He got about three hours and gave up on the rest.
The wallet was still on the pantry table where he'd left it, and he did not go back down for it. He knew what was in it. The problem for today was on the hall table, closed, with a divider three pages from the end and a note in the margin that said bus 9.40.
Ten thousand dollars. Before midnight. Twenty-two days after that.
At nine fifty-one the bell at the gate went.
She was on the drive by the time he got out, and it took him a second to work out why she looked wrong.
Hair down. He'd only ever seen it up. It was longer than he'd assumed and darker, and it changed the shape of her face enough that if she'd walked past him in town he might have needed the second look. Black jeans, a fitted black top, a short jacket that had been rained on more than once. The boots were the same boots. Some kind of thin silver chain that went under the collar.
No apron. That was the rest of it.
"You're staring at the gate," she said.
"I'm opening it."
"You're standing next to it."
He opened it.
She came up the drive with the binder under one arm and stopped where the gravel gave out, in the same place she'd stopped on Saturday, and looked at the stable gutter again to confirm it was still hanging.
"You've not slept."
"No."
"Why."
"Family debt."
She waited three or four steps for the rest of it.
"How bad?"
"Bad."
"How bad is bad?"
"Bad," Sebastian said, and that was all of it, and she let it go for exactly as long as it took to reach the door. He had already learned that this was not the same thing as letting it go.
Aldric was in the hall with the post. He had a different jacket on.
"Sir."
"How much are you owed?"
There was a pause about half a second long.
"Two thousand eight hundred dollars."
"Since May."
"Since May, sir. Not the whole of it. I've been taking what the household could stand each month and putting the rest against the line." He set the post down and squared it, and then stopped squaring it. "It has been between two and three hundred a month, mostly. It adds up faster than one expects."
"Account number."
"Sir —"
"You can say the other thing after."
Aldric said the account number. Yui repeated it back to him from the binder without being asked, and Aldric confirmed it, and Sebastian sent it.
Daily Spending Limit: $7,200 remaining
"Thank you, sir."
"That's the other thing."
"It is," Aldric agreed, and went to do something in the dining room that did not need doing.
Yui wrote it in the table under Saturday's rows and did not look up.
"You didn't need reminding," she said.
"No."
"I know. I'm noting it." She ruled a line. "Seventy-two hundred left. What's the plan?"
"There isn't one. That's why you're here."
She turned to the back of the binder, to the page of nine questions with the wide gaps under them, and put her finger on the fourth.
If you buy something and give it away, does that work?
"Yesterday was bills," she said. "Bills are fine and bills are finite. You've paid every staff balance in Aldric's book, one supplier, one glazier, one boiler. In about a week there'll be nothing left in this house to pay for and you'll still need ten thousand dollars a day. So today I'd like to stop guessing."
"You want to test it."
"I want one clean test. New merchant, nothing you keep, all of it gone by tonight, receipts, and a count I can actually check." She tapped the page. "If gifts work, that's the biggest door you've got. This house has one gutter. There's no limit to how many people there are."
"We've got seventy-two hundred."
"That wasn't an invitation to spend all of it on one experiment."
Sebastian looked at her.
"Why not?"
It turned out the answer was that nobody could do it.
They started at half ten on two phones at the hall table. A caterer in the west of the city could do a hundred and twenty covers with four days' notice and hung up when Yui said today. A sandwich firm said Sunday twice, in the voice of a man explaining a natural law. A pizza chain offered them a hundred and eighty pizzas and then rang back nine minutes later to say the franchise owner had said no.
At twenty past eleven Yui got a merchant on the docks — Teale's, shellfish, wholesale — who had four hundred lobster lunches boxed and iced in a chill room because a corporate booking on a boat had cancelled at eight that morning and the client's card had bounced at nine.
She put her hand over the phone.
"Eighteen dollars each. Four hundred."
"That's seventy-two hundred."
"I know what it is. I did it while he was talking." She took her hand off. "And you'd deliver? — Right. And a driver. — No, today. — Yes, today."
She wrote TEALE'S — SHELLFISH — NEW in the merchant column.
"Four hundred," she said, when she'd hung up.
"That's what he said."
"I heard him."
The rest of the morning was Yui on the phone finding somewhere for four hundred lunches to go. It took her about forty minutes, because it turned out she already knew who ran the Sunday meal at the hall on Ferrow Street and had done since she was about nineteen.
