“Maybe I do miss her. Nobody fucked up a Starbucks order quite like Tuij.”
Harvey piles a load of silk shirts up and then sits cross-legged on the floor to fold them, before placing them in boxes. “You want this taken to a thrift store?”
“No.” I swipe away a load of deleted emails with my index finger. Goodbye, time-sucking fuckface advertisers. Rot in digital hell with Viagra spam and thinly veiled incest porn. Gwen should have my company account login by now; this is the last time I’ll have to do this myself, and thank God for that. I don’t get this crap in my personal account. “Have it sent to storage. Tuij’s family might want it, or something.”
Her family think all her belongings were at her apartment, which they cleared months ago. I didn’t tell them about the office stash because I didn’t want them to get in here only to realize how much time she spent at work. And if I’ve come in here a couple times late at night, it’s only to escape work. To find space in my brain when the atmosphere in my own office was crippling, and my Leo was nowhere to be found in hers. She has a habit of being busy that is useful in its commercial subterfuge, but annoying in the face of her absence.
The quiet in here is still welcome solace. It’s a relief to escape the images flashing across my office TV screens; I thought rationalizing them to Gwen would help, but it hasn’t. My brain just spits Posner’s words back at me every time they come up: stay away. So here I am, pretending to be interested in clearing out my inbox when I’m mostly picturing the state of Leo’s chopstick scratch, playing her yelps over and over in my head like some kind of lullaby. They soothe me.
Then it occurs to me that Jamie Perkins’s screams probably soothed—or titillated— Blood Honey, and there’s a whisper of nausea rising like smoke in my belly, irritating capillaries and heating soft tissue. It’s not because I don’t understand him; it’s because I do. I lost my temper at Leo when she drew similarities between me and this careless butcher, but she’s right.
Fuck.
I do not want to know this. It means that I was wrong. I’m so rarely wrong.
“You know,” Harvey goes on, “I have about twenty other team members who could be doing this while I get on with all the shit I’m supposed to be doing.”
“You don’t need to watch Gwen right now. Fliss updates me hourly and she’s just waiting by her desk.”
“No, but I’m supposed to be installing the bugs on her phones and going through her emails.” He finishes with the shirts and scowls at the mess of heels beneath the desk, discarded randomly as if Tuija herself just kicked them off.
“Leo already tapped her phones.”
“Well-trained, isn’t she?”
“She has her own interests to preserve. And she’s not shy about them.” Ashamed, perhaps. Once. But I’ve dragged her far beyond that and she doesn’t seem bothered enough to climb out of the gutter; you can still see the stars from the gutter, scarlet as they are in our coal pit of a love affair.
“Sir?”
When I glance up, Harvey holds out an elegant scrapbook with a purple suede cover, the kind rich college girls buy just to trash. This one is evidently well-kept, its thick fibers unblemished by mucky hands or lack of care.
I take it from him. Flick through. It’s a grotesque catalogue of cut-out images from various magazines and websites: Tuij and I on red carpets. At charity balls. Staged “intimate” moments from our earlier years, where I’d hold her close and pretend to be enamored while trying not to retch at the stench of her unsubtle perfume. The pages, thick and luxurious as they are, are well-fingered and smell faintly of glue.
“Where did you find this?” I ask.
“Top drawer of her desk, under a bunch of paperwork. You want to keep it?”