The Boundary

Delilah sent Ash a message before she could turn breakfast into another appointment she had prudently avoided.

Nine. The café. I can tell you about myself. Not about the people who hired me.

He answered, I’ll be there.

When she arrived, he was standing by the counter. He let her choose their table. She took the one they had used on Thursday, because she wanted to sit there without having to remember herself leaving it.

“I nearly didn’t send that,” she said.

“I nearly wrote you a very long message last night.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“You said you’d get in touch if you wanted to. I thought I should try doing what you’d asked.”

She took off her coat. He watched her lay it over the chair, and this time she knew he was watching. She liked that he did not immediately look away.

“You can still say things I haven’t asked for,” she said. “That’s part of the difficulty.”

“I’ve resigned. The message went last night. I returned the full retainer this morning.”

Delilah sat with her hands in her lap. There it was, the action she had been unwilling to demand. It did not give her back Thursday. It made Saturday possible in a way it had not been before.

“You don’t have to show me your bank account.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“And it doesn’t settle what happened.”

“No.”

The waiter came for their order. Delilah ordered toast as well as tea. Ash asked for the same, and she almost made a joke about copying her answers. It would have been a way to forgive him before she was ready. Instead she asked for marmalade and let him say whether he wanted any.

“I’m still angry,” she told him when they were alone again. “I thought I should say that before this begins to look easy.”

“It doesn’t look easy.”

“It might from your side. I came back.”

Ash set his hands flat on the table. “I’m glad you did. I don’t know what you want to happen after breakfast.”

Neither did she, fully. She knew she had dressed with him in mind. She had put on the green jumper because its collar left her throat bare, then stood in front of the mirror furious with herself for considering what he might notice. She had kept it on. Being hurt had not made her stop having a body, or stop wanting him to like it.

“Listen first,” she said. “Afterwards I’ll decide whether I want you to stay.”

“All right.”

“Five years ago I promised a source that nobody would know she’d spoken to me. I couldn’t keep that promise. I should never have made it.”

He did not reach for her. That helped. She had practised this as a professional explanation often enough to recognise how touch might let her turn it into a story in which she had mostly been hurt.

“The woman worked for a company I was investigating. She gave me a detail that showed their public figures were wrong. She said I could use the detail, provided she couldn’t be identified. My employer said we could protect her. I wanted the evidence, so I accepted that. I didn’t ask her to look at how we intended to use it.”

Ash’s face was still. She could hear a spoon turning in a cup at the next table.

“The report didn’t name her. It didn’t have to. Her employer knew who had been in the room when the thing happened. By the end of the week they knew it was her.”

“What happened to her?”

“She stopped speaking to me.” Delilah felt the old temptation to make that the end. “She told me there were consequences at work. She wouldn’t tell me what they were. I kept asking because I wanted to help, and because knowing might have made me feel less useless. Eventually she asked me to leave her alone. I did.”

“You don’t know the rest.”

“No. I don’t get to finish her story so I can finish mine.”

The tea arrived. Delilah thanked the waiter and put one hand around her cup. The room had gone on being a place people bought breakfast. She had expected some visible change in it, though she knew better.

“I left the firm,” she said. “I told them why. For a while that was the part I told people, if I told anyone anything. I made leaving sound like the proof that I’d been on her side all along.”

Ash looked down at his tea, and she knew he had heard his own old mistake in it.

“I might have said you couldn’t have known,” he said. “If you hadn’t told me the part about not asking her.”

“Would you have believed it?”

“I would have wanted you to feel better.”

She had not known how much she dreaded being absolved until he declined to do it. The warmth in her face was partly shame. The rest came from being able to meet his eyes without receiving a kinder version of herself in return.

“Thank you for not saying it.”

“I don’t think you came here for me to tell you it was harmless.”

“I don’t know what I came for. I know I wanted you to be the person I told.”

His fingers tightened on the handle of his cup. It was the first sign she had seen that this was costing him anything beyond restraint.

“I’m glad,” he said. “Though I wish the reason you had to tell it were different.”

She waited until her throat would let her speak normally.

“At Sable I have a different arrangement. I gather what I’m authorised to gather. The people paying me decide what can be used. An adviser answers to them, not to me. She can end my work if they want someone else.”

“And they know about me?”

“Their adviser knows I’ve wanted to see you. I’ll tell the group what I’ve told you, before I do any more work for them. I’ve already stopped seeking anything new. They may think even this was too much.”

“Does saying who paid you reveal them to Harvey?”

“It tells you which side I’m on. It doesn’t tell you who is on it. I’m not confirming whether any customer you’ve heard me speak to is one of mine. No names, no messages, no details you could put together.”

