The Brief

Delilah wanted Ash to come to her desk. She had spent the journey to work deciding what she would say if he did, and all morning finding reasons to look at the door.

He arrived at eleven with nothing in his hands.

“Harvey hired me to identify the employee giving information to the customer group,” he said quietly. “I thought it might be you. I’d like to tell you the rest somewhere you choose.”

The sentence was so much plainer than anything he had said last night that she almost thanked him. Then she heard it again. The employee. Her calls, her amended letters, the evenings they had spent making one another laugh: he had been deciding what they meant in a file she could not see.

She put down her pen.

“Were you going to ask me to tea?”

“No.”

“Good.” She looked at the empty doorway behind him. “I’m finishing this letter. You can meet me outside at six. I’ll decide where we walk.”

“All right.”

He left. She had wanted him to stay, which made her angrier than the relief of his going.

The letter on her screen began Thank you for your patience. Delilah deleted the sentence. The woman waiting for it had not been patient. She had been given no useful answer. It was not the same thing.

For the rest of Friday, Delilah did the work her temporary contract required. She returned a letter that promised a recovery with no amount attached. She recorded a request for no further calls. When Ash passed on his way to the printer, she kept her eyes on the screen, then looked up too late to learn whether he had looked at her.

At lunchtime she took her personal phone outside and called Leonie.

“The analyst was hired to find whoever is passing information to the group,” she said. “He’s told me he suspected me. I haven’t told him who retained me.”

“Has he made an accusation?”

“He says he wants to explain. I’m seeing him after work.”

“For the assignment?”

Delilah watched a man take a paper bag from the bakery next door, open it and begin eating before he had cleared the window. She had forgotten lunch again.

“For myself,” she said. “I asked him out yesterday. He didn’t tell me then. I wanted you to know before I heard the rest.”

Leonie let the silence stand. Delilah resisted the urge to fill it with assurances about her judgment.

“I’ll arrange for the group to hear what affects them,” Leonie said. “Until we’ve spoken, don’t seek anything new for us at Sable. Don’t promise him a place in this work.”

“I won’t.”

“And eat something. You sound as if you’re planning to make being hungry a principle.”

Delilah bought a sandwich. She could bear being reminded to eat better than being told what she ought to feel.

At six, Ash waited on the pavement with his coat over one arm. She chose the road toward the river, where there were people walking home and enough room not to speak in one another’s faces. He fell into step beside her without offering to carry her bag.

For the first hundred yards she heard his footsteps and the small jingle of keys in his coat pocket. Yesterday she would have liked knowing the ordinary sounds he made. She still liked them. Anger ought to have been more useful.

“Start before Monday,” she said.

“Harvey told me an employee was giving company correspondence to a group of customers. He said the complaints were repeating details they could only have got from inside. I agreed to investigate, provided I could look at the process as well.”

“Did he give you my name?”

“Not before I arrived. He put me in the room for your call. On Tuesday he brought me your call note.”

She remembered the sheet between them and his chair on the other side of the table. Her invitation to stay had felt like a choice she was making. It had been one. She hated that knowing more could change a memory without making the memory false.

“And you thought it was me.”

“You knew the phrases customers objected to. You changed the letters. You asked questions other people here had stopped asking. I started a working note with your name in it.”

“What did you write beside my name?”

“That you were a possible source. I listed what you’d changed and what you’d asked. None of it proved you had given anyone a document. I wrote it as if putting the facts together made them stronger.”

They reached the river wall. Delilah stopped by a bench but did not sit. Ash stood far enough away that a woman with a shopping trolley could pass between them.

“Does Harvey have it?”

“No. This morning I told him I was withdrawing that line of inquiry as unsupported. I gave him the finding that I haven’t identified a source. He wanted the name I had considered. I didn’t give him one.”

“You haven’t destroyed the note.”

“No. It records a mistake I made. I won’t pretend I never made it. It stays in my working record, marked with the correction.”

“And I’m supposed to trust you about what happens to it.”

“For now you’re being asked to believe what I say about it. That’s less.”

She sat. The bench was still warm where the sun had reached it. Ash remained standing until she moved her bag from the other end.

“Sit down. I’m tired of looking up at you.”

He sat, leaving the space her bag had occupied between them. From here she could see the pale crease at his wrist where his watch had been. She had been imagining having whole evenings to notice things like that. Now she was weighing whether the things she had noticed were evidence of how easily she could be managed.

“Was the script a way to get me to talk?”

“No.”

“You don’t get to answer quickly just because it’s the answer you like.”

Ash looked toward the river. She let him take the time.

“I changed it because it was wrong,” he said. “I hoped you would notice. By Tuesday afternoon I knew I liked having you in my room. I kept telling myself that was separate from what I was being paid to do. It wasn’t separate for you, because you didn’t know.”

