Chapter 6: The Tray

Tobias crossed the study in four long steps.

He took the blue folder out of my hand.

He did not look at the page I had been reading.

He looked at me, and smiled, and signed with the clumsy hands I knew now to be a performance.

Found something.

I signed back, My ring.

It was true, in a way.

I had picked up the velvet box and it lay open on the floor where I had dropped it.

Tobias bent and lifted the ring out and slid it onto my finger.

"I was saving it," he said aloud, slow and warm. "Surprise."

His eyes never left my face.

I had learned to read lies off people's lips.

I had never needed to learn how to see one in the eyes of the man I married.

I knew in one second what was in his.

He was counting.

How much had I read, how much had I seen.

I kissed his cheek and signed thank you and let my hand shake, because a woman who was moved would shake.

He locked the safe and hung the painting straight, and put the folder under his arm.

At lunch he tested me.

I stood at the kitchen counter with my back to the room.

The housekeeper was behind me with a full tray of glasses.

I had seen it in the side of the steel kettle.

I saw the tray tip in the curved reflection, saw his fingers on its edge.

I set my feet and held my breath.

The crash was enormous.

Glass burst on the tile and the sound ripped through the implant and hit me behind the eyes.

I did not turn.

I kept my hand on the faucet and let the water run over a clean spoon.

Behind me the housekeeper gasped, and Tobias said, soft and amazed, "She really can't hear a thing."

I turned a few seconds late.

I looked at the glass and the housekeeper's white face, and I covered my mouth with a trembling hand.

Tobias put his arm around me.

"Accident," he mouthed. "Don't worry."

At four he packed a bag.

Halcyon wanted a dinner in Boston with their chairman, and he would stay the night.

He took Geneva's suitcase down himself.

At the front door he kissed me and signed I love you, in the one sign he had never forgotten.

I signed it back, and as soon as the car turned the corner I took off my shoes and ran.

Peter opened his door before I knocked.

He lived over the lab, in two rooms with a window onto an air shaft and a kettle that whistled.

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