Page 106 of Graceless

I set her down inside and she went straight to the keeper's bed without looking at me and shut the door, and I stood in the main room with her wet coat in my hands and the rain still running off me, and I listened to the two heartbeats through the wall — hers slowing, settling, the small one still running fast — and I stood my watch through the night, and toward morning the small one slowed too, and I did not move until it did.

Something was wrong. I could hear it. I had nothing in me that could name it, no vocabulary for this, no file — but the rhythm had changed, and I stood on the other side of a door I was not permitted to open, listening, and I was afraid in a way I had never been afraid of anything, not the field, not the fall, not the whole weight of the sky.

I was afraid of something the size of a spark.

CHAPTER 31

CATE

Iwoke up in a bed I had never seen, in a room that smelled like salt and old wood, with my shoes still on.

Gray light through a window I didn't know. A ceiling I didn't know. Stone walls, thick, old, and outside the window nothing but grass and the edge of something — a bluff, the sound of water a long way down. My hands hurt. Both of them, across the knuckles, a deep bruise-ache that didn't make sense until I sat up and remembered hitting him.

I flexed them. Good. They still worked. I'd hit harder things than him — a frozen pipe, once, with a wrench, the winter Nonna's heat went — but nothing that deserved it more.

The door was shut. I'd shut it. I got up and opened it and stood in the frame and looked at what he'd brought me to.

One room. Stone floor, low ceiling, a kitchen that was barely a counter and a stove. A fireplace with a stack of wood beside it — he'd made a fire sometime in the night. A table, two chairs. The front door, heavy, not locked. Past it, through the glass, a dirt track going down to a road going nowhere, and beyond that, ocean on every side I could see.

He was standing outside. Of course he was standing outside. Hands at his sides, face toward the water, the collar I used to fix standing wrong against the wind.

I opened the front door. He turned around before it was all the way open.

"Caterina."

"What time is it."

"Ten past seven."

"What day."

"Wednesday. You have been asleep a long time."

"I was carried across a state," I said. "It's tiring." And I shut the door on him, and sat down at the table, and went through my pockets.

Right cardigan pocket: phone. Still there — he wouldn't take it; I'd made sure of that on the track when I held it up between us and dared him. I pressed the button. No bars. Eight percent battery and no bars.

Left pocket: a gum wrapper and a fifteen-cent square of dried varnish I'd scraped off my thumbnail two days ago in another life.

Jeans: nothing. Nothing, nothing, and a laundry receipt.

No wallet. No keys — my keys, my house keys, the ones with Nonna's brass Sacred Heart on the ring, sitting in a dish on a counter forty miles west. His coat over the chair, enormous, the only coat in the building. My shoes by the bed, thin-soled, already ruined from last night's road.

The room was cold and the coat was there and I put it on. It went to my knees and smelled like him — rain and cedar and that low warm thing underneath that no cologne ever made — and my body did something traitorous and glad inside it, some animal recognition I want no part of, and I wore it anyway, all morning, furious, because being warm and being weak are not the same thing no matter what my skin was trying to tell me.

I sat back down at the table in his coat and took stock of my estate.

A dead phone, a gum wrapper, and a laundry receipt.

And, folded on the shelf by the bed where I had not asked about them: clothes. New, tags on, my sizes — jeans, two sweaters, wool socks, things with a receipt from some village store on this island — sitting there like an apology in cotton. I hadn't touched them. Three days in the same cardigan out of spite, because wearing them meant he'd thought of everything, and I wasn't ready to live in a world where the kidnapping came with a wardrobe.

"Okay," I said, to nobody. "Okay."

There was bread in the cupboard over the stove. Fresh — a good semolina loaf, the kind from a real bakery, the kind that goes stale in a day, which meant he had gotten it somewhere in the last twelve hours and put it in a cupboard in a house at the end of the earth.

Butter in a cold box. A jar of honey older than the plumbing.

I stood at the counter and ate three slices with my hip turned so the window wasn't in my eye, because he was in the window, and I chewed and swallowed and did not enjoy one crumb of it on purpose.