No One Knows Us Here(37)

“It’s a school night.” She would be starting at Lincoln High School on Monday. It was all arranged. Her grandmother had signed whatever needed to be signed, filled out all the forms. All I had to do was make sure she actually went.

The Mirror pulsed in my handbag. Leo was waiting for me downstairs.



The car dropped us off on a darkened street on the South Park Blocks, right on the edge of the university campus. “Where’s the restaurant?” I asked.

“We’re not going to a restaurant.”

“We had reservations at eight. You said—”

“I canceled them.”

I took in a deep breath, to calm myself. This is my job. It’s only a job. I recalled what Mira had said, about all the douchebags I’d slept with of my own accord: And you did that for free, you know? Is that what she had said? She was right. This was no different. This was better! Leo was a successful, good-looking (in his tech-nerd way) man. I could do this.

Leo took my hand, and we walked into a stairwell on the side of a parking garage built inside an old brick building, an old warehouse, maybe, that had been converted. Following a stranger—a near stranger—into a dark parking garage at night—this was a stupid thing to do. If I got murdered here, I would have no one to blame but myself.

We approached a metal door with no handle. Leo tapped a combination into a keypad on the side. The door slid open, revealing what appeared to be some sort of freight elevator.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Leo said.

I was thinking I was going to die. Right here, tonight, in this parking garage.

“You’re thinking I’d have a more state-of-the-art security system. Retinal scanning or something.” Leo took my hand and led me into the elevator. I took in deep, slow breaths through my nose, trying to calm down. “Totally unnecessary,” he went on as the doors closed us inside the steel cell. “No one even knows I live here.”

“You live here? In a parking garage?” I let out a high-pitched, nervous little laugh. I was overreacting. He wasn’t taking me to a murder dungeon; he was taking me home. Of course. This is my job. This is my job.

The doors of the elevator opened to a hallway with exposed redbrick walls, like the outside of the building. At the end of the hallway stood a console table with an outsize floral arrangement on top—orchids and curly willow, just like the bouquet I’d seen in the Lookinglass offices.

“Here we are,” Leo said, pulling open a door made out of planks of old lumber.

We stepped into a cavernous loft that filled the entire third floor of the building. Streetlights outside the factory windows that spanned the west-facing wall cast an eerie blueish light in the apartment. Leo said, “Hola, Consuela. Iluminación ambiental, por favor.” The lights all around the apartment began to shimmer. A lamp on an end table by the couch, the futuristic chandelier made out of driftwood and iron over the dining table, the undercabinet lighting in the kitchen. The light was dim at first, the barest flicker, and slowly grew brighter until the apartment was just barely illuminated.

“Consuela?” I said.

“Just something I’m working on. She’s teaching me Spanish.”

“I thought you already spoke Spanish,” I said. “And Thai.”

I looked around, half expecting an android to come marching out from a trapdoor somewhere, some sexy human robot with full lips and gigantic breasts. Leo laughed, as if he could read my thoughts. A disturbing notion entered my head, a notion I tried to stamp out as soon as it bubbled up: maybe he could read my thoughts.

Leo led me to the seating area, two long couches arranged in an L shape with an end table at the apex and a low, square coffee table in the middle. Again I was reminded of the Lookinglass offices. Wood and metal and low modern furniture. Sparse and clean, with just a few offbeat pieces to elevate the decor above a hotel lobby.

Leo yawned. “God,” he said. “Sorry. Jet lag.” The worst part was, he had to leave again in the morning, he said. Ghent this time. He should have expedited my passport; I could have joined him.

We weren’t supposed to talk about the arrangement. I knew that. I opened my mouth to say something to Leo and then thought better of it. “What?” he asked.

“It’s nothing.”

“You can tell me.”

“It’s just—I’d love to go to Europe with you sometime.”

“I’d love to take you.”

“I’d need some advance notice is all. My sister, she’s sort of fragile, and—”

Leo didn’t appear to be listening. He was tinkering around, filling up an electric kettle and flipping the switch. From a cabinet, he found two mugs and set them on the counter. The whole kitchen would seem like something out of a science fiction space novel if it weren’t for the mirror hanging over that shiny black stove. Who would hang a mirror over the stove? One of those midcentury mirrors, a round face surrounded by long, sharp metal spikes, like a cold winter sun.

I knew exactly who would hang a mirror over the stove: someone who either never cooked or never had to clean up after himself if he did.

Leo was making us tea. This was not the wild night of debauchery I had feared. I could fake a headache or a sore throat, slip out early. An image of my sister, her wrist spurting a fountain of blood, wouldn’t stop rattling through my mind. Yes, her suicide attempt had been a cry for help. But what if she cried for help again?