A Place Set

Olivia had rehearsed it four different ways in the shower, and none of them survived contact with the cafeteria.

"So," she said, as casually as she could manage, sliding into the chair across from Sage on Tuesday. "Weird question."

"Those are the only kind you ask."

"True." She unwrapped her granola bar, broke it in half, and slid one half across the table without looking. It had become a small habit again since last week, almost superstitious, like touching wood. "It's Thanksgiving on Monday. My mom's doing the whole thing. Turkey, the good stuffing, my aunt from Red Deer who brings the pie nobody wants. She said I should invite you."

Sage stopped with her sandwich halfway to her mouth.

"You don't have to say yes," Olivia added, quickly. "I know you have work. I know it's a lot. I just, she said to ask, and I said I'd ask, and now I've asked."

"I have work Monday."

"Okay."

"Marsh runs the place on holidays. He says it's the best night for business. People don't want to cook."

"Okay." Olivia kept her voice easy. She had promised herself this much. No pushing, no wounded looks, no visible disappointment. She'd practised that face too. "That's fine. Totally fine. Then, what about tonight? Instead. It's not a holiday, it's just dinner. Mom made way too much of something with chicken in it. You'd be doing me a favour."

"Tonight."

"Tonight. Just dinner."

Olivia watched the whole thing cross Sage's face. It went in stages, the way weather crosses a field. First the reflex, that quick tightening at the mouth that meant *no*. Then something else underneath it, softer and more startled, the look of a person offered a coat in the rain who has forgotten how coats work. Then the careful blank she wore when she was thinking too hard.

She could still feel the weight of a card against her ribs, though it had been sitting in her postcard shoebox at home for two weeks. *She has been frightened long enough.* She had thought about that line nine hundred times. She still didn't know who had written it. She didn't know what Sage was, or what she was afraid of, or who *they* were, the ones who wanted to know what Olivia had noticed. She knew only that her friend ate alone in a small room and was trained, like a soldier, to say *I'm fine.* And that somebody had gone to the trouble of asking Olivia to please, courteously, stand back.

She had decided, sometime around three in the morning last Thursday, that she wasn't going to.

"I'll ask Marsh," Sage said.

Olivia's whole chest went light. "Yeah?"

"I'm not promising."

"I'm not asking for a promise. I'm asking for chicken."

Sage's mouth did something at the corner, small and reluctant and real. "Okay," she said. "I'll ask."

***

Marsh said yes before she'd finished the sentence.

It was almost funny. She had walked into Jade Palace at four thirty with a speech prepared, an actual speech, a careful little argument about homework and a friend and how she'd make up the shift on Saturday. She got as far as *I was wondering if I could have tonight off,* and Marsh, standing at the register with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, said, "Go."

"I can make it up."

"You will not make it up. You will go and eat a real dinner with real people." He rang nothing into the till and closed the drawer. "It's the best idea you've had all month."

"Are you sure? It's Tuesday, Danny's still on doubles, and I don't want to..."

"Sage." He looked at her, and for a second the smile came off entirely, and what was underneath it was only tired. "I want you out of this building. Just for tonight. Just so I can sleep. Go."

She went. She didn't say anything about the new deadbolt, or the phones in the drawer, or the way Danny hadn't looked up from the wok since last Tuesday. She didn't say anything at all. It was, she had decided, a rule of the neighbourhood, and it had never once failed her. What you didn't say couldn't be used against you.

But as she pushed out through the front door into the cold October afternoon, she realized what she'd just done. She had asked for something. She had said the words out loud, *I was wondering if I could have tonight off,* and the world had not ended. Someone had said yes.

She stood on the sidewalk for almost a full minute with her hand on the strap of her bag, and did not walk anywhere.

***

The Bennetts lived on a street called Larkspur Crescent, and the first thing Sage noticed was the trees.

They were huge. They arched over the road in a long copper tunnel, maples gone red at the edges, with the last of the light coming through them in slow gold pieces. She'd walked through Ashford Heights before, to the fringes of it, on errands she'd never quite admitted to herself were curiosity. She had never walked into the middle. The houses got larger and quieter as she went, brick and stone and old wood, each one set back on a lawn with the calm of something that had never once been afraid of its landlord.

