THE BLINDFOLD HOUR

The first game was called the Blindfold Hour, and it took place, according to the printed card that arrived at the Aurelian on Friday afternoon, "in the dining room of Halcyon House, at nine, in the dark."

Win read the card twice. She put it in the ledger.

Then she did what she always did before a hearing, an audit, or the reading of a will: she made a list. Eat lightly. Take the white pill at seven, the blue at eight. Do not wear anything you cannot take off yourself. Do not, under any circumstances, look at your face in the mirror after six o'clock. She underlined the last one twice. The woman in the mirror had grown very good at looking like Win Callaghan, but she had begun to slip at the corners.

She wore the black McQueen again, because it was the only dress she owned that did not feel like a lie. She wore nothing on her left hand. At eight-fifty a young man in a gray uniform met her at the foot of the main stairs, bowed without speaking, and led her down a long corridor lit by a single candle, to a pair of double doors that opened onto absolute darkness.

"Mr. Draycott is waiting," he said, and left her.

She stood at the threshold.

It was a curious sensation, to step into a room that was not there. The dark was perfect. It was not the dark of a bedroom at night, with its gray rectangle of window and its small domestic glints; it was the dark of a mine, thick and warm and slightly resonant, a dark with a floor in it. She heard her own heartbeat. She heard the faint, steady, nearly inaudible tick of something that was not a clock.

"Close the door," said Callum.

His voice came from somewhere to her left and a little above. It was low and unhurried and nearer than she had expected. She closed the door. It shut with a muffled click, and the last sliver of corridor candlelight went out like a lid coming down.

"Don't move."

She didn't.

"You can't see me, and I can't see you. That's the first rule. The second is that you will not speak unless I ask you a question or you wish to use the word. The third—" a soft, faint smile in the voice "—is that there isn't one. Do you understand?"

"I understand the first and second. I'm skeptical of the third."

"You may be skeptical in silence."

"That seems to defeat the purpose."

A pause.

"Ms. Callaghan," said Callum, "I'm going to blindfold you."

"I thought the room did that."

"This is a different thing."

A hand touched her shoulder. She felt it before she heard anything: the warm, dry, exact pressure of fingertips on bare skin, and then the whisper of silk as something soft and cool passed across her eyes and was drawn gently, firmly, behind her head. His knuckles brushed the back of her neck as he tied it. He smelled of cedar and cold air and, faintly, of the sea.

"Can you see?"

"No."

"Can you see anything?"

"A little purple."

"That's the nerves in your eyes, firing at nothing. It goes away."

"Does it?"

"It goes away," said Callum, "when you stop looking for the light."

…

The table was cold marble. She knew because he guided her to a chair and her forearms found the edge of it, a smooth bright chill after the warmth of the room. She heard him sit, opposite. She heard the faint click of a lid, once, and then a silence, and she understood that he had put the watch on the table between them.

"Now," he said. "Tell me what this is."

Something touched her lips. It was small and cool and slightly wet. She parted them. A taste burst on her tongue, bright and briny and so enormous that for a second she lost the thread of herself: sea, iron, cold, a sweetness that came up behind the salt like a second wave.

"Oyster," said Win.

"Which?"

"Atlantic. Not Pacific. Pacific is creamier." She swallowed. "Belon, if you're showing off."

"I'm showing off."

"I thought so."

"Again."

This one was warm. It was soft and sticky and slightly bitter, and it came with the clean astringent perfume of orange peel and a deep, stubborn, dark sweetness that she knew from childhood. She knew it before she knew why.

"Chocolate," said Win. "Bitter. Seventy percent or more. With orange."

"Why do you hesitate?"

"I'm not hesitating."

"You are."

"My mother used to give me this," said Win. She hadn't meant to say it. The dark does that. It takes the guard away from a woman and leaves her only her tongue. "On Sundays. A little square, with a slice of orange. She said it was the only grown-up thing she could afford."

"Is she—"

"Clause eleven," said Win, lightly.

Silence. Then, to her surprise, a short dry breath of laughter.

"Quite right," said Callum. "My mistake."

…

He fed her for what seemed a long time.

He fed her smoked salt on a silver spoon, and a green olive that tasted like a coastal road, and a sliver of cold melon that dissolved against her tongue like a rumor. He held a glass to her lips and she knew it for champagne by the sting. He held another and it was water so cold it ached her teeth. At one point he laid a piece of ice against the inside of her wrist, and drew it slowly up her forearm to the crook of the elbow, and she felt every muscle in her body tighten in a long, slow, involuntary shiver that began at the base of her spine.

