He looked at the fire.
I looked at the fire.
“Good book?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile exactly.
“How was Sofia?”
“Good.” A pause. “Relieved. She’d been worried.”
“I would expect so.” He looked at the fire. “She knows you well.”
“Better than anyone.”
The words arrived before I had made them welcome. I felt his attention shift slightly–the quality change, the depth increase–and I looked at the fire and said nothing else.
He reached over and took the book from my knees. I let him. He looked at the cover and set it on the table beside his chair, and then he looked at me in the direct way that was simply what his looking was–complete, actual, nothing managed about it.
“You’re somewhere else tonight,” he said.
An observation, delivered with precision.
“I’m tired,” I said.
“Yes,” he said.
He stood, which I had not anticipated, and he crossed the small distance between the chairs and he sat on the arm of mine, the same configuration as the night of the storm. His arm came around my shoulders, the same weight and warmth as then.
I closed my eyes.
The guilt arrived in full, predictably, the way it arrived every time he touched me with this specific quality of uncalculated warmth. Not the operational warmth of a public gesture, not the heat of the nights when everything else was stripped back–this. The quiet, unhurried warmth of a man sitting on the arm of a library chair at nine in the evening because the woman in it seemed to need the space to be smaller.
He was quiet for a moment.
“You’re here now. You’re safe. Security increased this week,” he said. “The investigation has moved to the next phase.”
The parking structure.
He was close. He was so much closer than I had been permitting myself to understand.
“Okay,” I said.
His arm didn’t move. His breathing was even. He was looking at the fire with the composure that never quite left him.
I sat beside him and felt the warmth of him and felt the guilt at its full measure and felt the edge under my feet.
I had crossed a line.
I was on the other side of it. Whatever happened from here–the investigation completing, the confrontation arriving–I was already on the other side.
There was no corridor back. Only forward, and whatever forward required. The fire moved. His arm was steady. The manor held its night around us. I did not sleep for a long time.
Chapter Sixteen–Mikhail
The parking structure footage had arrived at 10 pm the previous night. I had watched it twice. The timestamp, the angle, the figures in the northeast corner of the second level–Elena, identifiable from her posture and her gait before the resolution confirmed her face, and across from her a man whose profilematched the description Dmitri had been building for three weeks. Bykov. The meeting lasted nine minutes and fourteen seconds.
