Chapter 13: Four Coffees

On the first morning of my life with nobody to report to, I slept until ten.

I lay in June's old lumpy spare bed and listened to the radiator knock.

My phone said the severance had landed at 8:02. Ninety thousand dollars, and a total under it that read $142,000.

I looked at the number and waited to feel something enormous.

What I felt was hungry.

"You're awake," June said from the doorway, in her scrubs, holding a spatula. "You're smiling at a bank app. It's creepy."

"It's Sunday."

"It's your Sunday. Contractually."

"The contract's over."

"Then it's just a Sunday. Eat your eggs, we're going to the store."

We took a pry bar, two pairs of gloves and a bag of doughnuts.

The boards on the Fleet Street windows had been up for two years.

June did the first one. The nails shrieked, and the board came off, and a long bar of gray November light fell across my father's floor.

I stood in it a moment.

"Don't cry on the merchandise," June said. "There isn't any."

"I'm not crying."

I took the pry bar and attacked the second board.

By noon we had four windows open, and a gray sedan pulled up to the curb.

Cain Rourke got out of the driver's seat on his own.

He was in a sweater with no tie, which I had seen perhaps twice in fourteen months, and he was carrying a cardboard tray.

"Ms. Bell."

"Mr. Rourke."

"I'm here for the wind-down audit."

"The wind-down ended at midnight."

"There are residual items."

He held up the tray.

There were four coffees in it.

"I did not know how you take it," he said. "So I bought one of everything."

June put the pry bar down very slowly.

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