he was running late, had a minor emergency of her own and called him 20 minutes before school let out. He was in the middle of a service call at a property three blocks from Sades school. He told Leona, who happened to be in the passenger seat of his truck on the way to look at a site nearby that he needed to make a stop. Leona said that was fine. Sadi was standing on the sidewalk in front of the school in a green jacket, a backpack half her height, and an expression of measured patience that looked in congruous on an 11-year-old.
She got in the back seat, and Leona turned slightly to say hello, and Sadi looked at her with clear, even eyes. "You're the rich woman my dad is seeing," Sadie said. "Satie," Nolan said from the driver's seat, his voice flat with parental warning. I'm just checking, Sadi said. I saw a picture.
It's accurate, Leona said. And it's nice to meet you. Sadi appeared to find this response acceptable. She buckled her seat belt, pulled out a library book, and read in silence for 4 minutes before she looked up again. "Are you going to try to buy him things?" she asked.
"I'm not planning to," Leona said. "Good," Sadi said. "He doesn't like that. He gave back a check once and didn't even tell me until like 3 weeks later. That sounds like him, Leona said.
Sadi seemed to weigh something. Then she returned to her book. After they dropped Sadi at the apartment and Nolan came back down to the truck, Leona sat quietly for a moment. "She's watching very carefully," Leyona said. "She always does," Nolan said.
"She gets it from her mother. He said it simply without weight. The way people say things they have made peace with, even if the peace was hard to arrive at. Leona looked out the window at the gray October street. I'll be careful, she said.