They Sent A Broke Waitress To Humiliate A Deaf Crime Boss — The Outcome Left The Entire Syndicate S...
Chapter 7
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I have spent 20 years in rooms full of people who think my silence is a disadvantage. Briggs is the hundredth man to try that particular move.He paused, then added:You were the first server who told me the truth about what you were walking into. Most people lie to protect themselves. You didn't.Tatum read it twice. She wrote back:I was out of energy for lying.He wrote:That tends to be when the truth gets interesting.She paid three months' rent the next morning. She paid Maya's prescription. She had enough left over to buy a space heater, the kind with the actual safety certification, and put it next to Maya's bed so the cold air from the broken radiator wouldn't reach her while she slept.She did not go back to Del Vecchio's. She didn't need to.Crane appeared at her building the following Tuesday with a folded note and a business card. The note said:An associate of mine manages a building on Lakeshore. The property manager position has been vacant for 3 months. The salary is listed on the card. If you want it, the job is yours, no obligation.The salary on the card was more than she made in two years of doubles. She called the number.The property was a 12-story residential building in a neighborhood where the streetlamps worked and the sidewalks had been recently repaired. The lobby had a marble floor, which Tatum appreciated less for its elegance than for the fact that it was easy to clean. She was good at the work. She had always been good at organizing chaos, at finding what was broken before it became an emergency, at talking to people who were frustrated without escalating them further.Three weeks in, Declan appeared in the lobby. He was wearing a gray jacket over a white shirt, no tie, carrying a paper coffee cup. He didn't look like a man who owned the building; he looked like a tenant checking his mail. He held up the paper cup, an offering. He'd brought two.Tatum took hers. She leaned against the reception counter. She'd been practicing. She'd borrowed three books and two video courses from the public library on ASL, and she had been drilling in front of her bathroom mirror every night for three weeks while Maya slept—her hands moving through shapes that still felt clumsy and imprecise, but were getting cleaner.She put down her coffee. Her hands moved:Good morning.Declan went very still. He looked at her hands. He looked at her face. And something happened in his expression that she had not seen from him in any of their previous encounters: something unguarded, brief, and completely involuntary.He set his coffee down on the counter. His hands came up:How long?She signed back slowly:I'm terrible.He shook his head. His hands moved in the fluid, precise shorthand she was just beginning to recognize as his specific register—the way everyone's voice has a quality that belongs only to them: