Page 53 of Christmas with Three Firemen

I leave the lamp off.

Chapter fourteen

Chapter Fourteen: Noelle

The box from the city archives office arrives at nine, and I have never been more grateful for anything in my life.

I’ve been downstairs since seven. Mateo made eggs. I ate them. I answered whatever questions came my way and kept my eyes off the hallway.

Grant’s office door was open the whole time. I know because I didn’t look at it.

I can’t. Not yet. Not since last night, since the argument that stopped being an argument, since his hands and his desk and the sound of my own name in his mouth like it cost him something to say it.

I’ve replayed it more times than I want to count. The way his control finally cracked, and how it felt to be the thing that cracked it. Mateo was warmth, and Wes was stillness, and I walked away from both of those nights knowing what they were. Whatever happened in that office yesterday, I don’t know what it was yet.

Grant was the last wall I had, and now that’s gone too, and there’s no one left in this building I’ve managed to keep out.

And then, at midnight, the stockings.

I couldn’t sleep, so I came downstairs for water, and he was in the bay in the dark. He didn’t hear me on the stairs. He was hanging stockings along the mezzanine rail, one at a time, careful, red felt with names written on strips of white tape. The whole crew. And at the end of the row, mine.

My name.

Written before I gave him any reason to write it. Hung in the dark by a man who didn’t know he was being watched, an hour after he’d had me on his desk, like I was already someone he’d decided to keep before I’d decided anything at all.

I went back upstairs without a sound. I don’t know what to do with any of it. The desk undid my body. The stocking undid something worse.

So when the courier hauls the archive box up to my room at nine, four hundred pages of city building permits spanning fifteen years, I pull it toward me like a life raft.

This I know how to do. Paper. Patterns. The slow accumulation of small facts until they become one large fact that can’t be argued with.

I start at the top of the stack.

***

The work consumes me before I even realize I’ve been pulled in.

Renovation permit, commercial property, Lexington and 103rd. Not on my subsidiary list.

Electrical upgrade, residential, East 96th. Not on the list.

Demolition approval, warehouse, First Avenue. Subsidiary match. Flagged.

The morning wears down into afternoon. Snow keeps coming at the window. Somewhere below me the station runs through its day, boots and radio checks and Danny’s laugh carrying up through the floor, and the pile on my left gets shorter, and the pile on my right gets taller, and slowly, mercifully, I stop being a woman who can’t look at a hallway and become the work itself.

Cross-reference. Flag. Next page.

I go down at some point and make myself a sandwich while the kitchen is empty, eat it standing at the counter, and take the stairs back up two at a time. Bathroom, coffee, back in the chair.

By evening I’ve stopped hearing the station at all.

Then I turn over the next permit, and the address stops me.

West 107th Street.

I sit very still and look at it. Electrical system renovation, residential building. The contractor listed is Meridian Building Group. I know Meridian. It’s been on my subsidiary list since the first week, a shell two layers removed from Delaney Urban Partners, the kind of clean paper buffer that exists so a parent company’s name goes unnoticed.

The permit is dated twenty-three years ago.