After, when the room's emptied and Wheeler's gone to write down how much of us he stole, I stay at the table alone with the deck.
I shouldn't. The cards want to be dealt when the room is quiet—no faces to read, no cover to keep, just the sight and the felt and me. I tell them to behave and they don't, the way the chaos in them never quite does, and I let the futures press up into my chest without the buffer of an audience and look, the way you press a bruise to check it's still there.
I turn cards. Not for a question. For the company of the motion.
And one comes up that I know before it lands, the way I knew the mark would take my bare hand the day they tried to leash me, a card whose whole meaning is an outcome that makes itself happen. The warning that becomes the cause.
I dealt that card to myself once before, and I have spent every day since learning that some odds are only long until you look at them.
I look at it now. It looks back.
The deck has gone still in my hand, all the way still, for the first time today.
I put it down on the felt, faceup, and I leave it there.
I don't shuffle it back in.
8
EVERLY
The kettle's been cold three mornings running, and on the third one my stomach knows it before my head does.
That's the tell. There's a dent in the back burner kettle and a girl who lives bent over it, and most mornings I come down to the tick of it warming and Enya humming something I can never place, sliding the good coffee an inch down the counter toward me like we made a pact neither of us ever said out loud.
A hum. A kettle. A cup nudged my way. I didn't know I'd built a whole morning out of it until the morning came without it and my body went looking for the warmth before I'd decided to.
Three days. I count them on the way down the stairs and they come out three.
The first day I told myself she'd slept in. Grad students keep their own hours up on the floors I'm not allowed on, locked away with their theses and their grudges, and nobody here owes me a reason.
The second day the coffee tin sat exactly where I'd left it and the kettle was cold and I told myself she was buried in work.
This morning there's frost on the inside of the window over the sink—Callister runs cold in a way the weather has nothing to do with—and the kettle is cold, and the kitchen is holding its breath, still the way a room goes still when it's been waiting longer than I have.
I stop telling myself things. The lump's already in my throat by the time I reach the bottom step, and I don't have a name for it yet, only the shape.
I take the back stairs up to the grad floor, which I'm not supposed to do. I know every edge of the terms that keep me here, and the second floor is theirs—insular, clannish, a door I keep my hand off of. But the rules that pin me to my own corridor were written by someone who wanted me watching the floor and not the people on it, and I've started to notice the difference.
Enya's door is open.
Not ajar. Open—all the way back against the wall, the way a door stands when there's no reason left to close it. I stop in the frame and make myself look before I let myself feel, because that's what the summer taught me, and the looking is the only thing keeping my hands steady.
The bed is stripped to the ticking. Blue-striped, bare, sagged in the middle where a body used to sleep. The shelf over the desk is empty. There's a paler rectangle on the wall where something hung, a print, a poster, and a little constellation of pinholes left around it, and that's everything she ever chose to put in front of her own eyes, gone.
The sill is clean. There was a mug there—I'd seen it, chipped blue enamel, the kind you keep because it was your grandmother's and not because it holds heat anymore—and it's gone too.
And the room doesn't smell like neglect. That's the thing that gets under my skin and stays. It smells like cleaning product,sharp and floral andrecent,the smell of a space scoured instead of abandoned.
Somebody emptied this room with their sleeves shoved up. Somebody wiped the sill. Somebody decided, in three days flat, that there should be nothing of Enya Halstone left for me to find.
It worked. There's nothing in there. That's the whole point of it, and the point lands in my chest like a stone dropped down a well, and keeps falling, and doesn't hit bottom.
I don't go in. There's nowhere in there to stand.
***-
By the time I'm back on the ground floor, the house has its story ready, the way the house always does.
