Places, Please

"Pauline," Desmond said. "First of all, I want to say your croissants changed my life."

Nina Alvarez sat with her ankles crossed and her hands folded on her knee, the way Pauline sat in Desmond's description. Like a hawk at a dinner party, he'd said, waiting for someone to drop a fork. She let the compliment hang there long enough to go stale.

"I'm aware," Nina said, as Pauline. "Are you here about the laminating schedule?"

"No. Yes. Sort of." Desmond was thirty-one and built like a refrigerator. He had hands that could crimp a thousand pie edges an hour and a voice that turned to meringue whenever anyone looked at him directly. He was leaning on his left foot, which meant he was about to apologize. Nina had learned that in session two. "I'm so sorry to bother you on a Thursday, I know Thursdays are—"

"Cut," Nina said, as herself.

Desmond deflated. The chair under him, the good one, didn't wobble. She'd given him the good one on purpose. The other one rocked whenever you shifted your weight, and Nina had sat on it for three years the way a sailor stands on a deck.

"That's the croissant thing again," Desmond said.

"That's the croissant thing again," Nina agreed. "And the Thursday thing. Two exits before you've made an entrance. You've apologized to her for the day of the week."

"Thursdays are hard for her! The flour delivery—"

"Desmond." She leaned forward. Sunlight came through the tall window at a slant, gold and dusty, the good late-September light that made Milwaukee Avenue look like it had been color-graded. Across the street, somebody at the bike shop rang a bell twice for no reason. "She's not going to be less upset because you understand her delivery schedule. You know what the sentence is."

"I'm giving my two weeks."

"Beautiful. Look at that. Not one croissant."

He laughed, and she laughed with him, and then his face crumpled a little at the edges. Nina knew that look. It meant the sentence was easy to say to her and impossible to say to Pauline. That gap was the whole job.

"Water break," she said. "Sixty seconds. Walk around. Shake out your hands."

Desmond stood and did a lap of the studio, which took eleven steps. He passed the green velvet couch, which had come from a production of Uncle Vanya and still had a burn mark where an understudy had leaned a prop samovar. He passed the rolling whiteboard covered in other people's handwriting. Then he wandered to the side table where Nina had left her binder open, and he started turning pages the way people flip through magazines at a dentist's.

The binder was black and battered, its spine held together by gaffer tape and stubbornness. Inside were three years of other people's hardest conversations in colored pen. Landlord, firm but not cruel. Father-in-law, deflects with golf. Ex-wife, pick up the cat. Desmond's own tab was in there, orange, with a note in Nina's handwriting: Leans left. Apologizes to weather.

His thumb reached the last pages, where the binder's back pocket was zipped shut, and caught the pull tab.

Nina was across the room before she'd decided to move. She closed the binder with one flat, friendly slap.

"Spoilers," she said, smiling.

Desmond held up both hands. "Sorry. Sorry! I wasn't—"

"You just apologized to a binder."

He looked at his own hands as if they'd betrayed him. "Oh no."

"It's okay. The binder forgives you." She tucked it under her arm, then set it on the windowsill, well out of reach. Note to self, she thought, exit the binder, stage right, permanently. "Back to your mark."

He sat down. She sat down. The spike tape on the floor, two strips of glow-white set exactly two meters apart, marked where each of them belonged. Desmond put both feet flat on the floor without being told, and she loved him a little for it.

The trouble was that Nina had been playing Pauline as a hawk. Hawks were frightening, and frightened people talked fast and fled, and Desmond had already practiced fleeing. What he hadn't practiced was staying.

So she changed the character.

The rule was simple, and she'd written it on the first page of the binder in red: You don't get to decide how they'll react. You only get to play what's possible. Pauline might be furious. She might be relieved. Or she might be what Nina suspected from the way Desmond talked about her, from she taught me lamination and she let me name the cardamom bun: a woman who'd trained someone for four years and was about to lose him.

"Pauline," Desmond said, both feet down. "Do you have a minute?"

"I have forty seconds before the ovens beep." Nina let it come out clipped, but softer at the end. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong. Something's good, actually. I got an offer from the Hartwell. To run their pastry program."

Nina let Pauline's face hold still. Then she let one small thing move behind it, a flinch in the jaw, a glance down at hands that had shown him how to fold butter into dough.

"The Hartwell," she said. "That's a hotel."

"It's a really good hotel."

