Something had snagged.
Something in that fifteen-second exchange had caught on something in Mark, like a thread pulling on a sweater, too small to see but enough to feel.
I looked at Jacks.
Jacks was looking at Mark.
Jacks looked at me.
Neither of us said anything.
There was nothing to say yet.
It was a half step.
It was a thread.
It was probably nothing.
But I’d been wrong about “probably nothing” before, most recently about a man in an oatmeal bathrobe who read newspapers and owned a blue mug and communicated through refrigerator stationery.
And who was turning out to be the most significant “probably nothing” of my entire life.
So I watched.
And I waited.
And I filed the half step away in the part of my brain that collected small, important things that might mean nothing yet but that I wasn’t willing to forget.
Chapter 16
Peter
It started with insomnia and a pot of chamomile tea, and it became something I didn’t have a name for.
The first time was an accident.
I’d been at my desk until 2 a.m., staring at the manuscript, trying to write the paragraph that came after the fish tacos on David’s last good day, the paragraph where we get in the car and drive home and David falls asleep against the window and I watch him and know.
I’d been trying to write that paragraph for longer than my mental calendar could compute.
The words were there, somewhere, circling the runway but refusing to land. At 2 a.m., I gave up and went to the kitchen to make tea because tea was the only ritual I had left that still worked when everything else seized up.
Benji was already there.
He was sitting on the counter beside the stove, which was a thing he did that I’d given up correcting because correcting Benji’s relationship with furniture was like correcting the wind. He was in his boxers and the dinosaur shirt, which I’d recently learned was not inside out by accident but by design, because the tag irritated his neck, and he’d rather look like a man who didn’t understand how shirts worked than experience minor physical discomfort. He was eating cereal from a mixing bowl because he’d broken two of my regular bowls in the first week and had graduated himself to the mixing bowl on the theory that its larger diameter made it harder to knock off the counter. I supposed that was technically sound reasoning even if it looked absurd.
He glanced up when I came in.
His face was different at this hour, stripped of the animation and the performance, operating on whatever reserves were left after a full shift behind the bar. His eyes were tired in a way that made him look both older and younger than twenty-five, like a person who’d been awake for a very long time and wasn’t sure if going to sleep would help.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
I made tea.
He ate cereal.
