Page 7 of Graceless

Here is what walking away protects, when everything in the dark has already heard her: nothing. It protects nothing. She was lit up like a struck bell in a city full of things that hunt by ringing, and the only variable left on the board was what reached her first.

I crossed Brooklyn the slow way, on foot, sweeping the field.

Bay 50th at one in the morning is quiet the way the end of a line is quiet — gates down over the fish store and the botánica, the elevated dripping last night's rain onto the avenue, a basement window with a light still burning and the edge of an easel in it. I walked her block once at human speed and read it. Roofline: clear. The alley behind the row houses: clear, then not clear — at its mouth, where the fence gaps, the air had a wrongness on it. Faint. Cold. Hours old. Not more. Not hell's stink; hell smells like commerce. This was quieter than that. Something had stood in that gap tonight and looked at the back of her house and left without wanting anything yet, the way a surveyor leaves without wanting anything yet.

It had heard her this afternoon. It had come the same night. So had I. That was the field now, and everything in it was going to have to learn the same thing the dock learned.

I stood where it had stood. I looked at what it had looked at: the window, the light, the shoulder moving at the easel, the brush hand that would not quiet even after the kind of day that ends civilians. Working. Of course she was working. Holding her line against the dark with three inches of sable, no idea what had followed her home, no idea what was already keeping her street.

I chose the doorway across from the gap — sightlines to the alley, the roofs, both corners — and I set my back against the brick and began the only work I have ever been good at.

I had not decided to come here. I noted the fact, filed it with the others, and did not examine it, because the light in her window was the only lit thing on the block, and whatever else had heard her would come for it eventually, out of the dark.

Let it.

It would find me first.

CHAPTER 3

CATE

Ididn't tell Nina about the bus. Nina told me about the bus.

That's not exactly how it happened, but that's how it felt, because I walked into her aunt's salon at nine forty in the morning with a dozen sfogliatelle as an offering and a speech prepared, and Nina took one look at me in the mirror over her first client's half-foiled head and said, "Who died."

"Nobody died."

"Okay. Who almost died."

I have known Nina Costanzo since the second grade, when she bit Anthony Russo for me, and there is no version of my face she hasn't seen before I've felt it myself. Lying to her is something I do for fun sometimes, the way you play chess against a computer on the hardest setting. You will lose. You do it for the experience.

"Sit," she said, pointing her comb at the empty chair at the wash station. "Connie, you're processing, don't move. Cat. Sit."

I sat. She ran the water warm, tipped me back, and got her fingers into my scalp, which is the Costanzo method of interrogation and has a hundred percent conviction rate, and I stared at the ceiling tiles and gave it up in pieces: the bridge, the late, the light, the bus.

Her hands stopped.

"The B one? On Fifth?" Brooklyn measures all disasters by their route number. "Caterina."

"I'm fine."

"You crossed against the light in Midtown with four hundred years of somebody else's angel zipped in your coat⁠—"

"In my defense, the angel made it."

"—and you're telling me this at the sink? A day later? I have to hear you almost died with my hands in your hair like I'm finding out from a scanner?" She yanked the sprayer like it had personally been driving the bus. Nina's anger has always been the most reliable love I know. Her husband gets flowers when he's in trouble; I get water pressure.

"There was a guy," I said, because the only way through Nina is cargo first, feelings later.

The water shut off. In the mirror across the room I watched her face go through its entire repertoire and land on the one she uses for novenas and gossip, which are the same face.

"What guy."

"The guy who pulled me back."

"Describe him."

"Tall. Dark hair. He had—" I lay there with my hair soaked, hunting for anything that wouldn't sound like what it sounded like. "He caught me like I was a grocery bag. He told me to watch where I was going. Then he told me I was fine, like he was reading it off a form, and then he left."