"Cold?" said Callum.

"Yes."

"Afraid?"

"No."

"Not even a little?"

"Mr. Draycott," said Win, "are you trying to scare me with a cube of ice?"

The ice stopped.

It sat at the crook of her elbow, melting. She felt a thread of water run down her arm and drip from her wrist onto the marble, and she heard, in the dark, the unmistakable sound of a man deciding not to say something.

"No," he said at last. "I'm trying to find where you are."

"Where I am?"

"Everyone has a place they go. When they're touched. When they're frightened. I haven't yet found yours." The ice moved again. It followed the line of the vein to the soft hollow of her inner arm, and lingered. "Most people, when I take their eyes away, begin to talk. They fill the dark. They tell me what they like and what they're sorry for and what they've done to someone they were supposed to love. You have been sitting there for twenty minutes, naming oysters."

"I am very good at oysters."

"I am aware."

"Perhaps there's just nothing in there."

"I don't believe that."

"No?"

"I believe," said Callum, very softly, "that there is something in there you're taking great pains to keep from me."

The ice was gone. His fingers replaced it. They were warm, now, impossibly warm, closing around her wrist with a light, exact pressure over the place where her pulse was, and she realized that he was counting. She could tell by the rhythm of his thumb. He was counting her heart.

"Seventy-two," he said. "It's been seventy-two for twenty minutes. A woman who is not afraid has a pulse like that. So does a woman who has decided not to be."

"Which am I?"

"That's what I'm trying to find out."

"And when you find out?"

"I haven't decided."

"You do know," said Win, "that you could just ask."

"Clause eleven."

"You wrote the clause."

"Yes," said Callum. "And I find I'm regretting it."

…

At some point the game stopped being a game.

She could not have said when. It wasn't a change in the air or a change in the room; it was a change in the weight of his hands. They had been exact. They had been precise as instruments, sliding along her collarbone, her jaw, the line of her throat, testing. Now they were slower. They were no longer looking for anything. They had simply forgotten, somewhere between the oyster and the melon, to leave.

"You haven't asked me what I want," said Win.

"You know the answer."

"Tell me anyway."

"I want to hear you say it."

"That's rather a lot to ask of someone who isn't allowed to speak."

"I withdraw the rule."

"All of it?"

"All of it." His voice had gone rough, unexpectedly, at the edges. "Say what you like."

"Then I'd like," said Win carefully, "to hear the time."

A silence.

"The time."

"You've got a watch. I've heard it all night. It clicks when you're thinking, and it clicked just now, when I said your name." She turned her face a degree to the left. The silk bandage moved against her lashes. "What does it say?"

"It says four seventeen."

"It's ten past ten."

"It doesn't say ten past ten."

"Why not?"

"Because it's stopped," said Callum.

She heard the lid snap open. She heard, a second later, nothing at all, in a stillness so complete that she thought for a moment he had left the room. Then something cold and heavy was laid in her palm and her fingers were closed over it with great gentleness, by a hand that was not entirely steady.

"It's been stopped for twenty-two years," he said.

She held the watch. It was small, and warm from his skin, and worn smooth at the edges where a thumb had passed over it ten thousand times. The crystal was cracked. She traced the crack with her nail. It ran from one o'clock to seven, exactly across the face, as though someone had tried, and failed, to cut it in half.

"Why do you keep it?" said Win.

"Clause eleven."

"I'm not asking your reasons. I'm asking about the watch."

"They're the same question."

"Then I withdraw it," said Win. She closed her hand around the little silver disc. "I'll keep it for a minute, if you don't mind. It's the first thing in this room that's telling the truth."

"What truth?"

"That it's later than anyone thinks."

The man across the table let out a breath she could feel on her face.

He leaned forward. She heard the chair, and felt the table's edge shift. His hand came up and untied the silk, with a slowness that was almost unbearable, and the bandage fell away from her eyes, and there was no light to meet them. She stared at nothing. And in that absolute black she felt his forehead come to rest against hers, very lightly, as a man might lean against a door he was not yet ready to open.

"You are," Callum said, "extremely inconvenient."

"So I'm told."

"By whom?"

"By everyone who ever tried to owe me anything."

He kissed her.