Sebastian listened to one side of that conversation and did not ask.
"Two hundred there," she said. "They do about a hundred and ten on a Sunday. They can't freeze the rest, so a hundred and ten people are going to eat very well tonight and the kitchen staff are going to eat better. The other two hundred we hand out ourselves."
"Where?"
"The market off Ferrow. It's a car park on a Sunday and there's a bus stand." She was writing. "New merchant?"
"Yes."
"You checked?"
"Yes."
"Receipt?"
He held up his phone.
She did not look at it. He noticed that. She went back to the page.
He put Teale's number into the bank app wrong twice, because it was long and the app hid half of it after the fifth digit.
The third time Yui leaned over from the next chair and took the phone out of his hand. She read the account off the invoice and typed it in with her thumb, and her shoulder stayed against his arm while she did it.
He moved about half an inch.
"Am I in your way?"
"No."
She finished it and gave him back the phone. He authorised it.
Seven thousand two hundred dollars.
Daily Spending Limit: $7,200 remaining
Sebastian looked at that for a second.
"It hasn't gone," he said.
"You've just paid him."
"It hasn't gone."
She looked at the number on his face rather than the phone, because she could not see the number.
"So we find out," she said.
Teale's van came at ten past two and it was not big enough, so Teale's second van came at twenty to three.
The boxes were white polystyrene, eight lunches to a box, fifty boxes, stacked in a way that would not survive a corner. The driver had done the corners anyway, and had a second man with him who had plainly been called in on a Sunday and was not being paid enough to look interested. He stood in the drive of the Jules estate with a docket in his hand looking at Sebastian the way a man looks at a set of circumstances he intends to describe to his wife later.
"Where do you want them."
"Two hundred to Ferrow Street hall. Two hundred stay on the van."
"You're not keeping them."
"No."
"Right," the driver said.
Yui counted them.
She counted them off the pallet, out loud, in eights, with a pen, and made the driver wait while she did it. At box thirty-one she stopped and made him open one because it felt light. It wasn't. Three hundred and ninety-two. She counted the last box twice.
"He's eight short."
"He's eight short," Sebastian agreed, and the driver went to the cab and came back with a bag with eight in it that had been going somewhere else.
Then Sebastian stood in the drive among four hundred lobster lunches and started asking questions in a voice Yui had not heard him use before.
How long out of ice. What temperature the chill room held them at. Whether the second van had a cold plate or just a curtain. Whether the hall had a fridge, how big, and whether it had been checked today. How long two people could hand out two hundred boxes if there was a queue, and how long if there wasn't. Where a queue would form at a bus stand and which end of the car park the wind came from.
The driver answered about half of it and got out a thermometer for the rest.
Yui had stopped writing and was watching him do it.
"What," Sebastian said.
"Nothing." She started writing again. "You've done this before."
"Not with lobster."
The hall on Ferrow Street had a woman in her sixties called Mrs Adeyemi running it. She took delivery of twenty-five boxes with the flat competence of somebody who has taken delivery of worse, signed the driver's docket, asked Yui about her mother, and only then turned to Sebastian.
"And why have you bought four hundred lobster lunches?"
"I needed to spend seventy-two hundred dollars."
Mrs Adeyemi waited.
Sebastian waited too, because he had answered the question.
"Right," she said eventually, and went to find another table.
The counter moved while she was walking away.
Daily Spending Limit: $3,600 remaining
Two hundred lunches. Half of seventy-two hundred, to the dollar, and not one cent of it when he'd paid Teale's four hours ago.
"It's doing it," Sebastian said.
Yui had the binder open before he'd finished saying it. "Now?"
"Now. Not when I paid. When she took them."
Yui made a sound she tried to stop and did not manage to stop. She turned it into a cough about a second and a half too late and had to put the binder down on a stack of chairs.
Sebastian looked at her.
She got it under control, mostly, and straightened up, and said, "Don't," and he had not said anything.
Somebody asked him where the rest were going and the afternoon carried on.
The car park off Ferrow took the rest of it, over about two hours, eighteen dollars at a time.
It came down in steps he could not always match to a box, because two went at once and sometimes a man took one and came back for his wife. Yui had the page open on the roof of the van and made him call the number out whenever it changed, and stopped asking after the fourth time because it changed too often to be worth writing.
