Page 101 of Graceless

"No." The joy went down like a drowned thing and what came up over it was clean and hot and mine. "No. You left, Raq. You want to leave? Leave again. You're good at it."

And I slammed the door in his face.

The bolt. The chain. Both hands flat on the wood, my breath going four to the second, and through two inches of steel-core door — his door, the one his company paid for, God, the nerve of this whole street — I heard him not move. That particular no-sound. The quiet with him in it, standing on my stoop, an inch of night air and a slab of steel away.

"Caterina." Level, through the door. "I know about the child."

The floor moved.

Nobody knew. Nina knew. Nina, and a pharmacy cashier with theories, and a test standing in a drawer like a little white witness — I hadn't said it out loud to the walls yet, I hadn't said it in confession, and the man I'd been screaming at inside my head for three weeks said it through my door with the flat voice on, like a fact he was reading off a form.

I yanked the chain off and pulled the door open.

"How."

"I heard it." He hadn't moved. Hands at his sides, coat open to the cold, and his eyes came down to the middle of me and back up, and something crossed his face that I had never seen on it before — not the banked thing, not the wall; the opposite of a wall. "From the corner. Twenty minutes ago. Two heartbeats." His voice stayed level and it cost him; I watched it cost him. "Yours I know. I set my nights by it for a season. And under it — small. Fast. New. I held on to the el, Caterina. My legs went. I held on to a train pillar on your corner like a drunk."

"Good," I said, and my voice cracked on it, and I hated that it cracked. "I hope it hurt. You want to know what I held on to? A pregnancy test. Alone. In my grandmother's bathroom. Because the father wrote me a note."

"I know."

"Eight words, Raq. You kept the rule like a lawyer and you gutted it like a lawyer, and then—" it was all coming now, three weeks of it, and I let it — "then I sat in that kitchen and took your beach speech apart one sentence at a time, and you know what I found. I can never have a child. You built that sentence. You knew the difference between have and make and you fed it to me in the dark and let me cry for you. I felt sorry for you, you enormous—" My throat closed. I finished it anyway. "I grieved for you while you were lying to my face."

"Yes," he said.

Just that. No cushioning, no defense. He stood on my stoop and owned all of it with one word, and that yes went into me deeper than any apology would have.

"Why are you here."

"Because everything I decided was wrong, and I have come to say so, and to—" and there, right there, he shifted — the weight, the shoulders, the old tide coming up in him — "Caterina. Pack a bag. Tonight. There are eyes that have not found this yet and a brother who can tell me where they won't look, and I need you somewhere no one stands a watch⁠—"

"Stop."

"—it is one bag, one hour, I will carry everything else⁠—"

"Stop talking."

He stopped. Somewhere up the block a television laughed at something through a window.

"You're doing it again," I said. "Right now. In front of me. You decided I needed guarding, and you decided what I could know, and then you decided I'd be safer left, and now you've decided I need packing — you're a deciding machine, Raq, you come off that roof with a whole new decision every time the sky changes, and the one thing you have never once done is ask me."

His jaw moved. And then terror did what terror does to a man with one card left, and he played it.

"Run." The word came out of him with the whole watchtower under it. "I am saying it, Caterina. The rule — my rule, the one we shook on. When I say run, you run. No questions. I am saying it now. Run."

"No," I said, and slammed the door in his face.

Both slams felt wonderful.

I stood inside with my back against the steel and my hands shaking — not fear, the other thing, the thing with no good name that's rage and love in the same pot at a rolling boil — and I listened to him not leave. The quiet with him in it, one inch of night away.

And then, through the door, my door, on a public stoop in Bensonhurst at midnight, he started to tell me the truth.

"There was a time we lived here openly." The flat voice, level, pitched for exactly one listener and no farther. "All of us. There were women we loved, and there were children, Caterina. There were children."

I didn't move.

"You asked what I held back. This is it. This is 'after,' and I will say it standing on a stoop if that is where you'll have it, because you were right — I ran without a word, and until you have the whole truth, nothing I say is worth anything. And I need my word to be worth something tonight."