Page 57 of Graceless

"Withdraw the contractor," I said, "and name a price."

"There it is." He looked at me with that thin interest again, longer this time. "The oldest inventory in creation, offering to open the vault for one mortal restorer. My principals would find that instructive. I find it—" he considered the word without hurry — "familiar. It's in all the old files, Watcher. Yours especially. It never prices well."

He turned to go, unhurried, and the hush began to lift off the block behind him.

At the edge of the streetlight's dead patch he paused, without turning around.

"Whatever you think you're protecting, Watcher — ask yourself why it was allowed to reach her at all."

CHAPTER 16

CATE

Ispent two nights on Nina's couch, under the afghan her mother crocheted during the Carter administration, being fed like a hostage in a very loving kidnapping.

She asked. Of course she asked. Nina Costanzo has extracted every secret I've ever owned with warm water and scalp pressure, and she started before my coat was off. Who is he. What did he do. Did he hit you — no? Okay. Is he married. Is he married, Cat, because I will drive to wherever he is right now. Is it money. Is it another woman. Is it — and here she lowered her voice to the register the neighborhood saves for the word it won't say — is he sick, Cat? Is that it? Is he sick?

I gave her nothing. Not because I wanted to — because everything true started with a word I could not say in her kitchen with her kids' school photos on the refrigerator. She'd look at my face after every swing, read the padlock on it, and come back twenty minutes later with a new angle, because that's the other thing about Nina: she has never once respected a locked door in her life, she just believes in picking it slow.

The first night, nothing. The second night she was still going at eleven — a new angle involving Joey, the house, and whether this was about money after all — when he showed up on her corner.

I was on the couch pretending to sleep when I heard her at the front window, and then I heard her get her husband up, and then I heard the word police, and I was across that living room in my socks before my brain had finished the sentence.

"Don't call anybody."

"Cate." She had the phone in her hand and the blinds cracked and her voice was doing the thing it does when she's keeping it down for the kids, which is barely. "There is a man on my corner. Enormous. He has been standing there since it got dark. He is looking at this house."

I looked through the blinds.

Streetlight, corner, and him — hands at his sides, absolutely still, making no attempt at a doorway or a shadow or any of the tradecraft I knew for a fact he owned. Standing in the open under the light like a man who had decided to be looked at.

"Don't call anybody," I said again, and something in how I said it made her put the phone down and look at me instead. Look at me, then the window, then me — every question she'd asked me re-sorting itself behind her eyes at speed.

She jerked the blinds another inch and pointed with her whole arm, in her robe, keeping her voice down for the children. "Does he look something like that, Cat? The man you won't talk about. Is that the him? Because that is the biggest human being I have ever seen in my life, and my cousin Angela married a Buonfiglio."

"That's him."

"Madonna." She looked through the blinds a long moment. Her husband hovered behind us in his undershirt, awaiting orders. "And he's not hiding. You see that? Man's under the streetlight. He wants to be seen." She let the slat go and turned around. "Okay. Nobody's calling anybody. Anthony, go back to bed." And then, to me, quietly, terribly: "He knows you're here. And you knew he'd come. That's why you keep looking at the window."

I hadn't known that. She had.

I was outside before I'd finished deciding to be. Nina's spare coat over my pajamas, my sneakers with no socks, down her steps and across the dead street with the cold coming up through the soles, and he watched me come the whole way — didn't move, didn't speak, just stood under that light and let me arrive at whatever speed my fury picked.

"What are you doing here?"

"You were behind that door. I can't be behind it with you. This is as close as the distance goes."

"You don't get to—" I stopped, because I didn't know how the sentence ended, and standing there in the cold with my breath showing, I made myself find out what I'd actually come down to say.

"The church thing. The sky. That's mine." I said it first because it was the one piece I was sure of. "That's between me and a locked building, and it's old, and it's not yours, and I'm not going to stand here and make you pay Heaven's bill. You're the only one in this whole thing who showed up. I know that." My breath came out white. "But here's what is yours. I drank coffee with you every morning for weeks. I told you about Nonna. I took you to bed." The word came out steady and it cost me. "And you're — I don't know what you are. I watched you cross a room in a way rooms don't allow. I've got a photocopy where your name is three thousand years old. And now it's midnight and my whole body still turns toward you like you're a stove in January, and underneath that, all the way down, I am afraid of you — and I hate it. I hate being afraid of you. I don't even know if I'm supposed to be. That's the part I can't put anywhere, Raq. Not the sky. You. What you are, and what it means that I—" I stopped that sentence with my teeth.

He took it all standing still. He didn't defend himself, and he didn't come closer, and both of those were answers.

"You should be afraid," he said at last, quietly. "Not of what I'd do. Of what I am. Those are different things, and you're the first one in a very long time to be afraid of the right one."

"That's not comforting."

"No. It's true. You asked for true."