"I know what it is." Quiet now. "I taught you lamination in this kitchen. Do you remember? You tore the first forty sheets."

Desmond's mouth opened, and Nina watched the apology climb his throat. I'm sorry, I'll stay, forget I said anything. She held his eyes and didn't rescue him. That was the hardest part of the job, and the most important. You had to let the silence get heavy enough that they learned they could lift it.

"I remember," Desmond said. His voice didn't turn to meringue. "That's why I can do this. You made me good enough to leave." He breathed in. "I'm giving my two weeks."

No croissants. No Thursday. No sorry.

Nina-as-Pauline looked at him for a long beat. She let the hurt be real, and then she let something else come through underneath it, because that was possible too.

"Well," Pauline said. "Damn. Okay. You'd better take the cardamom bun with you. It's yours anyway."

Desmond put his face in his hands and laughed, and it was only partly crying.

"Up," Nina said, as herself. "You know where the door is."

He stood and walked to the exit, the plain white door that was technically a supply closet holding three folding chairs, a box of whiteboard markers, and a vacuum named Gerald. He opened it, stepped in among the folding chairs, pulled it shut behind him, counted to five the way she'd taught him, and came back out flushed and grinning.

"That's never not going to be weird," he said.

"It's a metaphor, Desmond. Metaphors are allowed to smell like Pledge."

She handed him a blue marker. He looked at the whiteboard for a long time, at all the other lines: I'm not coming to Thanksgiving this year. — 9/12. I don't want to be a dentist. — 4/17. You can keep the couch but I'm taking the dog. — 6/2. Then he found a clean corner and wrote in round, careful baker's letters:

I'm giving my two weeks. — 9/25

Nina walked him out to the landing and down the first few steps, listening for the third stair. It creaked under him, as it always did, and he didn't stop. That was how she knew he'd do it for real tomorrow.

Back in the studio she went to the exit and tapped the doorframe twice, right on the worn pale spot where the paint had given up years ago. Thank you, house. Good show. She stood in the gold light with her hand flat on the wood, full of the warm, fizzy, borrowed courage that other people's bravery always gave her, and thought, not for the first time, that she had the best job in Chicago.

"Mail," said Marisol, leaning around the door. She held up a fan of envelopes like a losing poker hand. The one on top was cream-colored, heavy, and addressed in the cramped all-caps of Lionel Pasternak, the landlord, who did not believe in email and did not believe in good news.

---

The letter said FINAL NOTICE in a font that had clearly been chosen for its feelings.

Nina read it standing up, then sitting down, then standing up again, as though the words might rearrange if she changed the blocking. They didn't. Three months behind. Six thousand three hundred dollars by October fifteenth, or Mr. Pasternak would "regretfully begin the formal process." Below his signature he'd written by hand: Nina, I like you. My mortgage does not.

"He likes you," Marisol said from her desk.

The desk was an old school desk with a chair attached, the kind with a groove for pencils and a decade of initials carved into the lid. It sat on the landing at the top of the stairs so that every client had to pass Marisol first, like a border crossing. Marisol was twenty-seven and wore her hair in a knot skewered with a pen. She was chewing cinnamon gum and had her laptop open to the booking app, a riot of colored blocks only she fully understood.

"He likes me," Nina agreed. "His mortgage is the villain."

"His mortgage is a normal mortgage." Marisol didn't look up. "We're the villain. We're the people who don't pay rent."

"We pay rent."

"We paid rent in June. It was beautiful. I still think about it."

Nina came out to the landing and leaned on the banister. Below her the stairs dropped away steep and narrow toward Lumen & Co. Vintage Lamps, and through the floorboards came the amber glow of Mr. Abernathy testing bulbs. The light shifted from warm to warmer to a sudden blazing white that meant he'd found something he liked.

"Okay," Nina said. "Numbers."

"You don't want numbers."

"I want numbers the way you want a flu shot. Give me the numbers."

Marisol rattled them off flat. September bookings, seventeen. Average session, one-forty. Two cancellations, one no-show, one client who'd paid in a gift card to a steakhouse because "it felt right." After the utilities and the insurance and the website, after the sixty-dollar markers Nina insisted on because the cheap ones squeaked, the number left over could cover the back rent by October fifteenth only if somebody also robbed a bank.

"So we need, what," Nina said. "Forty-five more sessions in three weeks."

"Or one very sad billionaire."

"Do we have any very sad billionaires?"

