Borrowed Sugar

In the morning she's at the coffee cart.

Of course she is. The cart on the corner of Sheridan and Thorndale, the one run by a man named Melvin who makes the worst coffee on the North Side and the best breakfast burrito in the world, and Verena is leaning against it in her camel coat with the collar up, laughing at something he said.

Melvin doesn't make people laugh. Melvin barely makes coffee.

"Ah," she says when she sees you. "My neighbor."

"You know my name," you say. "I didn't tell you my name."

"Good morning to you too." She hands Melvin a twenty and waves off the change. "The doorman told me. Sylvester. He told me your name, your floor, that you run along the lake at six and that you once fixed his tax return for free. He also told me his doctor wants him to cut out salt and he doesn't intend to." She tilts her head. "He's very forthcoming. You should talk to him about that."

It's plausible. It's completely plausible. Sylvester would tell a lamp post your blood type if it asked nicely.

Melvin holds out a cup. "Usual, Ava."

Before you can take it, Verena takes it. She hands you hers instead.

"Try mine," she says. "Yours smells burned."

"It's always burned. That's the usual."

"Then try something unusual." Her eyes hold yours a beat longer than they need to. "Humor me. I saved your life."

"So you admit it."

"I admit nothing. I'm a translator." She sips your terrible coffee without flinching. "Have a good day at the office."

She walks away down Sheridan without looking back, and Melvin watches her go with his mouth slightly open, and so do two joggers and a man walking a dachshund.

You look down at the cup. Oat milk, a little cinnamon. Exactly how you'd make it if you had time.

Hazelton Quigg occupies the thirty-first floor of a granite tower on LaSalle Street, all glass and quiet carpet and framed prints of graphs that someone thought were art. Forensic accounting is a quiet business. You find the money people hid. You write it down. Lawyers do the shouting.

Fi Tindall ambushes you at the elevator with two donuts and a face.

"You look terrible," she says. "Did the hot stranger come back?"

"She moved in across the hall."

Fi stops chewing. Fi is thirty, five foot nothing, all dark curls and cat-eye glasses, and on weekends she does special-effects makeup for horror cosplay conventions, which means she has opinions about how blood should look. She lowers her donut.

"I'm sorry?"

"Same woman. Same face. Moved into 2206 last night with one box."

"One box?"

"One box."

"That's a serial killer box, Ava."

"She's a legal translator."

"That's what a serial killer would say." Fi grabs your sleeve. "Okay, separate weirdness. Come look at this."

At your desk she taps your laptop awake. She's on the internal IT team half the time, so she can see things nobody else bothers to look at.

"Your machine logged in at 2:13 a.m. last night," she says. "From inside the building. You weren't here."

"I was asleep."

"I know. Someone used your credentials and opened the Bexmoor folder." She scrolls. "They looked at the Radley Point workpapers for nine minutes and then they logged out."

Your skin goes cold under your sweater.

"Who has my credentials?"

"You. IT admin. Partners, technically." She glances toward the corner office, where the blinds are half open and Nanette Quigg is on the phone, pearls, silver-blonde bob, reading glasses pushed up into her hair. "Probably nothing. Probably IT running an audit on the auditor."

"Probably."

At eleven, Nanette calls you in.

She is fifty-four and the most precise human you know. She taught you to trust the paper over the people. When you started at Hazelton Quigg six years ago, she told you that every lie leaves a receipt, and you've been chasing receipts for her ever since.

"Your memo," she says, and smiles. "It's excellent work."

Some knot in your chest loosens. "Thank you. I think the Radley Point payments are..."

"I know what you think. You wrote eleven pages about it." She takes her glasses down. "This is sensitive. Bexmoor's board is full of very important people. I want to handle the client conversation myself. Send me all your workpapers on Radley Point. The originals, your notes, anything you've pulled from the bank. I'll keep it under my own login."

"All of it?"

"All of it, Ava. Today." She's already looking at her screen. "And don't discuss it with anyone. Not even Josefina."

You do as you're told. You always do. You send the files to Nanette at 4:52 p.m. and stare at the confirmation and feel, for no reason you can put in a spreadsheet, like you've just handed someone a key.

Over the next two days, Verena is everywhere.

She's in the elevator when you come home Thursday, holding a bag of groceries that's mostly lemons. She's on the lakefront path at six Friday morning, running in black leggings at exactly your pace, two strides behind, and when you stop at Foster Beach she stops too and stretches like a dancer and says, "Nice morning."

"Are you following me?"

"I'm running in the same direction at the same time. It's a different thing."

"Is it?"

"Legally? Completely." She smiles. The scar through her eyebrow lifts. "Also, you shouldn't run with earbuds in. You can't hear anyone coming up behind you."

"Like you?"

"Especially like me."

She flirts with everyone. You notice that. She flirts with Melvin and with Sylvester and with the woman at the dry cleaner's who blushes to her hairline. She has a way of leaning toward people that makes them feel like the only person on the block.

But she only watches you. You notice that too.

On Friday night you stay late at the office because Nanette asked for a summary you could have written in your sleep, and you get home at midnight on a train so empty it echoes. Sylvester's off. The night guy is asleep at the desk.

You walk down the twenty-second floor hallway with your keys out, the way you always do.

Your door is closed. Your lock is locked.

You open it and the smell hits you like a hand over your mouth.

Gas. Thick, sweet, rotten gas.

And in your kitchen, in the dark, with every window flung open to the cold lake wind, stands Verena, her gloved hand still on the knob of your stove.

She turns her head.

"Don't touch the light switch," she says quietly. "Come here. Slowly."

You don't move. "What are you doing in my apartment?"

"Saving it." She lets go of the knob. "Someone left your stove on, Ava."

Her grey eyes find yours across the dark.

"It wasn't you."