The List

Ash Weller crossed out RECOVERY CONFIRMED on the sheet Delilah had been ordered to read aloud.

He did it while Harvey Baird was watching. One black line, drawn slowly enough that no one could mistake it for a correction made by accident.

“That is the sentence the customers are expecting,” Harvey said.

“Then you ought to have a recovery to tell them about.” Ash put down the pen.

Delilah had been at Sable Recovery for six weeks. She knew which questions Harvey answered with a smile, which ones he answered by saying a colleague would call back, and which ones caused a customer’s file to disappear from her queue. She did not know Ash, who had arrived that morning with a process analyst’s temporary pass and the face of a man who could make an accusation sound like a request for the time.

She looked at the sentence he had struck through. She was supposed to telephone a woman who had paid Sable to find money lost to another company. The internal sheet said recovery confirmed. The column that should have named an amount was empty.

Delilah had intended to refuse. It would have been better if she had done it first.

“The payment is in progress,” Harvey said.

Ash turned the page toward him. “Which payment?”

The little conference room had a view of the service yard. Someone below was reversing a van into a space too small for it. Delilah kept her eyes on Harvey instead. She had seen him guide a frightened customer from a question to an apology without raising his voice. Ash’s question did not give him a place to put the apology.

“You’re here to improve the process,” Harvey said. “Not to make my staff afraid to use it.”

“I can improve a true sentence.”

Delilah felt the first, deeply inconvenient pull of wanting to see what he would say next.

Harvey looked at her. “Miss Crane. You have the account in front of you.”

“I have a claim number,” she said. “And a phone number. I don’t have a confirmed recovery.”

“The customer wants an update.”

“Then I’ll give her one.”

Harvey’s smile held. “You two can decide the exact words. I want the call made before lunch.”

He left without taking the sheet. The door shut softly. Below the window the van gave up and drove on.

Delilah set her hand flat on the table, covering the claim number. She did not need Ash to see it; he could already see the same number in his own copy. She needed a second in which neither of them pretended they were colleagues who had had an ordinary disagreement with a manager.

“Do you always cross out your employer’s favourite line on your first day?” she asked.

“Only when it has no amount beside it.”

“There’s a whole book of them. You’ll need a thicker pen.”

He almost smiled. It changed his face more than a full smile would have. She disliked noticing that.

“You’ve been using these?” he asked.

“I’ve been changing what I can before I make a call.”

“Does anyone check?”

“Someone will now.”

Ash did smile then, though there was no pleasure in the reason for it. His eyes went to her hand on the page, then back to her face. She let him look. A man paid to review a process had every reason to watch the person who had admitted altering it. She had no reason to want him to keep watching when they were done.

At thirty-one, Delilah had acquired a practiced way of being in a room she might need to leave quickly. She sat nearest the door. She remembered who carried a key. She said nothing personal that could become useful to somebody else. Today her first mistake had been to tell Ash a true thing about herself because he had told one first.

“What would you say?” she asked, pulling the sheet between them.

He took the other chair instead of standing behind her. The distinction mattered. If he’d stood over her shoulder, she would have moved.

“We have no confirmed recovery to report,” he said. “We are checking the status of your claim. You don’t have to wait by the telephone for another update you didn’t ask for.”

“Harvey won’t let us say that last part.”

“Then he can tell me why.”

“You like putting your name on things.”

“I like knowing what I’ve put it on.”

Delilah wrote the first two sentences on a clean page. There were seven people who had paid her through Leonie Quist to find out why Sable kept billing them for money it had not brought back. The name on this particular sheet belonged to one of them. She could make the call as the employee Sable believed it had hired; she could not let the woman know who else was in the room.

“What’s your part in this?” Ash asked.

“The call?”

“The company. Six weeks in, and you can tell me there are enough false lines for a book.”

She held his gaze. It was an excellent question. It was also the question she had been paid to keep him from answering.

