opened the cupboard under the sink. The watering can was still there.
Most of the plants around the flat were beyond revival. I watered them anyway. I stopped by one pot for a long time. When I had bought the cheese plant for her it had been just over four feet tall. When I left it had been nearly six, the leaves as big and glossy as heavily glazed dinner plates. And now the cheese plant was dying, the edges of its leaves yellow and parchment thin, the trailing aerial roots hanging like the shriveled skins of snakes.
“Put it on the table,” she said when I brought out the coffee. “I’m just about done here.”
I sat, and after a minute she joined me. It felt very strange to be sharing the same couch.
“So. Payment.”
“Yes,” I said, and waited.
“That scam you were so keen on a few months ago. The net ads for charity. Think it’s still possible?”
“I can make the film, and it’ll bring in money. Can you do the rest?” I deliberately didn’t look at the dust on the bench.
“No problem.” She made a dismissive gesture. “The hard part is going to be start-up costs.”
“I’ve got nothing left. Not to speak of.” I wondered briefly what it would be like to get a paycheck. Another three weeks to wait for that.
“I’ll provide start-up, then, on condition that it comes out of the pot before we divide it.”
“Fifty-fifty?”
She laughed. “You already owe me, remember? Seventy-thirty.”
“Sixty-forty.” I didn’t care about the money. All I wanted was the PIDA. I was bargaining because Spanner would think me weak if I didn’t. I wondered how dangerous her creditors were, and how much she owed them.
“Sixty-forty, then.” She didn’t bother to hold out her hand. I wasn’t sure what I would have done if she had.
“How long?”
“I’ll need to work out what equipment we need. And then I’ll have to find it. Hyn and Zimmer should be able to help.”
I stood. There was no point talking further until we found out about equipment. “I know the way out.”
I walked back to my flat, thinking about Spanner and her dying plants.
Trees are not delicate. You can do all kinds of things to a fully grown tree—drench it in acid rain and infest it with parasites, carve initials in its bark and split branch from trunk—and it will survive. It is not presence but absence that will kill a tree. Take away its sunshine and it will stretch vainly upward, groping, growing etiolated, spindly beyond belief, and die. Take away its water and its leaves wrinkle, become transparent, and fall.
I tilted the watering can into the pot of my ficus tree, watching the brown, granular soil darken and smooth out as it absorbed the water. I sprayed the leaves, wondering when the light green of the leaves grown in the summer, summer when I had left Spanner, had blended with the seasoned, deeper green of all the others. And then I cried.
I was still crying when I went into the bathroom. It was small, painted peach and cream, and everything in it was clean, but somehow it still reminded me of the bathroom Spanner and I had shared. Even the mirror, which was new and square.
I turned the cold tap, splashed my face. Enough, I told myself sternly. But how could it be enough when even the clear, cold water streaming into the sink reminded me of the first time I went into Spanner’s bathroom? How could it be enough when I looked into the mirror and even the hair framing my face was the fox red Spanner had chosen?
I looked at my hair more closely and sighed. The gray roots were beginning to show again. That would have to be fixed before I went to my new job.
I had never liked red. I would buy some brown dye, and I would let my eyebrows grow back. Symmetrically.
Lore’s back was healed and her hair was a different color. She was as disguised as she was going to get. She was getting restless.
She had been inside the flat for several weeks and, before that, the kidnappers’ tent. Now she was afraid to go outside. She sat by the living-room window and watched the sky as it turned to November gray, and shuddered. It was so big, so open. She tried to imagine being out under the whipping clouds, among the people who all seemed to be hurrying toward destinations she could only guess at. But she had nowhere