Olivia's was the third from the corner. It had a green front door and a lantern above it, already lit, and a pumpkin on the step with a slightly crooked face.

"Dad carved it," Olivia said, holding the door open. She'd been waiting on the porch. "He's very proud. Please don't ask about the nose."

"It's a nice nose."

"It's a tragedy of a nose. Come in."

The house smelled like garlic and lemons and something baking. It was not what Sage had expected. She'd been braced for a magazine, for white sofas and glass tables and a silence you could hear yourself in. Instead there was a hallway full of shoes, an umbrella stand stuffed with about nine umbrellas, a whole wall of framed school photos gone slightly crooked. On the hall table sat a bowl of keys, a stack of mail, and what appeared to be a handful of loose paper napkins.

"The linens are back," Olivia said gravely. "Mom made me swear not to tell anyone."

"Olivia," called a voice from the kitchen. "Is that her?"

"That's her!"

"Well, bring her in, don't leave the poor girl in the hall!"

They went through. The kitchen was warm and bright and a little chaotic, a big old table in the middle of it with five different kinds of clutter, and at the stove, with a wooden spoon in one hand and a tea towel over her shoulder, stood a woman in a green sweater. She turned around, smiling, already halfway through *Hello, sweetheart, I'm so glad you*

And she stopped.

It was very small. It lasted maybe half a second. If Sage hadn't spent two years reading every micro-expression in every room she'd ever walked into, she would have missed it entirely. Mrs. Bennett's face simply, briefly, stopped. Her eyes went to Sage's face and stayed there, wide and startled, with the look of a woman who has just heard her own name called from an empty house.

Then it passed. The smile came back like a light switching on. She set down the spoon and wiped her hand on the towel and came around the table with her arm out.

"Sage. Olivia's told us so much. Well, no, she hasn't, she tells us nothing, but I've gathered." She laughed, and it was a good laugh, warm and slightly loud. "I'm Claire."

"Thank you for having me, Mrs. Bennett."

"Claire. Please. Everybody calls me Claire, except Olivia, who calls me *Mom* in that tone."

"I don't have a tone," said Olivia.

"You have several."

Sage found her hand being taken and held in both of Claire Bennett's, dry and warm, calloused a bit at the thumb from years of something, and she braced. She always braced. It was automatic now, that tightening behind her sternum like a person setting her feet before a wave.

The wave didn't come.

There was no flash. No grief, no memory, nothing that poured out of the woman's skin and into hers. What she felt instead was quieter and much stranger. It was a warmth, low and general, like walking into a room where someone had just been laughing. Not a picture. Not a name. Only the feeling of a picture, a screen door, maybe, or a long summer table, right at the edge of something she almost knew.

She let go too quickly. Claire's hands lingered a moment, and then dropped.

"Sorry," Claire said, and laughed again, not quite as loudly. "I'm a hugger. I don't know where I got it. Nobody in my family's like this. Sit, sit. Peter! Peter, she's here!"

***

Dinner was chicken with something creamy, and roasted potatoes, and green beans that Mr. Bennett insisted on calling "a vegetable in a supporting role." He was a tall man with a careful voice and reading glasses on a chain, and he had the habit of taking every question seriously, even the ones that weren't.

"Olivia tells me you're at the top of Aldrich's class," he said.

"I'm not."

"She says you got an A on the essay about the Rebellion."

"It was an okay essay."

"That's what a person says when it was an excellent essay." He looked at her over his glasses, kindly. "Have you thought about what you'll do after? University, college?"

"I don't plan very far," Sage said. It was the truest thing she could think of, and it landed on the table like a dropped spoon.

"Dad," Olivia said.

"That's a perfectly reasonable answer," said Mr. Bennett, and to Sage's surprise he meant it. "I made a great many plans at your age. Most of them were wrong. It's the ones you didn't plan that turn out to matter." He glanced sideways at his daughter, and something in his face went gentler. "I keep having to remind myself of that."

Olivia looked at her plate, and blushed a little, and said nothing at all. Sage saw her hand move, once, and squeeze her father's sleeve.

