Below, Mrs. Fairweather's voice comes up through the floor. Whatever she is saying, it isn't taking. The other voice climbs straight over it, and somewhere in there is a word I'm fairly sure is my name, and it's accompanied with a foul curse that would make a kraken sailor blush.
I should leave Mrs. Fairweather to it. I am in no condition to manage anything more demanding than a glass of bourbon.
I get up anyway. This is my mess and I'll clean it up.
The room tilts a degree or two and then thinks better of it. Three bourbons, maybe four. Enough to make the floor feel like cotton balls under my hooves.
By the time I reach the bottom, Mrs. Fairweather is planted in the open doorway, spine very straight, one hand on the frame, and past her, on the step, is Jazz. Her red car sits slung across the gravel at an angle that suggests she parked it the way a person abandons a getaway vehicle. She holds a flattened cardboard box under one arm.
"It's all right, Mrs. Fairweather," I say. My voice comes out as gravel.
She gives me a look that says it is no such thing, and then steps aside, disappearing down the hallway and to the kitchen, her back straight and her motions jerky.
Jazz runs one long scan over me, top to bottom. The slept-in shirt. Whatever my face is doing. I'm pretty sure I also smell as good as I feel.
"God," she says. "You look like shit."
"Thanks, Jazz. Good to see you haven't changed."
"I'm not here for you." She cracks the box open against her hip in one motion, the cardboard popping into shape. "I'm here for Maddie's things."
It isn't a question, and she isn't waiting on me to answer it. She is already moving, past me and up the stairs, two at a time. I go up after her. I have nothing more pressing to do, and some part of me I am not proud of wants to be in the room while the last of Maddie leaves it.
She finds Maddie's bedroom like she has the blueprints.
She doesn't wait for permission. She crosses to the bed and lifts the grey sweater off the covers and folds it into the box with a violence uncalled for.
"You want to know what kills me?" she says, not looking at me. "I actually hoped you'd changed. Maddie believed it. She told me you were different now, older, and I looked her dead in the eye and said maybe. Because she wanted it that badly." A paperback goes into the box. A hair clip off the nightstand that I'm not sure is going to survive getting tossed with this level of animosity. "And then you proved both of us wrong."
"Jazz."
"I said don't talk to me." She finds a mug on the bookshelf, the chipped one Maddie brought from home, and she wraps it in the sweater like it's the one thing in this museum worth saving. "You had a woman who didn't care about any of this." She sweeps a hand at the room, the view, the whole of it, with the flat contempt of someone who truly doesn't care. "Not the money. Not the name. Not one square foot of it. She cared about you."
She straightens and finally turns to look at me.
"You're an idiot," she says. "A genuine, gold-plated, billion-dollar idiot."
I don't defend myself. There's nothing to defend. She isn't wrong. None of them are wrong. That is the entire character of this day.
"You want to know what you really are?" She tucks the box against her hip. "Under the suits and the cars and all the zeroes? You're a scared little boy. A coward."
Something goes through me then, cold and complete, because she has reached into a place I keep locked even from myself. I have been called a great many things by people intent to find the soft spot, and not one of them ever found this one. Jazz found it.
I say nothing. She does one last pass of the room with her eyes, hunting for anything of Maddie's she's missed.
"All you had to do," she says, quieter, which only makes it worse, "was have some balls. Stand in front of her. Tell her the truth. Ask the question. That was the whole assignment. You have all the money in the world, and you still couldn't afford it."
Then she's finished.
She's gotten every trace of Maddie into one cardboard box that doesn't even look full, and that is the detail that reaches in and twists. That Maddie's whole presence in this house fits in a carton a child could carry out under one arm.
That I could lose her that easily, like I never had her in the first place.
"For what it's worth," Jazz says from the doorway, not turning around, "she really does love you. That's the part I find the hardest. She loves you and you broke her heart."
And then she goes. Her footsteps echo down the hall. The front door swings shut with enough force to rattle the old stones of the Stronghold. Her red car coughs to life in the drive and pulls away with a screech of tires.
The house goes quiet again. I sit down on Maddie's bed.