"I'll check the app." Marisol tapped twice. "No. But we've got a new intake at four. Ten-session package."

Nina straightened. "Ten?"

"Ten."

"Nobody books ten. People book three and then cry and book two more."

"This one booked ten." Marisol turned the laptop a few inches toward her. A long block sat on the four o'clock slot in Marisol's premium-client purple, a color she'd invented and then refused to explain. WESLEY B. — INTAKE — 10-SESSION PKG. Under that, a note field: Work conflict. Partner. Time-sensitive.

"Wesley B.," Nina read. "Sounds like a man who owns a sailboat and is sad about it."

"Maybe."

"Did he say anything on the call?"

"He booked online." Marisol turned the laptop back. She chewed her gum slowly, deliberately, the way Nina had seen her chew it before telling their mother she'd dyed her hair. Nina noticed it the way she noticed a client's left foot, and then she filed it away, because she had six thousand three hundred problems and her sister's jaw wasn't one of them.

"Ten sessions," Nina said, and felt her pulse pick up. "If he's time-sensitive, he's motivated. If he's motivated, he's flexible on price."

"Nina."

"We have a premium tier."

"We do not have a premium tier."

"We have one now. It's called time-sensitive." She was already pacing, three steps across the landing and three steps back. She had to turn sideways to get past the desk. "Concierge rehearsal. Priority scheduling. I'll do research. I'll become the partner. Whoever Wesley B. has to face, I'll be them so well he'll want to send me flowers and an apology."

"Please don't bill him for flowers."

"I'm just saying, the value is there."

Marisol popped her gum, a small cinnamon gunshot. "You're doing the thing."

"What thing?"

"The thing where you narrate."

Nina hadn't realized she'd been doing it aloud, which happened when she was nervous. Enter the coach, confident. She crosses downstage. She is not worried about the rent. She stopped pacing.

"I'm preparing my character," she said with dignity.

"Your character is behind on rent."

"My character is a visionary small-business owner in a temporary cash-flow narrative."

Marisol almost smiled. She hid it by reaching into the bottom drawer of the school desk, the drawer that held the stapler, the first-aid kit, a single maraca, and the emergency tissues. She took out a fresh box, floral, with pink peonies all over it, and carried it into the studio.

Nina followed her in. She expected Marisol to set it on the little table beside the client chair, the good chair, the way she had before every single session for three years. Clients cried. That was the deal. You came up the stairs carrying a sentence you'd been holding so long it had worn a groove in you, and when you finally set it down, your face leaked. Marisol always put the tissues where the leaking happened.

Marisol set them beside the wobbly chair. Nina's chair.

Nina looked at the tissues. Then at her sister.

"Wrong side," Nina said.

"Is it?"

"I'm not the one who cries."

"Mm." Marisol adjusted the box a quarter-inch so that the peonies faced outward. "Feng shui."

"That's not what feng shui is."

"It's what feng shui is today." Marisol went back to the landing and sat down in the school desk with the composure of a woman who'd just straightened a picture frame, not like one who had done anything strange at all. The laptop's glow lit her face from below. "The tissue box doesn't need a reason, Nina. It's a tissue box."

Nina stood over it. The peonies looked back at her, cheerful and vaguely accusing.

There was a version of her, she knew, that people imagined when they found out what she did. They pictured someone who must be bad at endings to have turned them into a business, someone with a wound. Clients asked sometimes, gently, in the last five minutes, Have you ever had to say one of these? Nina always laughed and told them the truth, or a version of it so polished you could see your face in it. Sure. A guy left me a voicemail once, years ago. Moved across the country. I got over it in about a weekend. Turned out the real love of my life was rehearsal.

Everybody laughed at that one. It had good rhythm.

She moved the tissues back to the client side.

From the landing, without looking up, Marisol said, "Leave them."

"Why?"

"Because I'm the front desk, and the front desk has a system."

"The front desk is chewing her gum like it owes her money."

"The front desk," Marisol said, "is chewing her gum like a normal person."

Nina narrowed her eyes. It was a strange little prickle, a feeling she knew from tech weeks, when a stagehand moved a chair downstage without telling her and she sensed the change before she saw it. Something in the room had been set. Someone had dressed the stage for a scene she hadn't read.

Paranoia, she told herself. It's a tissue box. It's rent week. Places, please.