At six minutes past six the last four went to a woman who took two, and then took two more when Sebastian said there was nothing else to do with them.
Daily Spending Limit: $0 remaining
"It worked," Sebastian said.
Yui wrote GIFT — YES in the results column, and then, underneath it, one test.
"It worked," Sebastian said again, because she had not looked up.
"It worked."
"One test," she said. "Yesterday a restaurant paid you half and you still don't know why. Come back to me when you've given away four hundred of something that isn't food, on a day that isn't a Sunday, in a place that isn't this one, and I'll take the word yes off probation."
"That's four more days."
"Then it's four more days."
The phones started somewhere around the second hundred.
Yui noticed them a long time before he did — two teenagers on the wall by the bus stand, then a man filming from a car with the window down, then a woman doing a piece to camera with the queue behind her and Sebastian in it.
"You're being filmed."
"I'm standing outside."
"That's not what I meant."
The reactions in the car park were not one thing. A man in a council fleece shook his hand. A woman further down the queue said something to her friend that Sebastian did not catch and was not intended to catch and could read the shape of anyway. Somebody asked twice which charity it was and did not believe none either time. A kid took one, looked at it, and asked if there was anything else.
Sebastian said no, there was lobster, and the kid took the lobster.
They went back in the van because the second one had gone and there was nowhere else to put them. Bench seat, three across, the driver on the outside, Yui in the middle with the binder on her knees and her boots up against the heater housing because there was nowhere for them to go.
Her knee was against his. It had been for about a mile.
He noticed that he had not moved. Then he moved.
Neither of them said anything about it. The driver talked about the Chandler Street one-way system for eleven minutes.
At the lights Yui said, without looking over, "You keep doing things like this and people are going to start asking where the money comes from."
Sebastian looked out of the windscreen.
"I know."
"That's not an answer."
"No."
"Because you can't, or because you won't?"
The driver had stopped talking about the one-way system. Sebastian was aware of that, and of the fact that the man was two feet away and had a phone in the door pocket, and he did not answer the question in front of him.
Yui turned her head and watched him not answer it. Then she wrote something in the binder that took four words, and shut it, and put both hands on top of it for the rest of the journey.
At the house she worked out her day at the hall table with her coat still on.
"Ten hours."
"You got here at ten."
"Nine fifty-one, and it's twenty past nine now, so it's eleven and a half." She wrote it. "I'm charging ten. I ate a boxed lobster on a car park wall at four o'clock and I'm not billing you for eating your own lunch."
"That's not how —"
"Two hundred and twenty."
Under 17,258 she wrote 17,038.
"There is still no balance," Sebastian said.
"Seventeen zero three eight."
"Yui."
"You can say it every day. I've got a column for it." She capped the pen and put it through the rings. "Tomorrow's a Monday. Everything's open. If you want ten thousand gone before six you need three merchants lined up by nine, so I'll ring the hall about the freezer and you can find out whether Aldric knows anybody who does roofs."
"You're coming tomorrow."
"I'm on at Halvers at eleven-to-seven from Tuesday," she said, "so no, Tuesday. Tomorrow, yes."
She wrote MONDAY on a divider and put it in.
She was doing her jacket up when her phone went in her pocket, and then went again, and then twice more.
She looked at it standing in the hall with one arm in a sleeve.
"Halvers group chat," she said.
"Right."
"Vasilis has put it in the Halvers group chat."
She turned the phone round.
It was a photograph taken from about thirty feet away in the car park off Ferrow, slightly blurred, over somebody's shoulder. Sebastian was in the middle of it with a white box in each hand and his mouth open, mid-sentence, looking like a man being electrocuted at low voltage. The caption above it said JULES HEIR BUYS 400 LOBSTER LUNCHES and under that somebody had written why tho.
Sebastian looked at it.
"That's a bad photograph," he said.
Yui stared at him.
"That's what you got from this?"
"It's a genuinely bad photograph. I look like I've been shot."
"There are four hundred people who now know what your face —" She stopped. She put the phone away and did the other sleeve. "Look at the left."
He looked at the left.
She was in it. Right at the edge, half out of frame, in the black jacket, with the binder held against her chest in both arms and her pen in her hand, looking at the queue and not at the camera.
"Ah," Sebastian said.
"Yes."