“I write to people when no one else wants to,” she said. “Some of them tell me what’s wrong with the letters.”

He accepted that as a description of her job. She did not mistake acceptance for belief.

Ash was thirty-five, according to the staff list she’d been given before he arrived. The list also said he was contracted for eight weeks and reported directly to Harvey. His name had meant nothing to her that morning. Now she wanted to know whether he had a family who expected him home and whether he’d always sounded that calm when he was angry. Neither answer would help the seven people paying her. That was reason enough to stop wondering.

She dialled the customer from her work phone. Ash got up at once.

“You can stay,” she said, and regretted the invitation as soon as she heard it.

“Do you want me to?”

His question left the choice where she had placed it. She could have said no. She knew, because he waited for the answer instead of sitting back down.

“Yes. I want you to hear what I say.”

He stayed on his side of the table.

The woman answered on the fourth ring. Delilah gave her Sable name, which was her real name, and the claim number. She asked whether it was a good time to speak. The woman said she had been told a payment was coming.

“I can’t confirm that,” Delilah said. “I have no confirmed recovery to report.”

There was a pause. Ash looked down at the line he’d crossed out.

“The email says otherwise,” the woman said.

“I know what it says. I can’t find a payment to support it.”

“Should I send another fee?”

Delilah’s grip tightened around the phone. She had searched the account that morning. There was no request for a new fee yet. There was a blank field where someone could put one.

“I would not pay anything on the strength of this update,” she said. “If someone asks, please request the claim in writing before you decide.”

She could hear a kettle on the other end of the line, then the woman moving away from it. Ordinary life continuing around a number that had ceased to mean what Sable said it meant.

“Are you saying the first money’s gone?”

“I’m saying I can’t account for a recovery. I can call you when I have something I can verify, if you’d like that. You can also ask us not to call.”

The woman asked for the written record and no more calls until she’d read it. Delilah repeated the request back to her. When she hung up, the room was so quiet she could hear the van returning to make another attempt at the parking space.

“You didn’t say she would get it back,” Ash said.

“I don’t know that she will.”

“Did Harvey tell you to offer another fee?”

“No.”

He watched her for a moment. The question had been fair. So had her answer. He had no way to know what she’d left outside it.

“She asked,” Delilah said.

“I heard.”

He picked up the amended script and made a note at the bottom: Caller may decline further contact. Record the request. He slid it to her for her to read before he added his initials. He was not trying to do her job for her. She wished that felt less intimate.

“Harvey won’t approve the no-call line,” she said.

“He doesn’t have to say it himself. I do.”

“You’ve been here three hours.”

“Long enough to hear someone ask not to be called.”

She looked up. The neckline of his shirt had been mended with a dark, uneven stitch. Someone who had the means to send a shirt away had kept it and repaired it badly. Perhaps he’d done it himself. She did not want to know. She wanted, for one unguarded second, to touch the thread and ask.

Ash saw where she was looking. He put his hand to his collar, then stopped. He didn’t ask her what she’d noticed. That was the second thing she liked about him, and it was worse than the first.

“I’ll put the revised line in the process file,” he said.

“With your name on it.”

“With my name on it.”

He left her with a copy. He took the original, the crossed-out lie and her honest call note in the same folder. Harvey would see it. Someone else might see it too.

Delilah had promised seven people she would bring them facts they could choose to use. For six weeks she had managed to be careful with that promise by being careful with herself. Ash Weller had made one decent choice in front of her, and already she had let him stand close enough to hear the way she made hers.

At the door he looked back. “Miss Crane. The book of false lines.”

“It isn’t a real book.”

“I gathered.”

“There’s one on page three that’s especially good. It calls a second charge a courtesy review.”

He gave her the almost-smile again. “I’ll start there.”

She should have wanted him far from page three. Instead she watched him go to find it, and wondered whether the man who had just put his name beside her words would keep them safe or learn to use them against her.