Page 37 of Graceless

One trace led south, unhurried, toward the water. The same direction. The same patience. And it had smelled me on the ward. It knew whose word was holding the door. It knew, now, that the Watcher's nights had a purpose, and the purpose had an address.

I came down off the roof and walked the last block at human speed — she was at the window, I could see her shape behind the glass — and a man arriving from the sky was not something I could build a lie around.

The lie. I built it on the walk. A man casing the block. Moved along. The report will say. I have lied to her every day since the bell first rang, and every lie has been a wall between her and the dark, and I have laid every brick with my bare hands, and I am not going to stop.

I checked the laundromat doorway. Empty — the old surveyor trace stale, days cold. I put my hand flat on the alley brick where the new smell was thickest. South. Unhurried. Gone.

Then I rang her bell. Twice.

CATE

I opened the door with the chain on. One in the morning, you open the door with the chain on.

He looked at me through the four-inch gap with the dead streetlight behind him. He wasn't breathing hard. The phone had rung once.

"How are you HERE?" I said. "I called you thirty seconds ago."

"I was doing a walk-through. Late check on the property."

"At one in the morning."

"That's when people case houses, Miss Fontana."

"Do you live around here?"

"Close enough." He said it the way he says everything — flat, ungenerous, a sentence with no doors in it. Then, before I could try another: "He's gone. A man was casing the block. He's been moved along."

"He was at my gate, Raq. The chain was moving."

"I know. I checked it. Gate's shut, alley's clear." The voice that makes you believe things. "Chain up. Set the alarm. I'll be on the street."

"It's freezing."

"Good night, Miss Fontana."

I looked at him through four inches of chain gap, and his coat was open, and the dead streetlight made the street behind him look like the end of the world, and I took the chain off the door.

"Get in here," I said. "There's a couch."

He looked at me. Something in his face shifted — not softened, shifted, the way a load shifts when a beam takes it — and he came inside, and I locked the door behind him, all three locks, and set the alarm, and stood in my hallway at one in the morning with a man who was staying the night, which had not happened in this house since Joey moved out.

He didn't go to the couch. He went to the windows. Every one — kitchen, living room, the little one in the bathroom that hasn't opened since Clinton — checking the locks, checking the sills, running his hand along the frames the way he'd run his hand along the alley brick. I stood in my kitchen with my arms crossed and my heart still going and watched him work.

"Sit down," he said, without turning around.

"I'm fine."

"You're shaking. Sit."

I sat. He finished the windows, checked the alarm panel, came back into the kitchen and stood there, too large for it, looking at me.

"Tea," I said, because my hands needed a job. I got up. He didn't stop me. I made two cups of the terrible tea that lives in the cabinet for exactly this kind of occasion — somebody at your gate, a man in your kitchen who shouldn't fit but does — and I put his on the counter and he picked it up and his fingers brushed mine, and in the dark kitchen after the worst hour of my year that small touch held more weight than the whole week of coffee cups.

"It was probably nothing," I said. "Right? A guy. Checking car doors, looking for Amazon packages, whatever."

"Probably."

"Because people do that. This neighborhood, the gates — people try gates."