She pressed her thumb into the seam of her bag. The admission hurt more than a claim that he had managed to keep everything pure.

“Last night I asked you a direct question.”

“You did.”

“You could have said what you said at my desk in twenty seconds.”

“Yes.”

“You let me tell you I wanted to kiss you.”

His head turned. She had kept her voice level, but there was nothing level in the way he looked at her.

“I wanted you to go on wanting it,” he said. “I was afraid you would stop if I told you. That’s the reason. There wasn’t a better one I couldn’t explain in the café.”

She had prepared for a defence of his contract, for sentences she would need to prise apart. He had given her something she knew how to recognise and did not know how to forgive yet.

Across the river, a woman opened an upstairs window and shook a cloth out over the sill. Delilah watched crumbs fall toward a narrow garden.

“I came because people paid twice for the same loss,” she said.

Ash did not move. She could feel him attend to the difference between came and stayed.

“The first company took their money,” she said. “Sable offered to recover it. They paid again. They want an account of what happened to the second payment. I didn’t arrive six weeks ago hoping to make the letters kinder.”

“You’re investigating Sable.”

“Yes. That’s all I’m telling you about the people who asked me.”

He rested his forearms on his knees. The distance between their shoulders shortened; she stayed where she was.

“You knew what you thought this place was while I was explaining how to improve it.”

“I knew what they suspected. I’m still finding out what I can support.”

“And you let me talk.”

“You were doing something useful.”

He looked at her then. She heard how that sounded and wished she could take it back without taking away the fact.

“The field mattered,” she said. “It still matters. It wasn’t why I asked you out.”

“I know what I want to believe about that.”

“Then ask me something I can answer.”

Ash’s hand opened on his knee, then closed. “Did you tell anyone what I said about the people I left behind in my last job?”

“No.”

“It could have helped you work out what I’d do.”

“I worked that out for myself. I didn’t put it in a report.” She looked straight at him. “I told our adviser about your change to the script. I told her today that you suspected me. I also told her I’d asked you out. What you regretted about your old job belonged to you.”

He lowered his head. For a moment she could see only the back of his neck, and the temptation to put a hand there was so immediate that she folded both hands beneath her bag.

She wanted to comfort him. She also wanted him to sit with what he had done. Neither wish made her capable of choosing for him.

“I’m ending the inquiry,” he said. “I’ll send Harvey my resignation tonight and return the fee. He’ll have the process findings and their limits. He won’t have a finding that invents a culprit.”

“What does that cost you?”

“The fee. A reference I probably won’t get. Having to explain why I accepted the job and didn’t finish it.”

“Can you afford it?”

“Yes. I have other work. I’ll dislike the empty weeks I kept for this. I won’t lose my home.”

The answer relieved her. She did not want to be the prize at the end of a sacrifice she had never requested.

“Don’t do it because you expect me to tell you more.”

“I can’t keep taking his money for this inquiry. That was true before you sat down.”

“I might not see you again.”

He watched her hands beneath the bag. “I heard you last night.”

For a while they watched the water. A cyclist rang his bell well before reaching them. Delilah moved her feet out of the path and felt Ash make the same movement beside her. The small accord nearly undid the composure she had kept through the rest.

“I bought new tea,” she said.

He looked puzzled.

“Yesterday, before we met. I thought if the evening went well I might ask you to walk home with me. I had tea, but I couldn’t remember how long it had been in the cupboard.”

Ash drew a slow breath. His gaze went to her mouth, then back to her eyes. She felt the warmth of it low in her chest.

“I thought about walking you home,” he said. “Then I thought about whether you’d ask me in. More than once. Before I got to the café.”

“I wanted a whole evening. Not just the part when we were being sensible.”

“So did I.”

She let that remain between them. It was humiliating only if she agreed that wanting him had made her foolish. He had been dishonest; her pleasure in him had been real.

“I’m going home alone,” she said.

“All right.”

“But there’s something I could tell you about myself. About why I’m careful with other people’s names. You couldn’t use it to finish anything.”

“You don’t owe me a confidence because I’ve confessed something.”

“I know what I owe you.” Her voice was sharper than she meant, and she let it soften. “I haven’t decided what I want to give you.”

He nodded. She was grateful that he did not try to help her decide.

Delilah stood and put the strap of her bag over her shoulder. “I’ll text you if I want breakfast at the café tomorrow. Don’t go there to wait.”

“I won’t.”

She left him on the bench. At the corner she wanted to look back and did not forbid herself. He was still sitting there, his coat folded over his knees. He raised his head when he saw her, but he did not get up.

At home she put the new tea on the shelf. She had enough facts to end the evening for good. What she had offered him instead was the possibility of knowing the woman who had bought it, and she still had until morning to decide whether she could bear that.