"Security, you said. The college paid." I didn't read from the phone; I knew what I'd written. "My physical safety guaranteed." I set the phone face-down on my knee. "I'll take those as given. They're the floor of this arrangement, not the ceiling."
He nodded once.
"What I actually need," I said, "is for this to be navigable. I can work within constraints. I've done it my whole life. But I need to know where the actual walls are, not just where you've said they are, and I need the walls to be consistent. No rules that shift without explanation. No sudden exceptions that aren't discussed."
I was thinking of my father. I was always thinking of my father, in these conversations, every promise that had been made and quietly forgotten, every boundary that had moved when it was inconvenient to maintain it. I had built my whole sense of what was reliable around things rather than people: locks, schedules, the temperature of coffee that someone had made correctly twice in a row.
I didn't say any of that. He didn't need the backstory to understand the requirement.
He looked at me for a moment. "That's reasonable."
"I know it is."
The corner of his mouth moved, the same almost-thing as last night, the suggestion rather than the execution. He let it pass. So did I.
I picked up my phone. Stood.
At the door I stopped, because there was one more thing and it was the thing that mattered most and I'd been deciding, through the whole conversation, whether to say it as a request or state it as a condition.
I turned back.
"One rule from me," I said.
He waited.
"Don't lie to me." I held his gaze across the room, across the desk with its organized work and the maps with their marked routes and the shelf with the book I hadn't asked about. "You don't have to tell me everything. I'm not asking for that. But what you do tell me has to be true. The actual truth, not the convenient version of it."
He looked at me for a long moment.
Long enough that I noticed things I hadn't noted before, the quality of the room's quiet, which was different from the quiet of the rest of the house. The way the desk lamp threw its light in a direction that left the shelves in half-shadow. The fact thathe had, at some point, acquired a second copy of a book whose primary virtue appeared to be a dedication that told someone to survive.
"Justo," he said.
One word. French. Fair.
He said it the way people said things they meant to be binding, without ceremony, without elaboration, in the tone of a decision finalized rather than a gesture offered. He could have said agreed or of course or I'll do my best. He said fair, which was a different register entirely.
I opened the door.
"Goodnight," I said.
"Goodnight."
I went upstairs. Sat at my desk with the contract law notes still spread across it and the lamp still on and the garden dark beyond the window.
I opened my phone and looked at the notes I'd taken.
Four rules. One condition. One word that weighed more than the four rules combined.
I closed the application.
I picked up the book from the nightstand, M's book, worn and repaired and carried across whatever distance separated us, and opened it to where I'd left off.
Outside, something moved in the garden.
Outside, something moved in the garden. I held very still. After a moment, nothing moved again. I turned off the lamp. I did not go to the window.
* * *