Page 46 of Graceless

I put my hand on her threshold and said the words again — the same ones, in the tongue that predates doors — and put more of my word into them than I have ever spent on anything. It is not a wall. It has never been a wall. It is a promise standing where a wall should be, and mine is worth exactly as much as I am, and tonight I found out how much that is: I emptied it into her doorframe and it still did not feel like enough.

Then I woke her.

"Cate."

She surfaced slowly, one eye, hair everywhere. "Mm."

"I have to go out. An hour."

"Where?"

"Work."

"Mm." She got the other eye open, most of the way. "Why?"

"Something I have to check."

"Okay." She pushed her face further into the pillow. "You'll be back?"

"An hour."

"An hour," she said, agreeably, to the pillow. "Take the key. Don't set the alarm, it's loud, I'll never get back to sleep."

"No. Set it behind me."

"Raq."

"Set it behind me."

One eye came open again and looked at me for a second. "You are very paranoid. You know that?"

"Yes."

"Oh." She considered this from inside the quilt. "Okay."

And she got up.

She came to the door with the quilt around her shoulders and the code already punched in, and I kissed her there, in her own doorway, with the cold coming in off the step.

"Well," she said. "At least that made getting out of bed worth it."

"Set it behind me."

"Yeah, yeah." She leaned on the frame. "Hurry back."

"I will."

"Promise?"

I looked at her — hair everywhere, quilt slipping off one shoulder, half asleep in a doorway I had just spent everything I have to hold — and I gave her the only thing I own.

"I promise."

CHAPTER 13

CATE

He came back.