It was not what she had expected. She had expected force, a quick cold claim, the kind of kiss that signed its name. It was slow. It was almost careful. It tasted of salt and champagne and, behind that, something grave and rueful and unmistakably alive. She felt the whole length of him shake once, as though a wire had been pulled taut inside him, and then settle.

Afterward there was only the dark, and the sound of two people breathing, and the slow warm wash of a night that did not need to be described. She was aware, at the very edge of knowing, of his hand in her hair; of her own fingers curled in the front of his shirt; of a smell like rain on stone; and of a feeling in her chest that she examined, from a long way off, with the cold tidy attention of an adjuster.

Coverage, she thought. This is what coverage feels like.

She was almost unbearably happy. She was going to be sick.

…

She waited until he slept.

He didn't sleep long. A man like that doesn't. Some time after one he had gone quiet beside her, with the watch back in his hand and his breathing finally slow, and she lay very still until the nausea crested, the way a wave does, and passed over, and left her with a few minutes. She slid out from under his arm. She found the door by touch. She found the bathroom across the corridor by the thin gold line of light under it.

She locked herself in.

It was a marble bathroom with a claw-footed tub and a window of old green glass. She got to the toilet in time. She knelt on the cold floor in the black McQueen with her forehead on her forearm, and was sick for what felt like a very long time, quietly, efficiently, with her hair held back in one hand. When it was over, she sat back against the wall and put her head against the cool tile.

The pill bottle was in her purse. She did not want to take it. She wanted, with a dull and unreasonable ferocity, to sit here for another minute in her own body, the one that had just been touched.

She closed her eyes and began to count.

Ten. Nine. Eight.

Her hands were shaking. She held them still against her knees.

Seven. Six.

The ache under her ribs had woken. It was a different ache now: deeper, with edges. It said we're still here.

Five. Four. Three.

Somewhere behind the door, the floorboard creaked. She stopped counting.

She knew it was him. She knew it from the quality of the silence, a silence with a person standing in it. She held her breath. She heard nothing: not a knock, not her name, not the rattle of the handle. Just that careful quiet, a few feet away, on the other side of an inch and a half of oak.

He heard.

Of course he'd heard. The walls were thin enough to carry a whisper. He had stood there in the corridor in his shirtsleeves, with a dead watch in his fist, and listened to a woman be sick in a bathroom for four minutes, and he had not knocked.

He had not asked.

Neither party shall ask the other's reasons.

Win put the back of her hand against her mouth. She was not going to cry. She had not cried in the car, or in the doctor's office, or on the floor of an empty apartment with Josie's arms round her. But something enormous and soft had risen up behind her breastbone, a thing with no name in the language of claims, and for ten seconds she had to sit there with her eyes shut, and breathe, and let it go by.

Two, she thought. One.

Zero.

She washed her face. She rinsed her mouth. She took the white pill from her purse and swallowed it dry. When she was certain her face would hold, she unlocked the door and stepped out into the corridor.

He was there.

He was leaning against the opposite wall with his arms crossed, in a rumpled white shirt, with his hair disordered and his feet bare. The corridor candle threw his shadow long and thin across the stones. He didn't look at her face. He looked, with great deliberation, at a point somewhere past her left shoulder.

"The water in the second bathroom is warmer," said Callum.

"Thank you."

"There are towels."

"I'm sure there are."

"And a robe. If you'd like to stay."

She looked at him. It was a long look. She saw the faint red crease on his cheek where the pillow had been; the open collar; the knuckle of his right hand, white around the watch. She saw how exactly he was not asking.

"Mr. Draycott."

"Yes."

"Thank you for not knocking."

"I don't know what you mean," said Callum. He pushed away from the wall. He was a head taller, and in that light he looked almost young. "Go and get warm. I've sent for tea."

"Do you drink tea?"

"No."

"Then why—"

"Clause eleven," said Callum, and the corner of his mouth moved very slightly. "Good night, Ms. Callaghan."

He turned. She watched him go as far as the end of the corridor, with that long, restrained, unhurried walk, and then he stopped, without turning round, one hand on the stone arch.

"Next week," he said, to the dark, "I'm going to raise the stakes."

"I'd be disappointed if you didn't."

"You may not be."

"I'm never disappointed," said Win. "I'm only ever early."

He was gone. The candle guttered. She stood alone in the narrow stone corridor with her hand on the cold wall, and her knees, she noticed, were not quite her own.

She went to get warm.