Page 58 of Graceless

I wrapped Nina's coat tighter and looked at him — the size of him, the stillness, the streetlight landing on him like it was landing on a building — and everything I'd been holding stood up in my chest at once, the questions, the fear, the wanting, and I understood that if I opened any of it out here I was going to open all of it, on a corner, in borrowed clothes, at midnight.

"I can't do this tonight," I said. "Not yet."

"Cate. We need to talk."

"Tomorrow." I was already backing up, because backing up was the only way I was going to make it back inside. "We'll talk in the morning. But I'm warning you—" and my voice came out level, dead level, the intake voice, the one I use when the estimate is going to hurt: "You will tell me everything. All of it. What you are, what you can do, what happened to you, what's actually going on in my basement — everything. If you're not prepared to tell me everything, then don't show in the morning. Raq. I swear to the saints."

He looked at me for a long moment, under the light, with the whole empty street holding still around him.

"Go inside," he said. "It's cold."

"And you—" I was already backing across the street, and then the rest of it arrived, the thing that had been circling the couch with me for two nights among all the bigger things: "I walked out of my house and left you standing in my kitchen. Two days I've been lying on that couch not knowing if my door is locked, if you're still in there, if my keys — you were alone in my house, Raq."

"I left when you left. The house is locked."

"You don't have keys."

"The house is locked," he said, in exactly the same voice, and the hair went up on my arms, and I decided that particular receipt could wait for daylight with all the others.

"Fine. Then don't stand out here all night like a crazy stalker. Nina almost called the cops once already, and half this block has the precinct on speed dial. Go back to the house. You've got a painting to watch, don't you?"

He didn't move, and he didn't answer that either, and I knew with total certainty that he was going to stand under that light until the sun came up, visible to God and the whole block alike, because being seen was the entire message — and that whatever he was actually guarding, it apparently wasn't in my basement.

I let Nina's door close behind me with my heart going hard. The answer would be the morning.

Nina was standing inside her door with the afghan already off the couch. She didn't say one word. She wrapped me in it, and steered me back to the cushions, and turned off the lamp, and from the dark of the hallway I heard her say, to nobody, to the ceiling, to the saints: "Madonna santissima, the real thing."

I did not sleep one wink.

I lay on the couch with my heart still going and Nonna's rosary voice in my head saying say what's true, Caterina, so fine. Here was true: I'd stood three feet from a creature older than writing. I'd told him I was afraid of him. He'd told me I was right to be.

And the whole walk back across that street, what my body wanted was to turn around.

That was the part keeping me up. Not the fear — the fear made sense; the fear was the sanest thing I owned. It was the fear and the wanting in the same skin. Taking turns. All night.

Somewhere around four in the morning I stopped pretending I was deciding anything. I'd decided on the corner. Maybe on the stoop, before any of it. The only thing left was the terms.

He was still there at sunrise.

Nina was at the blinds when I gave up on the couch, coffee in hand, slat cracked, doing surveillance in her robe like it was a paying job.

"Still there," she reported, without turning around. "Same spot. I checked at three. I checked at five. The garbage truck went by and he didn't move, and Vinny's dog walked the block and wouldn't go near his corner." She let the slat go and looked at me. "You went out there at midnight in my coat and said six sentences to him, and whatever they were, that man stood at attention the rest of the night like you'd left him on post. So." She pointed me at the kitchen table. "Sit. Eggs. He can hold his corner five more minutes."

She put the plate in front of me, and the coffee, and then she sat down across from me and did what Nina does with a hopeless head of hair: stopped fighting all of it and picked the one place to cut.

"One question." She held up a finger. "Did he lie to you? Or did he tell you something true you didn't want?"

I looked into my cup. "The second one."

"Ugh." She sat back like I'd confirmed a diagnosis. "Those are the worst. The liars you can leave, Cat. The liars, you change the locks, you bless yourself, done. A man who tells you the truth you didn't want—" she shook her head, slow. "That's not a bad color job, honey. That's what's under the hair. You don't walk out on what's under the hair. You work with the head God gave you or you don't — but you decide it looking at it. Not from my couch."

She drank, and set the cup down like a cleaver coming down.

"Finish the eggs. I'm driving you home. And we're walking past that corner on the way to the car, because I want a look at this man up close in the daylight. All night under a streetlight in March, on purpose, where your best friend can see him? That's either the real thing or a Dateline episode. And I've seen every Dateline."

He was still on the corner when we came out into the morning — in the open, in daylight, a whole March night on his feet and looking exactly like he had two days ago, not a crease, not a shadow, like the cold hadn't dared to touch him — and when he saw me come down Nina's steps he went very still in a way I felt land under my sternum, in the spot where I'd been keeping the true thing since the morning of the letterhead.

He'd stayed. After the ultimatum, knowing the price of showing was everything — he'd stood on that corner all night with his answer, waiting for morning so he could give it.