Chapter 12 · Chapter 12

The elder let the silence work. It was not a silence that asked anything of me. It sat in the room the way the oud did, moving where it wanted, and I let it move.

Then he took the folder from his own knee, not mine, and opened it, and turned the first paper so the room could see the corner of it.

"Three papers," he said. "They were drawn before tonight. None of them is new."

The first he set down nearest me. An apartment in the north of the city, in my name, and a sum, and one line that struck a name from a register. Departure, made comfortable.

"This one lets you go clean," he said. "No one says a word against you after. You keep your own money and your own door."

I looked at it long enough that he believed I was reading it.

The second he set beside it. A wing, kept for me, closed on three sides, open on the fourth to the house. No leaving, no contest, no name on anything.