Page 123 of Graceless

"Here's how this goes," she said. "You're here because of what's coming. That's the whole reason. When it's passed — when your brother says it's passed — we revisit. Until then you're a security system with a face, and you live on that couch, and you don't get to be sorry at me, because sorry is for things you'd undo, and we both know what you'd do again."

"Yes."

"Yes what."

"Yes to all of it. The couch. The terms. The thing I would do again." She opened her mouth and I kept going, because if I stopped I would not start again. "The couch is fair. The silence is fair. And none of it is the punishment. The punishment is the door." I set the cup down. "I have stood watch on walls, Caterina. Cities. Borders. Once, a garden. None of it prepared me for a door with you on the other side of it."

She looked at me a long moment. Something moved behind her eyes and did not surface.

"Good," she said, and took her coffee to the studio.

That night I crossed the studio to close the window she had left open, and had it halfway down when she spoke behind me.

"I had it open on purpose."

"It is thirty-nine degrees."

"It's my window."

I straightened and turned. She stood in the middle of the studio with a brush still in her hand, and something was arriving in her face that had nothing to do with the window — had been circling all day, through the treaty, through the silence, waiting for a place to land.

"You want to talk about temperature," she said. "Okay. Let's. You were twenty minutes away."

I went still.

"The whole time. Queens. You told me at this table — twenty minutes, seventeen days. And you know what I had on this end? Nothing. Not a fight, not a goodbye, not an address — you don't have an address, I never had anywhere to even look. A note and a lie and then the world with you subtracted from it." Her voice didn't break. It went the other way — flatter, harder, the work voice, the one she uses on things that have to be said exactly. "I called the number. Did you know that? The insurance number, off the card, like an idiot. And it was dead. Disconnected. Eleven seconds and a recording."

"I know."

"You know?"

"I disconnected it." The truth, whole, because half of it would have been another theft. "The first hour. Because if it rang, I would have seen your name, and if I heard your voice I would have come back, and I did not trust myself to⁠—"

"Don't." Her hand came up. The brush was in it, forgotten. "Don't make it sound like discipline. You want to know what it was, on this end? I grieved you. Not like a breakup. I've had breakups; they leave a person, somewhere across town, being an idiot in a bar. You were gone. Gone like the Gowanus. No body, no wake, no place to put anything, and I stood in this kitchen with a dead phone against my ear and it was exactly — it was exactly like after Nonna, when I kept — when I'd reach for the phone to call her because the pot boiled over or the Mets did something, and I'd have her number half dialed before I⁠—"

And there it cracked. Not her voice. Her breath — one ragged inhale that she caught and held and refused to let become anything, standing in the middle of her studio with her chin up and her eyes flooding and not one tear allowed down.

"You made me grieve you like my dead," she said. "And you were in Queens."

The room was very quiet. The boiler cycled, far away, in a house where nothing was wrong.

I have been alive since before her species buried its dead in the ground, and I have no memory of any sentence landing on me the way that one landed.

"Caterina." My voice came out wrong. I let it stay wrong. "I planned for your anger. I did not plan for grief."

"Why not."

"No one has ever grieved me." The words were true and I had never said them. "I did not know it was possible. And I would have written the note anyway, because I believed it was your life. But I would have known what it cost. You would not have paid it in the dark."

She stood there breathing, brush trembling in her hand, tears held at the line by pure Fontana spite.

"Awesome," she said. "You'd have known. Not not done it — known. While I dialed my dead." She laughed, one syllable, nothing in it. "You should hear yourself. You think that's better, Raq. You actually think that's better."

She turned back to the bench, and I understood I was dismissed, and I went back to my couch, and neither of us said goodnight.

The next day, at ten past two, the studio was still silent — no water running, no kettle, no chair scraping back. The doctor's schedule was taped inside the cabinet in Nina's handwriting, three exclamation points after EAT, and the eleven o'clock plate had happened and the two o'clock had not.

I did not go in and say so. A man on a couch has no standing to schedule meals.