Before you put anything on paper, ask him to his face.”

I uncapped the red pen and circled the seventeenth.

I capped the pen and left the red circle on the desk pad to dry.

“Carl opens at nine,” David said from the kitchen doorway, jacket on, keys already in his hand.

Carl’s office sits between a nail salon and a vending machine depot on Route 4: one window, one filing cabinet with a drawer that never quite shuts.

He had a legal pad squared in front of him with nothing written on it.