“Come up when you get here,” I said. “I’ll be there.”
I told Imogen Tessa was coming to speak to me, not that I was approving any deliveries. Then I called work and said I had an urgent personal problem. Hearing myself ask for cover made me angry again. Caleb had arranged his secret around my shifts, and now I was the one who had to explain an absence.
Tessa arrived with an older woman carrying a plain canvas bag. I opened the door myself. Tessa stopped on the mat until I stepped aside.
Ruth introduced herself, then looked at Tessa rather than starting an explanation.
“You can tell her,” Tessa said. “About what we’ve been doing here.”
I stayed standing beside the kitchen counter.
“These meetings have been to help Tessa arrange to leave her husband confidentially,” Ruth said. “Somewhere she could talk without him knowing she was making plans.”
My first response was to look at Tessa. I had seen her husband pass her plates at dinner. I had seen them leave together. None of that told me anything useful, but my mind offered it up anyway, as if an ordinary evening could disprove what Ruth had said.
“Leave him?” I asked.
Tessa rubbed one thumbnail with the other.
“He checks what I spend. If something doesn’t look right to him, I have to explain it. Sometimes he won’t let me have money at all.”
“You never said.”
The words came out before I could stop them. She looked down, and I remembered our conversation beside the sink. I had barely let her finish describing the argument before offering my solution.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That wasn’t fair.”
She nodded without looking up.
“The parcels downstairs are mine. Things I need to take with me. I couldn’t have them sent home.” She glanced at Ruth. “Caleb collected the earlier ones.”
I called Imogen with Tessa beside me. When Imogen asked who was claiming the waiting parcels, I handed Tessa the phone. She gave her name and identified them as her supplies for leaving. I heard Imogen say she would keep them secure until we came down.
Nothing was being released yet. I needed a few minutes without another decision being put in front of me.
After the call, Tessa sat at the edge of my sofa.
“Caleb said you’d agreed,” she said.
I turned toward her.
“To what?”
“All of it. Meeting here. Using the address.” She finally looked directly at me. “He said he’d asked you.”
“He didn’t.”
She kept watching my face, waiting for a qualification.
“I found out downstairs today. He told me coworkers were coming here. When I asked who, he still said coworkers.”
Tessa drew her bag onto her lap.
“Then you didn’t know where those things were coming from. Or who was here.”
“No.”
She looked around my sitting room, at the door and then the windows. “I asked him if you knew. I specifically asked.”
Ruth pulled a chair nearer but left space between them.
“We’ll go through what’s been arranged,” she told Tessa. “We can check it together.”
I had wanted Tessa to confirm that Caleb had lied to me. I hadn’t thought about what hearing that would do to her. She was now asking Ruth which parts they had checked themselves, and I couldn’t blame her.
I called Caleb and told him Tessa was with me.
“You need to come here,” I said. “And this time you need to answer us.”
When he arrived, he looked past me at his sister.
“Why did you bring her into this?” he asked her.
“I called her,” I said. “Don’t put that on her.”
He stood near the counter, where I had been standing earlier. Ruth remained seated. Tessa still had her bag on her knees.
