Then, he was gone.
I stood in the studio for a full minute without moving.
Then, I sat down on the floor—not the sofa, the floor, my back against the cabinet under the sink—and pressed both hands flat against the cold wood and breathed.
The grocery bag was still on the counter, half unpacked. The olive oil was in the cabinet. The light through the east window was still doing what it had been doing, gold and indifferent, andthe canvases were still stacked against the walls with all five years of private work inside them, and Colleen's name was in a federal file somewhere being used as leverage against me, and none of it—not one piece of this morning—was what it had been thirty minutes ago.
I thought about my father's business.
I thought about my mother on the women's guild board.
I thought about Colleen.
I thought about Nora, who had turned from the crackers with warm eyes and saidgoodabout the gallery.
I pressed my hands harder against the floor and let the cold of it ground me. I told myself to think clearly, which was difficult because every clear thought I tried to have arrived with Craine's face attached to it.
He knew about the studio. He knew about Colleen. He knew things that were not knowable by ordinary means, which meant he had reached into the private life of a private woman and pulled her threads loose before he'd even knocked on the door.
And he wanted me to inform on Brock.
On the Danes.
I sat with that for a moment. Brock had never told me his last name. I had connected him to the Danes myself—the pier, the explosion, the way he moved through the world like a man who belonged to something larger and more dangerous than he'd said out loud. But Craine had come here knowing. Knowing Brock's name, knowing the address, knowing that a man from that world had spent last night in this room. Which meant someone had been watching the studio. Which meant that whatever I had thought was private—the last private thing I had—was not private at all, and hadn't been for longer than today.
I thought about the alias. The rental under a name that wasn't his. The behavior of a man who understood he was being tracked and had built his life accordingly.
He was a Dane. I was almost certain of it now. And I had no idea yet what that meant, or what he'd walked into when he came to this city, or whether the ambush his brother had pulled him away to deal with had anything to do with the man who had just stood in my studio and saidyour sisterin a voice like a door closing.
I picked up my phone.
My hands were not completely steady and I let them be unsteady because there was nobody watching anymore.
I found the number. The one he'd put in my phone in the dark before he left.
I pressed call.
It rang twice.
And then his voice, low and immediate: "Mary Catherine."
Not a greeting. A recognition. Like he'd been waiting for the call and had known something was wrong before I'd said a word.
"Someone was just here," I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected. "A man named Craine. He—" I stopped. Started again. "I need you to come back."
A beat of silence. One beat, no longer.
"I'm coming," he said. "Lock the door. Don't open it for anyone. I'll be there in twenty minutes."
"Okay," I said.
"Hey." His voice dropped lower, something in it settling like a hand on a shoulder. "You're all right. I've got you."
I've got you. He'd said it in the water off the pier and he'd said it in the dark of this room and he said it now down a phone line from somewhere across the city. It landed the same way every time—not like a promise a man made to manage a woman, but like a fact he was reporting.
I locked the door.
I sat back down on the floor with the phone in my hand, and I waited.
