Chapter 7: The Legal Pad

He opened the steel door before I knocked, and I walked past him without a word.

"Molly," he said.

"Don't."

"I would like to explain."

"Who's the guest?"

"There isn't one."

"The report says unlogged guest, overnight."

"I invented the guest. I needed something true."

I stopped in the middle of the marble floor.

"On Sunday you stayed in my lobby after sunrise," he said. "You were never entered in the visitor log."

I had stayed, I realized, for an hour that morning, to be sure he was all right.

"You reported that as a violation," I said. "Four days later."

"It is a true one. I saved it."

"You saved it for when I said I wouldn't come."

He didn't answer.

He didn't have to.

I turned in a slow circle and saw the kitchen light on, and the table in the kitchen, and the yellow pad on it.

I walked over.

He didn't stop me.

It was a legal pad, a plain one, with a pen laid across it, and three columns in neat slanted handwriting.

The first column was dates.

The second was a small violation each, in a few words. Window film. Fridge log. Out of zone. Dawn band. Guest log.

The third was points.

The first five lines had a check mark.

Under them there were ten more lines, in the future, through the middle of January.

*Late blood order. Window two. Curfew minus eleven. Unregistered plant.*

At the bottom, circled twice, the total: 69.

I looked at it for a long while.

"Sixty-nine," I said.

"Seventy is revocation."

"I know what seventy is."

"I did the arithmetic carefully. I had thought I would stop one short."

I turned around.

He stood at the kitchen door, perfectly still, with his hands at his sides.

"You were going to bring yourself to one point from Containment," I said. "On purpose."

"Yes."

"For what?"

"For fifteen visits."

"For what?"

"For you," he said.

It landed in the quiet kitchen.

"You were a kind woman at a counter," he said.

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