“No one.”
She looked directly at him.
“It’s your chapter.”
“It’s your information.”
“I found it in the course of doing my job, and I’m giving it to you.”
Jack looked at her.
“Why?”
“Because it’s the right thing to do.”
A pause.
“And because this is where I work now and I take my work seriously.”
Another silence.
Nobody’s ever said that to me,” Jack said.
“About taking work seriously here.”
“That’s a problem you have also had for a while.”
Something crossed his face.
Almost a smile.
More visible this time.
“Fair.”
He took the folder.
He came back three days later.
He sat down in the office chair again.
And he told her the name of the person who had been moving the money.
He told her it had been handled.
And that she should close out that section of the books and remove the anomaly from the active records.
She did not ask what handled meant.
She had worked around enough complicated men in her life to know which questions to ask and which not to.
But she looked at him as she filed the folder in the archive section.
“You trusted me with that?”
“Yes.”
“It can be dangerous information.”
He thought about it.
“Because you found it and you came straight to me.”
He paused.
“Because you didn’t go looking for it, but you didn’t ignore it either.”
He looked at her.
“I’ve known a lot of people who either see things and don’t tell you.”
“Or tell you things they haven’t actually seen.”
He stopped.
“You seem to be the other kind.”
Evelyn thought about that.
“Gerald used to say…”
She spoke carefully.
“The most reliable people are the ones who say what they see and do what they say.”
She paused.
“He was a reliable man.”
“He sounds like one,” Jack said.
“He was.”
She went back to work.
Jack stayed in the chair for a moment watching her.
Then he got up and went back to whatever needed his attention.
The afternoon settled around them both.
Outside, the Arizona heat pressed down on Silver Creek like a hand.
The fifth week was when Ryan showed up.
She had not told Jack or anyone else the name of the man she was trying to avoid.
She had told them enough.
That there was someone.
That the bruise had not been an accident.
That she needed a place that was safe.
She had not told them the specifics because she was still, at that point, telling herself that she had the situation managed.
She was telling herself that coming here three days a week was enough of a buffer.
She was telling herself that Ryan was difficult and controlling and frightening.
But that she could manage difficult and controlling and frightening.
Because she had been managing it for fourteen months.
And she was still here.
She was telling herself a story that had once been useful.
And was now slowly becoming less true.
Ryan had noticed over the past weeks that she was gone on specific days.
He had not been subtle about noticing.
He had started leaving the television on in the room adjacent to where she slept, loud late into the night.
He had stopped driving her to the pharmacy to pick up her prescriptions and told her to take a cab.