Page 84 of Graceless

He stopped himself, and chose the plain words, which Cam never does, and that frightened me more than the rest of it together.

"You know this. You have always known this. You have simply been happy, and happy makes brave men stupid."

Behind him, over the harbor, the last of a squall was dragging out to sea, and the low sun came under the cloud, and the rainbow stood up over the water — whole, both feet down, the old sign, hanging over the Narrows like a posted notice.

I looked at it. He watched me look.

"It was promised," I said. "There it hangs, Camael. Never again. Their own word, in their own light, in their own sky. The mothers bought that promise with everything, and it binds."

Cam looked at the bow for a long moment. When he turned back, his face had gone somewhere I had never seen it go.

"And you would put her life on that promise," he said. "You. Of everyone standing. You watched them keep their promises. You wrote down every promise they kept, and how they kept them, and to whom." He stepped past me toward the roof edge, and paused, shoulder to my shoulder, not looking at me. "The rainbow covers the flood, brother. Read the terms again. It does not say never. It says never again by water."

He stepped off the roof into the dark and was gone the way our kind is gone, and I stood where he had stood, where I had stood all those nights, with her window burning at the bottom of the seam, and the rainbow fading over the Narrows, and his sentence standing in the air where he'd left it.

I did not go in for a long time.

Sar, on the boat, with the water moving under us: pay it, all of it, every day you can get. But pay it the way we do everything. Out of sight. Don't let them see you happy.

Cam, on the roof where I learned her window, with the rainbow over the harbor: you are seen. Keep your promise somewhere else.

He had come alone, at night, to warn me instead of reporting me. He was afraid. And he had called me his.

Whatever he knows, it is worse than what he said.

Below me, the yellow light went off in her kitchen, and came on in her bedroom: she is putting the mug in the sink. She is checking the studio door out of habit. She is carrying the day back through the apartment to the room where I sleep beside her, in the home I live in, in the borough where, for one season out of my whole long existence, I have been happy.

Happy is loud.

I walked the roofline once, end to end, the whole length of that roof, and the borough turned its lights off under me a window at a time — the Espositos, the Wongs, the argument at the deli resolving into two men going home in two directions, unchanged, undefeated. I stood where I stood the first night of this watch, when she was a stranger with a lamp and a rolling pin. Every night since, her window has been at the bottom of that seam, and every night I chose — before I understood I was choosing — to stay.

Cam wanted me to believe there was one move left on the board.

There are always more moves. You simply have to be willing to lose more to see them.

I stood a long time in the wind, and I could not tell which losses I was willing to take, because none of them were mine alone anymore.

I went in. She was half asleep, and took possession of my arm without waking. I lay in the dark, and I did not sleep, and I told myself I had decided nothing.

But I turned my head on the pillow and looked at her face a long time in the streetlight — the scar through her eyebrow, her lips parted, the small crease between her brows that never fully leaves, even sleeping. I learned the weight of her arm across my chest. The exact temperature of her. The sound she made when she shifted closer, half a word from some dream, gone before it finished.

I have a memory that has never once dropped a day it was given. I filled it all night — her face, her weight, her warmth, her breath — hour after hour, greedy as a drowning man, while she slept on my arm and trusted me completely.

There is a rule in this apartment, on a legal pad, in her handwriting. The first rule she ever made. No disappearing.

I held her, and learned her, and missed nothing that night. Not one minute of her.

Sometime before dawn, I stopped counting my hours with her forward.

I started counting them down.

CHAPTER 23

CATE

Tara called Thursday night.

"Okay," she said, in the voice she uses for findings. "Seven letters. Every database I can reach, every catalog, every onomasticon, and two colleagues I trust who think I'm writing a paper." A breath. "Nothing. It hits nothing, Cat. A fully-formed personal name, fluent hand, correct period — and it is written down nowhere that I can reach. And I want to be precise about what I can swear to: I can't swear it was never written anywhere, ever. Nobody could swear that. What I can swear is that my reach is the reach — if it existed where scholarship can see, I'd have found its shadow by now."