The Insides Read Online Free PDF Page A

leads her to the client; it might as well be a series of arrows painted on the surface of the road, pointing the way. She is led, in the end, to a long brick outbuilding, one of a series of similar buildings unglamorously filling in the back of the park. It houses six separate businesses behind identical generic facades facing a strip of parking spaces.
    Ten minutes early, she notes with satisfaction as shepulls the car into a space. She looks in the rearview mirror and musses her hair again.
    From her suitcase in the passenger seat she retrieves a box of black nitrile gloves; she opens the box and dons a pair.
    She emerges from the car, strides across a sweltering strip of asphalt, steps up onto the curb. The glass door behind which lies the prospective client is stenciled with the words THE RIGHTEOUS HAND FOUNDATION .
    A bell jangles as she pushes into the tiny lobby. It’s cool inside, but even despite that the space seems swampy, as though there’s mildew beneath the cream wallpaper, as though the rust-colored carpet has spent time under stagnating floodwater. She can feel the client, just one room away now; she turns her head to face the door set in the far wall and closes her eyes for a brief moment, perceives him as a shape in the darkness, which is a thing she couldn’t do when they were communicating transatlantically, via e-mail. It’s not like she sees a glowing silhouette or anything. It’s more like she sees a kind of floating Rorschach blob. Not his shape, but rather the shape his personality makes in the world.
    She is unsurprised when she finds the flaw, the part of this shape that tastes to her mind the way rancid oil would taste on her tongue. It repulses her, somewhat, but it generates no alarm; there’s no surprise in it. Years ago, when she first began finding for others, it would startle her to peer into a client and discover
damage
there: some wound that never healed correctly, some emotional apparatus that had grown wrong, curled inward, rankled, bloated. But before too long she realized that those people—damaged people—werethe kinds of people who needed her the most, and that she wouldn’t get far if she turned and walked back out the door every time she caught wind of something foul. Thus, she learned that sometimes you have to know when to stop looking inside someone, you have to know when to get out of someone else’s head and get back to your own. And that’s what she does now.
    She opens her eyes and rests them on the small, unattended reception desk, finds the least interesting thing available—a selection of highlighters fanning out of a plain white mug—and she waits.
    After a minute, the office door opens and she gets her first actual look at the prospective client, Mr. Hogarth Unger. He’s sixtyish, ruddy complexion, wearing an ill-fitting navy suit that looks about thirty-five years out of date. Big brass buttons.
    “Maja Freinander?” Unger says, in a voice pitched loud, bordering on a shout. The accent catches her off guard for a second: it’s European, French, where she was expecting coarse Boston honk. “Yes,” Maja says, taking the time of one blink to recover. “Mr. Unger. Hello.”
    “Please come in,” says Unger, gesturing into the office with a sweep of his arm.
    He does not offer her his hand to shake, which she takes as a sign that he’s remembered the instructions that she laid out in their preliminary exchanges. So she might not have needed the gloves after all. A good sign.
    Together they step into the office, into a space barely wider than the desk that Unger settles behind. She takes a seat in the molded plastic chair available to her, looks quicklyover the array of items on the desktop. A large beige computer monitor dating back to before the era of the flatscreen. A letter opener with a wrought handle, resting atop three file folders stuffed thick with documents—old documents, some of them rotting at their edges, as though they’ve been recently