“Nothing,” he said.
Right.I’d asked an unnecessary question, pushed when I shouldn’t have.If anyone knew to sit quietly, it was me.“You don’t have to tell me.”
“I know.”
He picked up the phone and turned it over.For a single second his attention caught on the screen -- I couldn’t see the content, only the bright rectangle of it reflected in his eyes -- and then he flipped it over again, set it in the same place, and went back to the fork.
I did not ask again.
We stayed at the table until the plate was empty.Mine was not a plate but a slow accumulation of stolen bites -- another piece of his bread, a forkful of rice I reached across for when he looked at the window again, a second forkful when he didn’t say anything about the first one.He hadn’t offered.He also hadn’t drawn back his plate.
He tidied up the table, then turned off the overhead light.The front room lamp was already on -- the same lamp from the night before -- and I sat on the leather couch with my knees drawn up and the cut gathered around my shoulders.My coffee mug, which had been refilled at some point I hadn’t tracked, was slowly going cool between my palms.
He sat on the other end of the couch.
He wasn’t watching me.His focus rested on the far wall, and mine on the lamp, and the house did its small sounds around us.I couldn’t have said when the exhaustion arrived, only that it was there, and that for the first time in as long as I could remember the exhaustion wasn’t also fear.Just tired.The ordinary kind.The kind that asked only to be slept off.
The cut was warm.
I put my head against the back cushion and turned it toward the lamp.The light behind my eyelids was the soft red of tissue held against a candle.My breathing was even.Slow.The fear was gone.
I did not finish the thought.
* * *
Rogue
She fell asleep fast.One second she was breathing with the careful restraint of someone trying to be still, and the next the rhythm had gone slow and steady.The coffee mug tipped in her hands just far enough that I got my hand under it before it fell.I set it on the table.
I looked at her.The cut was bunched up around her shoulders, the lapels curved around the collar of the gray hoodie she hadn’t been sure she was allowed to want.One hand rested against her cheek, palm down, fingers loose, the bruised wrist visible where the cuff of the hoodie had ridden up against the couch cushion.She was small on the long leather couch -- the cut still swamping her -- and she was asleep without apology, without the careful, braced position she slept in when she was watching for something to happen.The fact I’d let her wear my cut went against a lot of rules, but for now it was all I had to offer.I’d need to get her a property cut.
I went to the hall closet and came back with a blanket, the thick cotton one off the second shelf.I shook it once and laid it over her in a single motion, tucking it against the back of the couch cushion on the side away from the room.I left her hand where it was.
I picked up my phone, opened the messages.The area code placed it in a firm in Midtown Manhattan.The formal cadence of the first line of every message, the careful legalistic language was designed to sound like concern yet meant something else entirely.I didn’t read them.I’d read the first one.That had been enough to know what all of them said.
I deleted them.
One, then two.Then I hitselectand checked off every one before removing them all, especially the one that said --Urgent: Welfare of Lennox Hale.
I set the phone on the table.
The lamp put its circle of light on the floor and on the edge of the couch where her feet were, and the house settled into the deep stillness of late evening.I leaned back against the chair I’d taken after putting the blanket over her and looked at the phone, dark on the table.
Chapter Six
Lennox
The percolator had been doing its death rattle since before I got there, and nobody had turned it off.I stood at the cast-iron skillet with a spatula in one hand and an egg in the other.The grease popped once and caught me on the wrist.I didn’t pull away -- just hissed through my teeth and cracked the egg cleanly into the pan.
The kitchen was thick with the heat of a morning already in motion.Bacon had been the first thing on the stove, and the smell had worked itself so deep into the walls I suspected it was permanent -- part of the compound now, like the motor oil and pine from outside.Through the doorway to the rec room, a country station was turned up too loud for the hour, all steel guitar and a woman with something to prove.Whisper, Forge’s old lady, sang a few words of every third verse, not seeming to know she was doing it.
I was wearing the cut over one of Rogue’s flannels.The flannel was too big.The cut was too big.My feet were bare on the linoleum -- someone had told me the floors held heat in the morning, and I’d tested the theory and found it true.My hair was up, pulled back with a rubber band I’d borrowed from Danica two days ago and not returned.She hadn’t asked for it back.
Whisper was at the counter, slicing bread with a serrated knife that had never seen a bread box in its life.The slices came out uneven but sure.
“Don’t move that off the heat,” she said, without looking up from the bread.“You’ll break the yolk.”
“The yolk was already broken.”
