Amara’s Test

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The quiet room was used for training when it was not being used to store broken things.

There were six plastic chairs, a projector without a cable and a model ship in a glass case. One of its miniature lifeboats hung crookedly from its davit. Nico found himself wanting to straighten it before Amara shut the door.

"What did Rosa tell you on Thursday?" she asked.

He turned from the model.

"About the report?"

"Before you left the ship."

He could ask her to be more specific. Perhaps she would supply the missing information and he could rearrange it into something that sounded like memory. He had already begun doing that in the meeting room. It was astonishing how quickly a person could acquire a habit he despised.

"I wasn't on the ship on Thursday."

"I know. Lucien was."

Amara put her folder on a chair. The care with which she did it made Nico feel suddenly clumsy.

"Who are you?"

There was no useful answer except the one he had been avoiding all morning.

"Nico Laurent."

She drew in a breath and looked toward the closed door.

"His brother."

"His twin."

"I worked that part out."

The anger in her voice was quiet enough to make him wish she would shout.

"Celeste asked me to come. Lucien's missing. Since Sunday. We don't know what happened."

Amara stared at him. Whatever accusation she had prepared was interrupted by the last part.

"Missing how?"

"He didn't come home. His phone goes to voicemail. There was a train booking, but the bag he packed is still in his room. The police are involved."

"And your solution was to wear his clothes?"

"It wasn't a solution."

"Then what was it?"

Nico looked down at the jacket. He had defended the limits of what he was willing to do so carefully that he had begun to confuse having limits with doing nothing wrong.

"Buying time. That's what she called it."

"For whom?"

He thought of the Friday vote, the car, the suit already waiting on the chair.

"I don't know."

Amara walked to the window. Below it was an enclosed yard where two workers were moving a long crate beneath an awning. One held the door while the other backed through with the trolley. They waited for each other without needing a discussion about trust.

"A man could have been badly hurt," she said. "You sat there while his captain thought she was speaking to someone she'd already spoken to about it."

"I didn't promise her anything."

Amara turned.

He heard himself. It was his aunt's defense, carried downstairs in his own mouth.

"That doesn't make it all right," he said.

She said nothing.

He told her about the missed call. The words came reluctantly, with none of the fluency he had found when explaining why Celeste's plan was different from an outright lie.

"I saw his name. I let it ring. I thought whatever he wanted could wait."

"Why?"

"Because he's usually wanted something from the brother who was supposed to have stopped needing anything from him."

The sentence surprised him. He had never put it that way, not even to Sami.

Amara did not soften into the response he might have hoped for.

"Being frightened for him doesn't give you permission to borrow everybody else's judgment."

"No."

For a while they listened to the trolley wheels crossing the yard.

"Did you sign anything?" she asked.

"No. I wouldn't."

"Give an instruction? Approve the ship's departure?"

"No."

"Does the police contact know you're here?"

"They know his brother came to the house. Nobody has told them Lucien's been found. He hasn't."

She returned to the chair and opened her folder. Nico braced himself for an announcement that she was leaving with the one useful piece of his brother's last week.

Instead she took out a blank sheet.

"I'm making a note of what happened this morning. Under your name. And mine. Not an improved version."

"All right."

"I'm telling Celeste that I know. I won't support this performance, and I won't pretend to have received instructions from Lucien."

"All right."

"And I decide what I need to report through my own work. You don't get to make secrecy the price of helping your brother."

He nodded. That cost him something. He had entered the room imagining that if Amara recognized him, everything would be over. Now he saw that the thing she could end was not the search. It was the part of the search in which his family controlled what other people were allowed to know.

"Would you still help me find him?"

She looked at him for a long time.

"I want to know where Lucien is. I wanted to know before I knew he was missing. He asked me questions on Sunday, and then he stopped answering mine."

"About the empty crates?"

"About who had accepted them. About a supplier name that appeared where a warehouse name should have been."

She wrote the name North Reach Services on the sheet, then covered it with her hand before he could reach for the paper.

"That's a question, Nico. Not the name of whoever took him."

He sat down.

The model ship's crooked lifeboat reflected in the glass behind her. He wanted, absurdly, to tell her that he knew how to fix small engines, that he was useful somewhere, that he was not simply a badly rehearsed imitation of a better man.

"I repair boats," he said.

Amara looked up.

"At the cooperative on the lower quay. The small ones. Fishing launches. River taxis. I don't know how to run a shipping company."

"Then don't try to learn by pretending you already do."

For the first time since she had closed the door, there was something other than anger in her expression. Not forgiveness. Perhaps an assessment of what they might be able to do with the truth.

"How did you know?" he asked.

"You looked at everyone when they spoke."

He almost laughed. "Lucien doesn't?"

"Lucien looks at the document, then decides what the person probably means. Sometimes he's right."

She glanced at his left palm. "And he doesn't have that burn. I noticed it when you reached for the return sheet."

Nico rubbed the scar with his thumb.

"A hot housing. I was twenty-four and thought gloves were for people who weren't in a hurry."

"Did you learn?"

"Eventually."

The smallest movement at the corner of her mouth acknowledged the answer. Then she picked up her phone.

Celeste answered on the second ring. Amara put the call on speaker and said Nico was with her. She did not give his aunt time to use another name.

"I know who came into the meeting. We need to correct what happened."

Nico listened as his aunt began to explain the urgency. He could have helped her. He knew all the reasons now, and the fear beneath them was real.

Instead he said, "She's right."

Celeste stopped speaking.

A knock came before the conversation had properly ended. Ines stood outside the training room, holding her phone.

"Someone just called to say I must be relieved," she said to Nico. "They'd seen you in planning."

His aunt's voice came faintly from Amara's phone, asking who was there.

"For a minute I thought you'd found him and nobody had told me," Ines continued. "I thought there might be a hospital call I hadn't answered."

Nico stood up. "I'm sorry."

She looked at the jacket, then at the note Amara was writing.

"I knew you were his brother. I didn't know I was supposed to let everybody else get it wrong."

"You aren't," Amara said.

Nico repeated it himself. Ines deserved to hear the answer from the person who had created the confusion.

"You aren't. I shouldn't have let that happen."

She asked whether she could tell the colleague who had called what she actually knew. Nico said yes, although it had not been his permission to give. He corrected that too.

Ines did not thank him. She went back into the corridor to make the call. Listening to her ordinary, careful explanation, Nico felt the morning's deception lose the protective shape of a family emergency. It had frightened somebody who was already frightened enough.

It was not a grand declaration. It did not bring his brother home. But it was the first choice Nico had made that morning which did not depend on looking like somebody else.

After the call, Amara wrote his name at the top of the sheet.

"Start with Sunday," she said. "The things you know yourself."

Nico placed his phone on the chair between them, the missed call still visible on the screen.