I blink. “You know what?”
“That you’re with child. I’ve known since the first night I came here and had dinner.”
My mouth is open. “That first night? The lasagna? And you never said anything. Why not?”
“I knew you’d tell me yourself when you were ready. I decided I’d follow whatever you did. If you told the brides, I’d know it was spoken of. If you told no one, I’d say nothing, for as long as that took.”
Heknew.From the first night and never made me explain myself. He just quietly rearranged himself around a fact I hadn’t told him and waited for me to be ready.
I put my hands over my face and cry like I haven’t cried since I was nine years old.
Chapter Sixteen
Mara
Cayzor doesn’t say anything about that either. He just stays on the floor with me. At some point his hand comes down onto my shoulder, warm and comforting.
“It’s a good thing,” he says eventually. “A child.”
“It’s a disaster.”
“No. It isn’t. And you aren’t alone in this, Mara.”
I sniff and wipe at the wetness on my face. I’m certain that what he just said is super significant, but I suddenly feel an overwhelming need to see my brother.
Under the shaking, the raw throat and the awful floating clarity after throwing up, I know I must see Andrew. I have to stand in front of him and watch his face while I say all of it out loud, because there is still a piece of me — a big, embarrassing piece — that is absolutely certain he will have an explanation.
That’s what I’m thinking as I wash my face.He’ll explain it.Four years on that clearance record and he’ll have a reason andit’ll be stupid and I’ll be furious with him for a month and then it’ll be fine.
Cayzor doesn’t try to stop me.
He doesn’t sayyou shouldn’torlet me handle itor any of the seventeen things a male his size might reasonably say to a woman who’s just been vomiting in the toilet. He stands up, and he opens my door for me and walks down the corridor beside me. He knows what I’m doing without me having to say a word.
Forty paces to my brother’s door.
The door isn’t locked. That’s the first wrong thing. Andrew locks his door, he’s been locking his door since we were kids.
I push it open. “Andrew?”
The lights are still on and I stand in the doorway trying to work out what I’m looking at, because it isn’t empty. There’s a cup on the counter with something dried in the bottom of it. His spare boots are by the door. The bed’s unmade. It looks like a room somebody is still living in.
It’s only when I start walking through it that I understand.
Both of his tablets are gone, the work one and the personal one. His credentials. The little document case he’s carried since he was twenty. The good jacket, the only expensive thing he owns, that he wears when he wants people to take him seriously.
And he took the flat metal box with our mother’s ring and the picture of them at the coast before we were born. He stood in this room and picked up his tablets, his jacket and our mother’s box, and he left everything else, and he walked out.
“Mara,” Cayzor says quietly from the doorway.
I’m going through the drawers, and the shelf, and the little table by the bed, and then I’m doing it again, faster, opening things I’ve already opened.
“What are you looking for?”
“A note.”
“He was already gone,” Cayzor says.
I turn around, realizing there’s no note.