She moved the tissues back beside her own chair, where Marisol wanted them, because it was easier than arguing. She ate half a granola bar standing at the window and drank a horchata latte from the café on the corner, cinnamon and rice and too much sugar, the drink that tasted like being nineteen and certain about everything. She reviewed her intake questions and wrote PREMIUM at the top of a fresh index card, then underlined it twice and then, after consideration, a third time.

At 3:58, Marisol's chair scraped on the landing.

At 3:59, the downstairs door opened, and the bell Mr. Abernathy had hung on it gave its small brass hiccup. Footsteps started up. One stair. Two.

The third stair creaked.

The footsteps stopped there for a long moment. A man was standing on the creaking stair, Nina thought, and losing his nerve.

---

He got it back. The footsteps came the rest of the way up, slowly, the way people climbed toward a dentist or a former teacher. Nina took her mark on the spike tape by the wobbly chair. She stood with her weight even and her chin level and her face arranged into its best intake expression, warm and capable and ready to take anybody's money.

"Hi," said a man's voice on the landing. "I'm, uh. I'm Wesley. Four o'clock."

"Hi, Wesley," Marisol said. She didn't sound surprised by anything at all. "Go on in. She's ready for you."

Nina knew the voice before she saw him. It was the way you know a song from the first two notes, before the singer comes in.

Then he was in the doorway, and she was not ready for him at all.

Theo Bennett had always been too tall for doorways and slightly apologetic about it. He stood the way he used to stand, with his shoulders rounded a little forward, as if he were trying to take up less of the frame. His hair was shorter. There was a new line beside his mouth, the kind you get from smiling at things that aren't funny. He wore a navy canvas jacket with a fleck of sawdust on one sleeve and held his keys in his right hand. On the ring she could see a small brass padlock, dull with age and thumb-worn, and his thumb was working it right now: open, click, shut, click.

Five years.

In the theater there was a thing that happened when an actor went up on a line, when the next word simply wasn't there and the stage lights got very loud. Nina had felt it maybe twice in ten years. Both times she'd handled it the same way: don't freeze, don't apologize, don't let the house see you looking for it. Make the next thing up and play it like you meant to.

"Wesley," she said.

Her voice came out crisp, clean, pitched for the back row. Good. Excellent. The coach greets the client.

Theo's ears went red. They had always done that, starting at the tops and spreading down like something spilled. "Nina. Hi. I know. I— hi."

"Come in. Have a seat." She gestured to the good chair. "That one's yours. Mind the tape."

He looked down at the floor, at the glowing white strips two meters apart, and then at her. "There's tape."

"There's tape," Nina agreed. "It helps people know where they stand."

He sat. His knees came up a little too high, because the chair had been bought for clients of normal human height. He set his keys on his thigh and then picked them back up immediately. The padlock clicked. Nina sat on the wobbly chair, and it rocked under her. She stilled it with one heel, as she'd done a thousand times, and it was the first time in three years she'd hated it.

Do not look at the tissues, she told herself. She didn't look at the tissues. She could feel the peonies at the edge of her vision.

"So," she said, and picked up her clipboard. She had never used a clipboard for an intake in her life. She clicked her pen. "You booked under your middle name."

"Yeah." Theo winced. "That was— I thought if I booked as Theo, you'd—"

"Delete the appointment."

"Set the building on fire, honestly, was where my head was. Which I would have understood." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I'm not trying to be sneaky. Okay, I was being a little sneaky. Booking under a fake name is objectively sneaky. It's not a fake name, though. It is my name. It's just the name nobody uses, except my grandmother, and she's only ever used it when I broke something."

He was rambling. He always rambled when he was nervous. There had been one memorable night in a bar on Division when he'd explained the full history of the pin-tumbler lock to her for twenty minutes because he was working up to asking her out. Nina felt the memory slide toward her and stepped neatly around it.

"Wesley," she said. "This is a sixty-minute intake. We have fifty-six minutes. I'm going to ask you what I ask every client, and I'd like you to answer out loud, in full sentences. Who is the person, and what is the sentence?"

He blinked at her. "Right. Straight in."

"That's how it works."

"I thought there might be—" He made a vague circle with the hand holding the keys. "Small talk."

"There's a café on the corner if you'd like small talk. They have a punch card."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth, an old, involuntary flicker, and he squashed it. Nina hated that she'd been watching for it. Worse, she hated that she'd been glad when it came.