It was so easy. That was what she couldn't stop noticing. Nobody in this room was performing. There was no theatre in it, no flourish, no careful surface over something colder. Olivia's father was simply a man who cared about his daughter and didn't know how to say it, and her mother was a woman who cooked too much, and the dinner went around and around them like a river with no bottom.

They passed the potatoes. They argued about hockey. Claire told a long, unflattering story about the fundraiser, and the linens, and a neighbour with a minivan who had been *entirely too enthusiastic,* and Sage laughed. Really laughed, the way she had in the bookshop. It startled her again, hearing it come out of her own mouth.

She reached up, without thinking, to tuck her hair behind her ear.

She did it with two fingers, quick, a small flat motion, and paused with the fork in her other hand. It was a thing she'd always done. Nobody had ever noticed.

Claire had noticed.

She was sitting across the table with her glass halfway to her mouth, and she'd stopped, again, that same quiet stop. She was looking at Sage's hand. Her lips had parted slightly, as though she were about to say something.

"You do that exactly like," she said.

The table went still.

"Like who?" Olivia said.

"Nobody." Claire set the glass down carefully. She smiled, and it was very nearly her usual smile. "Like someone I used to know. It's silly. People have the same gestures. It's a small world." She lifted the serving spoon. "More potatoes, Sage?"

"Thank you."

"Where are your people from, dear? Olivia says you haven't been in Millhaven long."

"Two years," Sage said. "Before that, Ohio. Youngstown."

"Ohio." Claire repeated it as though it were a word in another language. She put a spoonful of potatoes on Sage's plate with great care. "I knew someone from Ohio, once."

"A lot of people are from Ohio," said Mr. Bennett, mildly.

"Yes. Of course they are." She put the spoon down. "How silly of me."

Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Olivia, with the desperate cheerfulness of a person throwing herself onto a grenade, said loudly, "Dad, tell Sage about the time you got locked in the walk-in at the law school," and the whole table exhaled at once.

But Sage had felt it. She'd felt it as a kind of pressure, brief and enormous, the way you feel the weight of a stranger's stare in a crowded room. It wasn't fear or suspicion. It was something much older and more careful than that. It was the look of a woman holding very, very still, so as not to frighten off something she had lost a long time ago.

She didn't ask. She had learned, from Olivia, how to not ask.

She ate her potatoes. They were the best she'd ever had.

***

At the door, after dessert, after the third argument about whether Sage was too thin, Claire pressed a foil-wrapped plate into her hands.

"For tomorrow. Don't argue, it's leftovers, it's not a gift." She hesitated. "And come Monday, if you can. Even for an hour. We'll set a place. If you can't, we'll set one anyway. That's how it's done, in our house."

"I'll think about it," Sage said.

"That's all anyone can do." Claire looked at her a moment longer. Her hand came up, as if to touch Sage's cheek, and stopped, and went instead to her own collar, and straightened it. "You're welcome here, Sage. I mean that. Whenever."

"Thank you," Sage said, and this time her voice came out steady, and she turned and walked down the path toward the crooked pumpkin and the copper trees, carrying the plate against her chest, and did not look back until she'd reached the corner.

The green door was still open. Olivia was standing in the light of the lantern, one hand raised, and behind her in the hall, half out of the light, stood her mother, perfectly still, watching the street.

***

The dishes took a long time.

Olivia washed and her mother dried, which was the arrangement, and for the first ten minutes neither of them said anything. The water ran. The tea towel snapped. Upstairs, her father had put on the hockey game.

"She's very quiet," Claire said at last.

"She's careful."

"That's a kind word for it." Claire set a plate down on the rack, and picked up another, and set it down again. "How long have you known her?"

"Since the spring. The watershed project. I told you."

"You did." A pause. "Does she have family here?"

"No." Olivia's hands went still in the water. "She lives alone, Mom. She's fifteen, and she lives by herself, and she works at a diner, and I don't think anyone has ever cooked her dinner. I don't know anything about her. That's kind of the whole problem."

"Nobody at all?"

"Nobody I know of."

