Empire of Ashes — Season 2, Episode 43: A Name That Isn't His Either

0:00 Empire of Ashes. Episode 43. A name that isn't his either. Written by Mia. Lena. Sophia left for Renata Cole's dinner at 7 wearing the green dress she saves for clients she actually likes, which I have come to understand is its own kind of tell. My sister -in -law dresses less carefully for people she's merely managing, and I stood at the glass house's tall windows and watched her car's lights curve away down the harbor road until they were just one more set of taillights among all the ordinary ones, and made myself stop watching, because there is a particular madness in. Standing at a window waiting for a thing you cannot affect from that window at all. You're doing the thing, Dario said. Not

0:46 looking up from the two glasses of wine he was pouring at the kitchen counter, which was his way of telling me he'd noticed anyway. I'm allowed to worry about her. You're allowed. You're not allowed to worry so loudly I can hear it from across the room. He crossed to me and put a glass in my hand and did not let go of my fingers right away, which is a habit of his I have never once told him I've catalogued and treasure. She negotiates for a living Lena. Tonight, she's having dinner with a woman who likes her. That's the whole shape of the evening, as far as Sophia knows it. We're the only two people in this house carrying the part she doesn't. That's exactly what worries me. I turn the wine in my hand without drinking

1:29 it. We send her in knowing something she doesn't, Dario. If Renata Cole is what we're afraid she might be, Sophia is sitting across the table right now from someone who might already know that we know. Then we did the one thing we could do about that before she walked out the door, he said. We told her everything we had. The rest is her skill, not our worry to carry for her a second time over. I let him take the wine out of my hand then, and set both glasses down, and he pulled me in against him in the middle of our own kitchen the way he does when he has run out of better arguments and switches, without any apology at all, to simply holding on to me until my body remembers to believe him before

2:09 my mind does. We stood like that longer than either of us needed to. It has become, in ten months of marriage, one of the few forms of honesty I have never once caught either of us faking. Tell me something that isn't Renata Cole, I said, into his shoulder. My mother used to say a marriage needed one ordinary hour a day, or it would forget how to be one, he said. We are extremely behind on ordinary hours this month. Then give me one now, while we wait. So he did. Not a grand thing.

2:43 Nothing that will ever make it into anybody's account of this war. Just my husband turning on music low enough that it was really just a rhythm under the room, and dancing badly with me in our own kitchen with the harbor going dark outside the glass. Both of us still in the clothes we'd start a war and if the phone rang, laughing at how badly he leads for a man who otherwise plans everything down to the hour. You catalog everyone else's tells, he said, turning me under his arm with more confidence than the actual result deserved, and you have never once noticed you have your own. You hum when you're trying not to think about something. Off -key. You've been humming since she left. I don't hum. You

3:24 have hummed four different things since seven o 'clock, and none of them were songs. They were just worry with a tune attached. He pulled me back in, slower now, and rested his chin on the top of my head the way he does when he wants to say something without watching my face while he says it. I used to think love was a thing you proved by handling every danger before it reached the person you loved. I have learned, marrying you, that most of the actual danger in a life like ours arrives whether or not you're ready and the only real choice left is who you're standing next to when it does. I would rather be badly out of rhythm in a kitchen with you than perfectly composed anywhere else, waiting

4:03 alone for a phone to ring. That is the least efficient thing you have ever said to me. It's the truest one, he said, and did not apologize for either fact. It was, I think, exactly the hour his mother meant. It did not stop me watching the phone on the counter, out of the corner of my eye the entire time. It only meant that for once, Watching it wasn't the only thing I was doing. Dario. The call came a little after 10, and it was not Sophia's voice that told me something had happened. It was the fact that she called at all instead of texting, because my sister has never once in her adult life used a phone for its actual purpose, when a message would do, unless something had gone somewhere she didn't

4:47 want written down even to us. I'm fine, she said, before I could ask. I'm in my car outside her building. I'm fine, Dario, but I need to come to you both tonight, not tomorrow, and I need you to not ask me anything until I'm actually in the room, because I have been holding this together for 40 minutes, and I would like to fall apart exactly once, in front of people I trust, and then never again. She was at the glass house in 11 minutes. Still in the green dress, her negotiator's posture finally, entirely gone, and Lena had a blanket around her shoulders before she'd finished sitting down, which is a thing my wife does for people she loves that I don't think she's ever once noticed she does. She's

5:30 not what we thought, Sophia said. Or she's not only that. God, I don't even know which sentence to say first. Start anywhere, Lena said. We'll build the order after. Lena. Sophia told it the way she negotiates, out of sequence at first, circling the number until she trusted it, and then, once she found the shape of it, fast and precise and merciless with herself in a way I recognized because it is exactly how I tell my own worst stories. Dinner had been ordinary for the first hour. Wine. The renewal numbers on a policy they both already knew by heart, an easy, real warmth between two women who had built something honest together over a year of actual work. And then, halfway through the second course,

6:19 Renata's phone had lit up on the table face down, and she had turned it over just long enough to read something, and Sophia said the color left her face the way it leaves a person's face when a debt has come due that they had genuinely hoped might simply forget to. She excused herself. Fifteen minutes, which is a long time for a bathroom, Dario, I sat there timing it without meaning to. When she came back her makeup had been redone badly, which told me she'd been crying and trying not to look like she had been, and I did the thing I do with clients who are about to lose a negotiation to their own nerves, I didn't ask.