Because she was. That was the awful part, the part she'd write in the margin if this were someone else's scene. She was glad to see his face. It went through her before she could stop it, an animal gladness, like the moment in a dark house when you find the light switch on the first try. Then the rest arrived behind it, cold and orderly, five years of it lined up like an ensemble waiting in the wings. Two minutes and fourteen seconds. Break a leg Thursday.

She clicked the pen again. "Who's the person, Wesley?"

He looked at the floor, at his tape. "June. June Whitaker. She's my best friend. We met at Northwestern, sophomore year, in a stats class neither of us needed. She's my business partner. She and her wife keep saying they'll adopt a beagle, and I'm apparently the godfather, which—" He stopped. "Sorry. You don't need the beagle. You know about June."

"I know that you went into business with a college friend named June." Nina kept her voice perfectly level. "I know you build escape rooms. That's the extent of my research."

That much was true. She had never looked it up. She had decided not to, back when the not-deciding had felt like a full-time job, and she'd never once broken the rule. Not on bad nights, not on the anniversary, not even the time she'd seen a flyer on a CTA bus shelter that said ESCAPE ROOMS — WEST LOOP and had looked at the sky instead until the bus came.

"Tight Spot Escape Co.," Theo said. "It's in Fulton Market. Six rooms. We're expanding. That's— that's sort of the problem. I've been in Seattle, designing remotely, and I came back this summer for the expansion, and there's a lease. Ten years. On the building and the space next door. We sign it in December. The fifteenth."

"And?"

"And I don't want to sign it."

He said it to the tape. The padlock clicked shut and didn't open again.

"Out loud," Nina said. "To me. As if I'm her. What's the sentence?"

He looked up. His eyes were exactly the same, gray-green and too readable. The man had built a career on locks no one could pick, and his face had never once kept a secret from her. Almost never, corrected a cold voice somewhere behind her sternum. He kept one big enough to move to Seattle on.

"I want out," Theo said. "Of Tight Spot. I want to tell June I want out before we sign, and I—" He swallowed. "I can't. I've tried. I've had the sentence in my mouth for, like, four months. I get as far as 'June, can we talk' and then I ask her about the HVAC. We've had the best-maintained HVAC in the West Loop since June. She thinks I've developed a passion for ductwork."

Out on the landing, very faintly, Marisol turned a page of something. Nina did not look at the doorway.

"And you came here," she said.

"I came here because I can't do it alone." It came out plainer than the rest, without any ramble attached. "And because I asked around, and people said Exit Lines was the best. That you were the best. Somebody in our booth said her cousin quit a cult here."

"It wasn't a cult. It was a multilevel candle company."

"See, that's exactly the kind of distinction that makes me trust you."

She didn't laugh. It cost her something not to. She looked down at the clipboard, where she had written nothing at all except PREMIUM, triple-underlined, which now felt less like a business strategy and more like a ransom note.

Here was the job, then. She made herself see it the way she'd see a stranger's case, with the facts on the table. A conflict-avoidant client. An important relationship. A hard deadline in eleven weeks. A man who needed to rehearse leaving someone who loved him.

She had seen this show before. She'd had a seat in the front row.

"Can I ask you something?" Theo said.

"You're paying for the questions to go the other way."

"I know. I just—" He turned the keys over. "Is this okay? Me being here. If it's not, I'll go. I'll still pay for today. I'll pay for all ten, honestly, and you never have to see me again. I'm not trying to make this—"

"Wesley." She stood up, because she needed to be standing, and because the wobbly chair had chosen that moment to tilt. She crossed to the exit without deciding to, the way she'd crossed to the binder that morning, and her hand found the doorframe. Her fingers settled on the worn pale spot where the paint had given up.

She'd started tapping doorframes the spring she'd met him. He'd been at the side of the stage at a Rogers Park storefront show, a friend of the lighting designer, holding a coffee he hadn't touched, and he'd said, You looked like you were knocking to be let in. She had done it before every entrance since. She'd done it before every session for three years, and she'd never once let herself remember why.

She didn't tap it now. She held on.

Behind her, the chair creaked as he stood. He didn't come closer. He'd stayed on his tape. She could feel exactly where he was in the room, the way you can always feel the other actor when your back is to them.

"Nina," Theo said. Not Wesley's coach, not anything careful. Just her name, the way he used to say it, as if it were the solution to something. "Will you help me?"

She stood with her hand on the frame of a door that led nowhere but a closet full of folding chairs, and for once in her life she had no idea what her next line was.