Ash nodded. She watched him wait, perhaps for more, perhaps because she had not yet made herself stop.

“That’s all,” she said.

“Then that’s all.”

The words were almost absurdly small. She had prepared for a reasonable question, a request so modest that refusing it would feel like cruelty. He took a sip of tea. When he put the cup down, he asked, “Would you like me to stay?”

Delilah looked at the chair opposite her, at the man who had made a bad choice and could not erase it, and at the two plates of toast arriving between them. She could end this without losing a fact, a fee or a route home. The thing she would lose was his company.

“Yes,” she said. “I haven’t eaten my breakfast.”

“Neither have I.”

“That wasn’t the reason.”

His smile came slowly, giving her time to answer it. She did.

For several minutes they ate. The toast was thick and the butter cold enough to tear holes in it. Ash broke a piece in half and set the butter between the warm sides to soften. Delilah tried the same thing and dropped a crust on her plate.

“You could have warned me there was a method,” she said.

“I thought we were finished with those.”

“Only yours. Mine are excellent.”

His laugh was quieter than it had been on Thursday. She liked being near enough to hear it without the woman at the next table turning round.

“Will you miss the work?” she asked.

“Some of it. Not writing down what Harvey means by progress. I’ll miss knowing I might hear you in the corridor.”

She put down the marmalade knife. That was the invitation she had been waiting for him to risk: something she could refuse, with no respectable task attached.

“You could hear me somewhere else.”

“I’d like that.”

“I need to speak to the people I work for first. They don’t decide whether I see you. They do decide whether they keep employing me when I want to.”

“And if they don’t?”

“I have other clients. I’d lose work I care about. I’d have to hand it over properly, and hate not being there for the end.”

“I won’t ask you to choose me over them.”

“Don’t turn that into choosing for me.”

He sat back. She had caught him in the act of making a kind decision without her, and she saw him recognise it.

“I want to see you,” he said. “Tell me when you know what you can offer.”

“I can do that.”

They finished breakfast without finding anything else that had to be confessed. She told him that the book beside her bed had acquired three bookmarks because she kept forgetting where she’d stopped. He asked whether any of them agreed. She said she was afraid to hold a meeting. It was an ordinary, stupid thing to tell a man; she enjoyed telling it so much that she kept talking.

By the time they stood, the café was filling with people who had slept later. Ash picked up his coat. The cuff turned back on itself, showing another line of dark stitching, this one straighter than the seam at his collar.

“You’re improving,” she said, pointing to it.

He looked down. “Different attempt.”

“May I see?”

He held out his arm. She took the edge of the cuff between finger and thumb, turning it toward the light. His wrist was warm beneath the cloth. She could have examined the work without noticing his stillness; she had no wish to pretend she hadn’t.

“I wouldn’t have put that one in the tin,” she said.

“Neither did I.”

She let go. He lowered his arm, giving the moment no more weight than she had offered. That made her want to offer more. She was beginning to understand that this might remain difficult even when no one was doing anything wrong.

Outside, they stood beneath the bridge while a train crossed overhead. Delilah waited for the noise to pass. There was no useful way to disguise what she wanted to say as a joke now.

“I still want to kiss you.”

Ash’s gaze held hers. “So do I.”

“I’m not ready to.”

“I know.”

“You didn’t know until I told you.”

He smiled, rueful this time. “Then I’m glad you told me.”

She had no need to step away to make him believe her. He stood where he was, his hands in his coat pockets, and she let herself look at his mouth. The wanting was hers to keep. It did not require her to hurry.

“Next time,” she said, “I’d like to do something that doesn’t involve tea.”

“A walk?”

“With no resignation in it.”

“I’ll have to improvise.”

“You could try.”

He waited until she chose her direction before he turned toward his own. She did not need him to watch her reach the corner. She knew how to get home.

At her kitchen table, Delilah wrote to Leonie. Ash had ended his inquiry. She had told him why she was at Sable and described her own earlier failure with a source. She had given him no customer’s name or private account. She wanted to see him again. The group needed to know all of that before deciding whether her work should continue.

She read the message once. Then she removed the sentence in which she had assured Leonie that her judgment was unaffected. Her judgment was affected; that was why other people needed a choice.

She sent it and made herself lunch. There was bread, an egg and enough time to cook it without answering a telephone. For once she used the time.

Leonie replied after two. The group could meet the following afternoon. Delilah was to bring an account of what she had disclosed and the work still outstanding. No recommendation about herself was required.

She put the meeting in her diary, then added a second line beneath it. Ask Ash about a walk.

She left a space for the day.