6:54 I just waited, and ordered a second bottle, and let the silence get uncomfortable enough that she filled it herself. And she told you, I said. She told me everything because I think some people have simply been carrying a thing alone for so long that any door left open long enough will do. Sophia pulled the blanket tighter and for a moment looked exactly her age, which she almost never does. Eleven years ago, when she was starting out, Renata altered a claim report to cover for a client who was about to lose everything over an honest mistake that would have looked, on paper, like fraud. It wasn't fraud. It was a kindness that broke a rule, the kind everyone in her business has done once and prayed never

7:38 surfaces. Somebody found it. Not this year. She doesn't know when. Only that a man calling himself boss contacted her four months ago and made it very clear he'd found it too, and that he had no interest in exposing her as long as she was useful to him instead. Useful how? dario said very quiet now the way he gets right before he stops being my husband for a minute and starts being the man this city used to be afraid of small things at first which harbor insurers were renewing which contracts who was expanding warehouse space and where nothing that looked like anything she said nothing she could point to and call betrayal until three months ago when he asked her, very specifically, whether Russo Shipping

8:24 still held any harbor property in its own name, dormant or not. She didn't know. She asked me at drinks in April because I was the fastest honest way to find out, and I told her, without knowing what I was actually handing anyone, that it was probably tied up in a state matter nobody had touched. So she's Marsh, I said. Or she sent Marsh. She swears she's never heard that name in her life. And I believe her, Dario. I have built a career on knowing when someone is lying to save themselves, and she was well past that tonight. She was lying to herself for months about how bad this actually was, which is a completely different animal. Sophia looked at both of us in turn. Whoever filed that paperwork works for

9:09 Voss, or is Voss's, but it isn't Renata. She's not a spy. She's a frightened woman who made one real mistake 11 years ago and has been paying for it every month since without ever telling a single person, including the people she now works with every day, closest to the exact thing being hunted. How does he reach her? I asked.

9:30 A man doesn't blackmail somebody for four months without leaving some kind of door open between them. A number that changes every few weeks. Text only. Never a call, never his voice. She's never once heard him speak. He signs off every message the same way, always. She showed me on her phone before I left. One word, no name. Patience.

9:54 She said the first time he sent it, she thought it was almost kind, like he was telling her to breathe. She doesn't think that anymore. Sophia's hands had gone still in her lap, the way Lina's do when a thing has finally stopped being an abstraction. He's never once threatened her outright. That's what frightens her most, she said. A man threatening you. You can at least name what you're afraid of. A man who is simply, endlessly patient, and never once raises his voice even in writing.

10:25 She doesn't know what he actually wants badly enough to stop being patient for, and neither now do I. Dario Voss isn't a name I know. I said, and I said it the way I say things I have already checked twice against every ledger of memory I keep for exactly this reason. Not Greco's. Not anyone who ever drew from that family's accounts while I was watching them. I would know. I built my whole piece on knowing every name that ever mattered to that man. Then it's someone new, Lena said, or someone old enough that even you don't have him filed. Either way, he found Renata specifically, he asked about Russo's shipping specifically, and he asked three months ago, which is before the woman who called herself

11:10 Marsh ever walked into a records office asking about Birth 9. She was already doing the thing with her hands, smoothing an invisible fold flat, working at the way she works everything that frightens her. Voss isn't chasing the same lead Marsh was chasing. Voss found the lead first. Marsh may just be the hand he sent to go get it. One man, I said, and possibly one woman working for him, which is smaller than a war and worse than a rumor. Or it's not one man at all, Sophia said quietly. It's a name somebody picked because it doesn't mean anything the same way Marsh doesn't mean anything. I've negotiated against enough shell companies to know a disposable name when I hear one twice in the same month. We sat with

11:57 that for a while, the three of us, in a kitchen that had held, An hour ago, nothing heavier than bad dancing and cheap ordinary hours, and I found myself doing the thing I have done since the day I first understood what my wife actually was underneath her father's careful daughter, counting the cost of a war before it had fully announced itself as one. The way you check a door is locked long after you already know, in your body, that it is. We could be wrong about all of it, I said, mostly to hear whether the sentence still sounded honest out loud. A frightened woman, a disposable name, a word signed at the bottom of a text message. None of it has to add up to anything larger than one bad decade catching

12:40 up with one ordinary person. You don't believe that, Lena said. No, I said. But I wanted it said once tonight, the same way I wanted the last one said last week. So we'd know for certain which parts were fear and which parts were fact. Instead of letting them blur together the way they always tried to, this late, in a kitchen this quiet. What does Renata do now? Lena asked.

13:06 Does she know we know? No, Sophia said. And I'd like to keep it that way a little longer, if you'll let me. She's not our enemy. She might be our best way to find his real name, if she'll let me help her instead of just watching her drown in it alone. Something steadied in my sister's face as she said it. the negotiator coming back online underneath the woman who'd needed a blanket twenty minutes earlier. I told her I'd help her look into who Voss actually is. I meant it. I also meant every word of it, as exactly the kind of help that gets us his real name eventually.

13:42 Outside, the harbor had gone fully dark, ships riding at anchor under a sky with no moon in it worth mentioning, a city that still believed. correctly enough for most ordinary purposes, that its worst decade was safely behind it. Somewhere in it a woman named Renata Cole was lying awake with a secret finally, happed instead of carried alone, and somewhere beyond any name any of us had yet earned the right to say out loud. A man who called himself Voss was counting a patience of his own, certain that a broken woman and a borrowed name were more than enough armor between himself and a city that had already. once, burned an empire down to find out what a man like him was actually hiding. He did not know yet that

14:30 we had found the seam in his armor before he'd found ours. To be continued, that was episode 43 of Empire of Ashes. If this one has its hooks in you, the next episode is already waiting. Subscribe so you don't miss it. The complete book is on Amazon and early episodes plus Dario POV bonus scenes are on my Patreon. Links are in the description. Thank you for listening.