The Verifiers (The Verifiers #1)

by Jane Pek

She would hurl herself at the chance for a life where she could make things happen instead of one where things happened to her.

I’m simultaneously thinking, Oh shit and also How exciting

What I do next: I google the dry cleaners in the neighborhood and visit them in order of distance from Jude Kalman’s apartment. At each one I say I’m there to pick up the dry cleaning for Jude Kalman. When the person at the counter has no record of the name, I ask if it could be under his wife’s name instead. The address is 310 Columbus Avenue, Unit 8E, I say. I learned this trick from Inspector Yuan and the Penitent Courtesan, where the inspector uncovers the identity of the titular courtesan by bringing her cloak around to all the seamstresses in the Forbidden City.

According to the Romantick website, online dating will destroy us all by irreparably degrading interpersonal relationships and ultimately ceding control over humanity to the instruments of eugenics (also known as the matchmakers’ compatibility algorithms). The group’s efforts are focused on lobbying Congress to outlaw matchmakers and populating its blog with semi-grammatical rants.

He despises what he does but claims he has to stay for health insurance reasons.

Iris may want to believe that’s what happened because it fits into her narrative of her sister as fuckup, but, as Inspector Yuan likes to say, believing something for its convenience is at best negligence and at worst culpability.

Because she broadcasts her boredom whenever Lionel and I talk about books or writing.

How vapid.

“Do you think that’s weird? That Sarah’s profile is gone?” “She no longer needed it.” “But why go to the trouble of deleting it?” Becks shrugs. “I knew someone who took out the trash before he killed himself.”

He seems to be one of those people who enjoys stating the unhelpful obvious,

That's my MO!

I pause to consider whether this girl could belong to a secret society and is trying, through an apparently nonsensical question, to determine whether I do as well, like in Inspector Yuan and the Constellation of Kings, where the members of the outlawed Sun Moon Sect identify each other by asking the question of why the moon mourns for the sun.

Long sentence.

There’s a slight hitch in the rhythm of her statement, as if, maybe, she had been about to say when we lived up there. Now I get it. The Very Recently Single and Unhappy About It.

The kitchen looks like the house elves went on strike a century ago.

What I imagine is Rina like one of those giant sequoia trees whose heartwood has been hollowed out. There must be so much of that other girl bound up in the person she has become.

I hit doorbells at random until someone buzzes me in, probably mistaking me for their food delivery.

Good point.

I have to say I always considered it a cop-out (pun semi-intended) in the Inspector Yuan novels how everyone chatters away at the inspector whenever he and Constable Zhang come around inquiring about the latest mysterious death. It’s a lazy way to get important bits of information to the detective and the reader: have someone tell them about the turbulent relationship the victim had with his youngest son, or about the overheard muttering between the couple by the lake on how best to drown someone. But now I’m thinking maybe people really do just want to talk about death. How close it got to them, and how, this time, it moseyed on by.

Right then it comes to me that I’m in the information-asymmetry scene in every Inspector Yuan novel where one out-of-the-loop character keeps asking questions so everyone else can reveal important information in a vaguely naturalistic way. And, goddammit, that character is me!

But: what he said to me while we were driving through hushed, late-night Queens, Symposium a melancholy sweetness through the speakers. You become something if you act that way for long enough. Maybe that’s the truth of why my brother loves me. And it might have made him a better version of the person he would have been otherwise, but the fact that he felt he had no choice but to be that way—it hollows everything out.

I’m so befuddled by this opening move—I’d spent my ride over prepping for anger, recalcitrance, denial, all the ways I might react if someone confronted me about my plan to cover up a murder—that I respond with “You moved your plant.”

I have this sudden sense memory of sitting in a car with Max, the two of us rushing forward through space and time and not even noticing because we’re yowling our way through one of the Valjean and Javert duets from Les Misérables.

solicitude

Each time she does she very considerately glances at me to signal that I’m included in this conversation, even if it’s obvious that to Adam he’s enjoying a solo audience with Lucinda Clay. I don’t blame him; he’s just accurately assessing the food chain dynamics, which, in the wild, would be a prerequisite for survival.

I hug my knees to my chest. “I think,” I say, “I’d do everything I could to help her get away.”

Brilliant way of revealing what happened.