Max looks up from the notebook.
He looks toward the window. Can't see us—the lamp has turned the glass into a mirror on his side, the dusk on ours making us invisible. But the bond catches. I feel it. The filament goes taut for half a second. His head tilts. His pen stops.
Then he smiles at something he just wrote. Goes back to the page.
The smile cracks me open.
I sit in the back seat of my brother's car with my fists in my lap and I watch the only person I have ever loved write in a notebook in a window two floors above me, and I don't go in, and I don't say anything to anyone, because the truth is I don't know how to walk up those stairs and sit down next to him and not tell him everything.
And if I tell him everything, he'll do the thing we're all afraid of.
He'll try to fix it himself.
The lamp light catches the edge of his jaw. He turns a page.
Bane's hands are still on the wheel.
Atlas hasn't moved.
I don't move either.
Chapter 12
Hours earlier
Margot calls at three.
I'm in the kitchen making tea—the kind she taught me, loose leaf, the strainer she bought at a flea market when I was seventeen that she's convinced makes everything taste better. The phone buzzes against the counter and her name lights the screen.
"Hi, sweetheart."
"Hey, Mom." Her voice balms my soul.
"I'm just checking in. It is so beautiful up here, sweetheart, the leaves are just starting to turn. Richard's downstairs at the bar pretending he knows something about Connecticut wine."
"Does he?"
"He absolutely does not. But he's happy, so."
I smile.
"Have you eaten?" she asks. I roll my eyes.
"I'll find something."
"Max."
"I'll eat, Mom. I kind of have to, to survive. And believe it or not I dofeelhunger. Don't stress about me."
A beat. The sound of her shifting the phone to the other ear.
"I can't help it, Maxie. It's what I do." A breath. "You're doing so much better now. I can see it. I can hear it in your voice, even—you sound like yourself again. But for a while there, sweetheart..." She trails off. Picks it back up quieter. "For a while there I was really worried about you. The end of the spring. The way you stopped eating. You disappeared. You'd go to your room at seven o'clock and I wouldn't hear you move for the rest of the night. I didn't say anything because I didn't want to push, but I was scared, Max. I was really scared."
"Mom—"
"I know. I know you're okay now. I can see it. That's not what I'm saying." Another breath. "What I'm saying is—your happiness is everything to me. You know that, right? I would do whatever it takes to keep you safe. Whatever it takes. I need you to hear me say that."
"I hear you."
