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"The second reason is more fun." She sounds, God help me, delighted. "I'm told I owe you five hundred dollars. Or you owe me. Did you win? Has the formidable Ms. Brewer come around to your plan?"

Everything goes very quiet.

"Margaret, I'm going to take you off speaker."

"Don't be coy. You were so sure, Roman. She told the entire room you were wrong and you said, and I quote, 'She'll be on my side by Sunday.' Well, it's Sunday. Did you charm the operations manager?"

I turn around.

She's in the doorway to the front hall. She's dressed, a soft blue sweater and leggings, her hair damp and dark against her neck, her feet bare.

She must have come down the stairs without the fourth step creaking. She's picked a tea towel off the hook by the stairs and I watch her hands close on it, the knuckles going white, the exact white of Friday morning, her palm flat on a conference table, the same hand, and I'm on the other side of it.

"Roman?" says Margaret. "Hello?"

I reach out and kill the call.

The kitchen is so silent I can hear the faucet, not dripping, and the skillet ticking as it cools. A pancake burns slowly in the pan.

"Bet," says Rosey.

"Rosey."

"Bet." She says it quietly, like a person reading a word off a wall. "How much?"

"It was Friday morning." I put the spatula down. My hands aren't entirely steady. "Ten minutes after you walked out of that conference room. I called Margaret to tell her you'd torn me apart and I was delighted, and she bet me five hundred dollars you'd never come around. It was a joke, a stupid, glib thing a man says to his mentor, and I forgot it by lunch. I swear to you—"

"Did you win?"

"No."

"Did you charm the operations manager?"

"That's not—"

"It's Sunday." Her voice doesn't rise and that's what's terrible about it. It's flat and level and entirely without the thunder I earned. "Five hundred dollars. That's what it cost you. For me."

"It wasn't for you. It was whether you'd come around to the plan, the plan, Rosey, it had nothing to do with—"

"You sat on my porch last night." Her chin comes up. Her eyes have gone bright and green and she's gripping the towel in both fists now like a rope. "You told me the first thing you thought about me was ugly. You told me about the lock. You had a bet in your pocket the whole time and you told me a nice story about a lock."

"I was going to tell you this morning."

"When? Before the eggs or after?"

"After." It comes out of me before I can think and I hear it land. I watch it land on her face. "I was going to tell you after. I wanted to—"

"After." She nods slowly. "Of course after."

"Rosey, please, let me explain."

"You're explaining." There's a crack in the middle of the word and she runs straight over it, the way she ran over it in the conference room, the way she must have been running over cracks her whole life. "A man kept a gas station receipt with eleven tally marks and a circle. I found it in a junk drawer. I told you that. I told you last night and you sat there and listened."

"That's not the same—"

"Isn't it?"

There's a speech in me. It's very good. I've been drafting speeches since I was nineteen and I can feel it assembling itself in the back of my throat, in three clean points, with a closing argument.