Page 22 of Graceless

"You work at height on a compromised platform above a concrete floor." He was still looking at the stool the way he'd looked at my old Segal lock, like it had personally offended the concept of safety. "A fall from that height onto this surface — wrist, hip, or head, depending on the rotation."

"It's a STEPSTOOL, Barrett, it's two feet⁠—"

He took out his pen and wrote something on the clipboard.

"What are you writing?"

"That tomorrow you will have a proper stool."

"I like my stool."

"No."

"No? What do you mean, no? You can't no my stool. It's my stool. That's not a — you don't get to just write things⁠—"

"It's written," he said, and went back to the chair.

And here's the problem with my new policy of compassion: I'd decided to be gentle with whatever war he brought home, and forty minutes later the man was legislating my furniture, and I stood there discovering that you can feel tender toward someone and want to throw a stool at him in the same breath. Nobody warns you those fit in the same hand.

I stood at the sink and washed a brush that did not need washing for approximately four minutes. Some of that was the stool argument. Most of it was the whole right side of my body, ribs to hip, holding the shape of his hand like the ground holds heat after the sun goes down. It held it for an hour. I checked. And I'd like the record to show that there was no bus this time, no knife, no adrenaline with somewhere to hide. Just a stool, and a hand, and my entire nervous system standing up and applauding like the cheap seats at a Springsteen show.

That's Exhibit E, and the case against me is building.

He left when the sun went down. "Lock the door," at the top of the stairs, not a request — and then the street took him the way the street takes him, which I have stopped going up to verify, because the verifying was starting to feel like the crazy part.

I ate dinner. I called Nina and gave her a report with a hole in the middle of it shaped exactly like a hand. I did give her the theory — the soldier thing, Frankie Marchetti, the window — and she went quiet for a second and said, "That tracks," and I heard the case close a little tighter, and it felt like solving something, and I let it.

And then, before bed, I did the thing I'd been not-doing all evening.

I turned off the kitchen light and went to the front window in the dark, and looked at my street the way he looks at it.

Corners first.

Empty, dark, nothing — same street it's been my whole life. And then the rooflines, and I stood there a long time looking at the rooflines, and I couldn't tell you why.

And on the parapet across from the alley, something moved.

Not moved — resolved. The way a shape steps out of a magic-eye picture: one second it was chimney and antenna and orange-black sky, and the next there was a stillness up there with edges to it, a darker dark, wrong for a chimney and far too still for a man —

I blinked.

Chimney. Antenna. Sky.

I pressed my face nearly to the glass and counted the rooftop shapes like a crazy person — chimney, chimney, vent stack, antenna — and everything was accounted for, and nothing moved, and nothing had edges, and my heart was going anyway, thudding away at a wall of nothing.

"Okay," I told the dark kitchen. "You're tired. He's paranoid. Apparently it's catching."

But that wasn't the whole of it, and the evidence only works if you don't lie about the evidence, so, fine: I stood at my dark window thinking about a paranoid, impossible, infuriating man who checks my window every four minutes and eats my pasta like it's a sacrament and confiscated my stool because I might fall — and about those eyes, dark past dark with the blue banked down in them, looking at me for one second today instead of the street — and I thought: whatever's wrong with him, whatever war he's still fighting, some completely unauthorized part of me wants to be the thing he's guarding.

I looked at the roofline one more time. Nothing.

I pulled the curtain closed anyway. Just in case.

CHAPTER 7

RAQ

Third night on the parapet.