I exhaled.
Then he said: “But you’ve been with him five years.”
I tensed again.
“And I have to ask you something, not as a reporter. If you think I’m out of line, you can tell me to go to hell.” He paused. “Do you really think nobody can see it?”
I opened my mouth and then closed it again. I had nothing to say.
He let a few seconds of silence pass between us. Then he reached into his jacket and took out a card, sliding it to the middle of the table.
“I’ve already said more than I came to say. We should leave it there,” he said. “But if you want to talk about the real piece, the one about what it costs to stick around, call me. If you don’t, throw the card out, and I’ll write the honest version of the parts you and the others have already given me and nothing else.” He stood, picked up his cup, and put two bills under the saltshaker. “It was good to see you, Mattias, even like this.”
I watched him go out into the West Loop morning with his hands in his pockets. I sat in the booth.
The card was in the middle of the table, where he’d left it. My coffee had gone cold without me drinking any of it.
Everything I’d built, I’d built on one belief—being seen put us in danger. If I could stop others from seeing, I could keep us from being erased the way Easton got erased. Kovac thought some could already see us.
I picked up the card and put it in my jacket pocket. It was a short walk to my truck. I got in, shut the door, and I put both hands on the wheel.
Next, I would start the truck, drive home, and make lunch. It was a simple plan, but something was wrong with my breathing. It had gone shallow and high up in my chest.
My heart was racing like it did in the third period of a one-goal game. I put my forehead down on the backs of my hands on the wheel and breathed slow, on purpose, but it kept coming short. My hands shook.
I’d told myself for five years that building a wall was the price of keeping him. I believed that if nobody saw, nobody could do to him what got done to Easton. Now, a man I’d told the truth to once had just asked me, plainly, whether I really thought nobody could see.
I couldn’t say yes. I knew Heath saw. That meant Kieran, too. Others probably had seen, too, for years, and they’d said nothing.
That meant the wall had never made him invisible. He’d been visible the whole time. The people close enough to see had simply chosen to absorb what they knew.
Even though he wasn’t invisible, I’d made him live like contraband anyway. Five years of the garage door coming down before he was all the way inside. Five years ofassume someone’s watching.
The danger was still real. I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t. Somewhere out there were eyes that were unkind, and the wall was still the only thing between those eyes and us. That still didn’t justify what I’d put him through.
I lifted my head from my hands. My eyes were wet, and I wiped them once, hard, with the heel of my hand. I made myself breathe deeply. It took a few tries. My hands stopped shaking slowly, the way feeling comes back into a foot.
It was 11:40. I’d told him back by lunch.
I started the truck. It took twenty minutes to drive home.
The garage door went up on the first tap. A thought came back that I couldn’t keep out of my head.You’ve kept him in the house like contraband.
I walked into the house from the garage and dropped my bag in the laundry room. In the kitchen, Varga was at the island with his phone propped against the fruit bowl, building sandwiches. He’d started talking before I had the door open.
”—and it’s not like I want a beluga. I don’t. But you go to the Shedd with Kieran one time, one time, and you stand there at the glass and the thing looks at you, Rook. It looks right at you, and you think, okay, theoretically, if a person had the right tank—“ He looked up. The sentence kept going for about three words on momentum alone and then it stopped, all at once, the way a needle comes off a record.
He opened his mouth to ask me about the rink. I watched him change his mind before the words came out.
“Hey,” he said. “Where are you?”
“I’m here.”
“Not entirely.” He stepped around the island, placing himself in front of me. “You’ve been crying.”
“A little. In the truck. It’s done.”
He reached out and put his hand on the side of my jaw, his thumb rubbing lightly under my cheekbone. I leaned into it. “What happened?”
