Page 31 of Dirty Game
Her posture: hunched, deliberate, spine like a hunting cat.
Her hair falls over her face in a perfect sheet, hiding the calculations happening behind it.
She holds a pen—mine, sterling with a needlepoint tip—in a loose grip, and she’s hitting it between her fingers.
Her red pen cuts through the pages, notating corrections in the margins, slicing through decades of bad math.
The numbers flow beneath her, and I can see, in the way her lips move as she reads, that she is savoring each equation she sets right.
I’ve never watched anyone do numbers like this.
There’s a sickness to it, an obsessive purity.
I wonder if she even knows I’m here.
I make a noise, clearing my throat, the sort of thing you do to remind someone of your presence without breaking their focus.
Her hand twitches, the pen halting above a column of sixes, but she doesn’t look up.
She waits patiently for my interruption to prove itself worthy.
I step forward, suddenly unsure what I should say, just feeling the need to saysomething.
I count three full ledgers open and another five stacked at her elbow.
All of them annotated with her handwriting. The red is unmistakable, acid-bright.
There are coffee rings on the oldest book, a testament to how many hours she’s put in today alone.
“Rosalynn,” I say, and her name comes out raspy and gritty.
Her eyelids flick up, just for a second. No fear. Only readiness.
She finishes the sum she’s working on, then sets the pen down, parallel to the desk’s edge.
Her movements are so precise it’s almost a challenge.
Her voice, when it comes, is almost a whisper. “You’re off by nine million, give or take.”
“Is that all?” I lean against the back of a wingchair, arms folded. She smells like detergent and old paper. “My last accountant rounded up.”
Her mouth doesn’t smile, but her eyes crease with the ghost of something that almost could have been amusement. “You don’t pay me enough to be this honest.”
“I don’t pay you at all,” I remind her. “You’re here on a family plan.”
That gets a reaction.
Her chin dips, just a fraction, as if she’s weighing the words before she spends them. “Then I hope my father’s debt was worth it.”
I watch her for a full breath, letting the silence load the room with meaning.
I want to see if she’ll fill it.
I’m sort of disappointed when she doesn’t. She is better at silence than I am.
“You’re saving me more than your father ever stole,” I say. “I suppose that’s worth something.”
She blinks once. Twice. “If you say so.”
