as if it were a joke between the two of them: "Oh, Nora's great, she's a lifesaver. She's sort of between things right now, so it works out for everybody. Free rent, free babysitting. Win-win."
Nora stood in the doorway with a stack of plates in her hands and felt the words go into her like a splinter.
Free rent.
That night she sat on her bed in the little room off the upstairs landing and opened the green notebook and added up the column. Ten thousand four hundred and twelve dollars and eighty cents in April. Then six payments of one thousand seven hundred and forty dollars, May through October. Then the five still to come before the date she had circled in pencil at the bottom of the page, the end of March, one full year from the day she had found the letters. She did the math twice, the way the teller had counted the zeroes.
By the time Linnea turned one, the total would be a little under twenty-one thousand. By March, if nothing changed, it would be almost thirty.
The House had held a little over forty when she started.
She knocked on Daniel's door the next morning, early, before Brooke's car pulled in. He was standing at the bathroom mirror in a T-shirt, shaving.
"We need to talk about the loan," she said.
He did not stop shaving. "What loan?"
She waited. He rinsed the razor. In the mirror, his eyes found hers and slid away.
"Daniel. It's been six months. You've been working steady since June. I need to know when you're going to start taking over the payments. I need to know about the repayment schedule. We said—"
"I know what we said." He put the razor down. "Things are just tight right now. The Superior guys pay on a ninety-day cycle. The Lakeside thing is still in discovery. It's not a good time."
"It's never going to be a good time."
"Then why are you pushing it now?" He turned around. His voice had gone low and tight. "Is this about Brooke? Because I'll be honest with you, Nora, that feels a little—"
"It's about twenty-one thousand dollars and counting," she said. "And it's about you telling your girlfriend I'm living here for free."
He went very still.
"I'm going to need you to sign something more formal," she went on, her heart pounding. "A real promissory note. With a schedule. I talked to someone at the credit union and they said—"
"You talked to someone?"
"About a promissory note. Not about you."
He looked at her for a long moment with an expression she had never seen on his face before. It was not shame. It was not anger, exactly. It was calculation, cool and assessing, the look of a man working out how much a wall can hold before it comes down.