Claire looked at the dish in her hands as if she had never seen it. "That's hard," she said, quietly. "For a girl that age."

Olivia turned and looked at her. Claire Bennett was standing at the kitchen counter in her green sweater with the tea towel in her hands, and she was smiling, and the smile was almost perfect. But her eyes weren't on the dishes. They were on the window over the sink, on the black glass and the small reflection of the room in it, and on something a long way past it.

"Mom," Olivia said. "Who did she remind you of?"

"Nobody, sweetheart."

"You said..."

"I know what I said." Claire folded the towel into a square, and then a smaller square. Her voice was very gentle. "Be kind to her. That's all. Whatever else. She's a girl who's had to be much older than she is, and it shows, and I'd like her to have somewhere to put it down."

"I'm trying."

"I know you are. You're a good friend." Claire kissed the top of her head, quickly. "Go on up. I'll finish."

Olivia went. She went up the stairs slowly, past the crooked photographs, and it was only when she'd reached the landing that she looked back. Her mother was still at the sink. She hadn't turned the water on. She was standing very straight with both hands flat on the edge of the counter, staring at the window, and for the first time in her life Olivia thought her mother looked like someone who was trying not to remember.

She took her card out of the shoebox that night, and read it, and put it back.

*She has been frightened long enough.*

Somebody knew a great deal about Sage. And somebody, three doors down from Olivia's own bedroom, seemed to know a great deal about her too.

***

"Hollis and Crane," Nate said. "Notaries Public. Tanner Street."

The woman behind the counter of the laundromat, a wide tired woman named Mrs. Adeyemi with a set of reading glasses on her forehead and a cash box under one arm, squinted at the business card he'd set down. "That's him. That's the man."

"Tell me again," said Eli.

"I already told the young officer. Back in August, before all of this." She sighed. "A gentleman came in. Very polite. Lovely coat, gloves, the kind of manners you don't see anymore. He said he was a notary, tracing an estate. A family had left things in safekeeping with local businesses a long time ago, and he was trying to find them. He asked if we kept things for people. Envelopes. Boxes. Lost property. I said we've got the bin, and the counter, and he asked if he could look through them. I said no, not without a reason. He was very nice about it."

"Did he say whose estate?"

"He said it was confidential." She sniffed. "I thought, well, he's a notary. They're always confidential."

"And then somebody broke in," Nate said.

"Two weeks later." Mrs. Adeyemi laid a hand on her cash box. "I thought about him then. But he was such a gentleman. And he left that." She tapped the card. "So I thought, it can't be him."

Nate turned it over. Cream stock, heavy, expensive. Raised lettering, a phone number, an address on Tanner Street. There was something about the paper he didn't like. It was too clean. It was a card that had never once been in a pocket.

"Did he say his name?" Eli asked.

"He said it, I didn't write it down. It was ordinary. It was like a name out of a book." She frowned. "I'm sorry. I'm bad with names. I only remember the coat."

Eli was already dialing the number on the card. He held the phone to his ear for a long moment, and his face went slowly flat.

"Disconnected," he said.

"Of course it is."

"Doesn't mean the address is." Eli pocketed his phone. "Tanner Street, though. That's Old Millhaven. Half of it's lawyers and the other half is places nobody ever goes into."

Nate looked at the card again. He thought of four rooms torn apart in the dark, drawers upended, filing cabinets emptied onto floors. He thought of a polite man in good gloves, asking very nicely if he could look through the lost property. And he thought of what Eli had said on Friday, half joking, over a stack of folders.

*Something somebody left with somebody, a long time ago.*

"We should go take a look," he said.

"We're in court until Friday," said Eli. "First thing Friday. And then lunch. Not at the dumpling place."

"I know."

"I'm only saying."

"I know, Vance."

Outside, on the sidewalk, the afternoon had gone grey and windless, and the wet leaves lay flat on the pavement, and somewhere up the street a child was laughing at a dog. It was an ordinary afternoon. Nate stood with the notary's card in his hand, and felt, right at the center of his chest, that slow familiar tug, warm and patient and unexplained.

And for the first time since Memphis, he wasn't sure it was pointing at the past.