you’ll be sleeping,” he told Brink, slapping the daybed, and Brink said, “I’m good with that.”
Micah was mildly curious about Brink’s political views, but the whole time the announcers were talking, Brink was consulting his cell phone. Micah glanced toward Cass, hoping to exchange a grimace with her, but she remained stubbornly focused on a line of Latino immigrants being herded into a paddy wagon.
Well before the news was finished, though, she stretched her arms above her head and yawned aloud and said, “I should be going, I guess. I’m really beat.” Then she said, “Good night, Brink,” and he glanced up from his phone and said, “Hmm? Oh. Nice meeting you.”
Micah waited till he and Cass were out in the kitchen before he asked, “You don’t want to stay over?”
“No,” she said, “you have company.” And she took her parka from the back of the chair and shrugged herself into it.
“That shouldn’t change anything,” he said. He wrapped his arms around her from behind and tucked his face into her neck, the warm nook of it that seemed especially designed for the point of his nose. “I was hoping for a little cuddle,” he murmured.
But she disentangled his arms and moved toward the door. “You never asked about Nan,” she tossed back.
“Oh! Nan,” he said. “Right. Did you call her?”
“No,” she said. She opened the door and stepped out.
“Don’t you think you ought to?” he asked.
She turned and gave him a look he couldn’t read. “Maybe I should just go live in a car with Deemolay and his grandmother,” she said.
“Aw, now,” he said, teasing her. “Why do that when you’ve got a car of your own you can live in?”
But this didn’t make her smile. She just closed the door behind her and left him standing alone in the kitchen.
He stared at the blank expanse of the door for a moment, and then he turned and headed back toward his office. He ought to fetch Brink some sheets, he supposed. Then he would relocate to his bedroom. Ordinarily he hung out on the couch and played solitaire on his phone in the evenings, but not tonight. Not with an audience, so to speak. That was the trouble with houseguests: they took over a person’s space. They seeped into all the corners.
The image rose up in his mind of the baby in the supermarket, watching him so expectantly. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that prophetic dreams were not much use if their meaning emerged only in hindsight.
3
BRINK, IT SEEMED, had that teenage knack for sleeping late. When Micah set out on his run the next morning, the office door was tightly closed and silent. It was still that way when he got back, and later when he emerged from his shower. He debated what to do if he had to leave on a client call before Brink woke up. Leave anyhow, he supposed. He didn’t figure the kid for any kind of felon.
As he was scrambling eggs, he saw a cell phone in a spangled case lying next to the stove. Brink must have spotted Micah’s charger at some point the previous evening and made a mental note of it—returned to the kitchen to plug in his phone after Micah went off to his room. This gave Micah an edgy sense of invasion, although of course there was nothing particularly private about a charging cord. He shook the feeling off and dished his eggs out onto a plate.
Darn, he should have fixed bacon. The smell of frying bacon worked better than any alarm clock, in Micah’s experience.
Ding! Brink’s phone went. A text. It was loud enough to make Micah glance toward the office door again, but still he heard no sounds of stirring. The phone gave its repeat alert two minutes later. Micah sat down with his eggs.
The percolator stopped chugging, and he rose to pour his first cup of coffee. As he sat back down with it, the phone gave another ding. “Es muy misterioso,” he said aloud. He added cream to his coffee and