Page 104 of Graceless

"No."

The word again. Twice tonight I had used it on her. Twice tonight. Both times it had come out level, and both times something in me had flinched from the sound of it.

"Caterina. Listen to me. Nothing can hear it from here. The water covers the sound — that is why my brother keeps this place on his map. One month. Two. Until he learns what is safe, until I understand what is coming — you sleep here, you are alive here, and I will stand⁠—"

She turned her back on me and walked out the door.

Into the dark. Onto a bluff she had never seen, in March, over the ocean, without her coat — she walked out of the house and down the track toward the road with her arms crossed and her spine straight, and I stood in the doorway of the safest place I could find her, and began to understand what I had done.

I went after her. I did not touch her. I walked beside her in the dark and the wind and said her name, and reason, and the child, and she walked. Half a mile. A mile. The track met the road and the road went west, black between the scrub pines, forty miles of it before anything, and she turned west and kept walking, five months of my son or daughter under her heart, in a cardigan, at midnight, and she did not once look at me.

At the second mile I stepped in front of her.

She stopped. She looked through me — through, at the middle distance, a stare I last saw on the walls of besieged cities — and she waited, with the wind moving her hair, for me to do the only thing left, which was to pick her up again.

And I did it.

I did it again. I picked her up off the road and the road vanished — two miles of scrub pine and gravel replaced by four seconds of cold air and the cottage door, the old speed, the kind that doesn't bother with distance — and I set her down on the stone floor and she stood exactly where I put her, rigid, the wind still in her hair from a road she had been walking on a breath ago.

And here is the thing I will carry, that I deserve to carry: for four seconds she was against my chest, rigid with fury, and her body was not furious. I hear everything. That is the curse of what I am and I have never once wished it away until this bluff. Her heart did what it does when I am close — the skip, the surge, the rhythm I know better than my own name — and she felt it do it, and I felt her hate it. She would have paid anything to be made of stone in my arms. She was not made of stone. Neither of us said so. It was the cruelest thing either of us didn't say all night.

"So that's it," she said. "I can't outrun that. I can't outwalk it, I can't out-argue it, and there's no door in this house that means anything." She looked up at me, and her voice did not rise at all. "I'm a prisoner. That's what I am. Say it back to me."

I did not say it back to her.

"Say it, Raq."

I said nothing, which was the same as saying it, and she knew it, and she walked to the far corner of the room and sat in the keeper's chair facing the window and did not speak to me again that night.

I had told myself I would guard her door.

There is no other side of this door. I am the other side of the door.

I went outside and did the only thing I have left. I watched the sky.

Clear over the ocean, no cloud, stars hard and bright and too many of them — the kind of sky I used to stand under when the world was emptier and the watching was the whole job. I walked the bluff in both directions, reading the dark for anything with weight in it, anything with attention. The wind came off the Atlantic clean and carried nothing. No trace. No pressure. No signature in any register I own. Cam had chosen well; this place was a hole in the world's attention, a blank spot on every map that mattered.

I came back to the cottage and stood at the corner where the bluff meets the track, where I could see the door and the road and the eastern sky all at once, and I held that position until the stars began to thin, and I held it after, and the whole time I was aware of two things: the small heartbeat behind me in the stone house, steady, quick, asleep. And the woman carrying it, also asleep, who had looked at me tonight as she has never looked at anything — not the angel under the muslin, not the dark at the end of her block, not any of the old frightening things I have watched her face without flinching.

She looked at me the way a person looks at a locked door.

Because that is what I am now.

She tried again before dawn.

I heard the latch and was at the track before her, and this time she didn't walk past me. She stood in the gray light with her phone held up between us like a warrant.

"It was in my pocket when you grabbed me," she said. "Three weeks of being a woman alone in a basement — you learn to keep it on you. Something else you did." She turned it in her fingers. "One bar. It comes and goes on the bluff. I timed it. So here's your situation, warden. Sooner or later I get ninety seconds of signal, and I call Nina, and I tell her where I am — and then you can explain your quiet little map to her, and to Connie, and to whoever else piles in the car. You want to take the phone? Take it. Add it to the list. My no, my house, my phone. You're building quite a collection."

"I am not going to take your phone."

"No?" She put it in her cardigan pocket. "Then take me home."

"Caterina—"

"Then we do this every day." She said it the level way, the terrible level way. "Every morning. Every road. You'll win every single one, you have the arms for it — and every single time, you'll be a little more the thing you're pretending to save me from. That's the deal you made. Enjoy the wins."

And she turned and walked back to the cottage herself, because even her retreats were hers, and I stood on the track in the dark and did not feel like a man who was winning anything.