Page 86

He couldn't finish the sentence. The memory was arriving in full now, not as a recollection but as a physical experience, his own voice playing back to him with devastating clarity. The hallway scene. The emotional logic is strong. The characters don't feel stupid or act that way just because they're scared.

He had said that about Antonio's book, to Antonio's face, while he stood there and listened and asked him favorite? Antonio watched him answer with quiet attention, hearing his own work described by someone who didn't know they were talking to the author.

Is that your professional critique, or your personal one?

Antonio asked about his own novel while Hakeem stood in the living room holding a copy of Mercy House, describing the prose as if it were a confession.

Hakeem sat down.

Not in the armchair. His legs simply stopped working, and he dropped onto the arm of the chair and then slid into the seat with the gracefulness of a body that had given up on structural integrity. He stared at Antonio.

"You let me talk about your books," he said. "You asked me questions about your own writing. You stood there and watched me—" He couldn’t finish.

He pressed both hands over his face.

Antonio sat very still on the couch.

He had not moved since Hakeem said the—his—name. His hands were in his lap, one resting on the closed book, the other flat against his own thigh. His glasses caught the lamplight. His face was doing something Hakeem had never seen it do. Something was underneath the careful modulation Antonio wore like a second skin. Something that looked, from across the room, like he was watching a building come down and recognizing it as his own.

"You’re right," Antonio confirmed, defeat in his voice. "I'm Toni Sanchez."

Hakeem made a sound that wasn't a laugh and wasn't a sob. It lived somewhere between the two, ugly and involuntary, and he hated it immediately.

"How long were you going to—" He stopped. "Were you ever going to tell me?"

"I don't tell anyone."

"You don't tell anyone?"

"The pen name exists for a reason. I don't introduce myself as Toni. It's a name on a cover and contracts. That's where it lives."

"It lives in this house, Antonio. Your books are on the shelf. Your manuscript is in the drawer. You—" Hakeem's hands dropped from his face. "You asked me what my favorite Toni Sanchez book was! You stood right there and asked me my favorite while I was holding your novel. With your notes in the margins, in your handwriting!"

Antonio's jaw tightened, but he didn’t look angry. He looked like he was absorbing a blow he knew he deserved.

"You're right," he said.

"I'm right."

"About that part. Yes. I let you talk about the books without telling you they were mine. I asked you questions I already knew the answers to. That wasn't—" He paused. The fissure in his composure widened by a degree. "That wasn't fair."

"Fair?" Hakeem laughed, and it came out bright and brittle, the laugh he used when he was one honest sentence away from falling apart. "You sat in this room and listened to me describe your prose like I was reviewing it for you. Like I was giving you notes. And you just took it! You collected it like you collect everything else. My words and reactions, my⁠—"

He stopped because the next word was going to be feelings, and he was not ready to hand Antonio that one. Not yet. Not in the middle of this.

Antonio leaned forward. His elbows found his knees, and his hands pressed together, fingertips touching, in a posture that looked less like sitting and more like holding himself in place.

"I didn't plan it," he said. "You moved in, and you were—" He exhaled. "I was going to tell you. Not immediately. But eventually. And then you started talking about Toni's work at the bar, and Layla told you about Mercy House, and you came home and found the book on my shelf, and you said things about the hallway scene that⁠—"

He stopped.

Hakeem waited.

Antonio's voice, when it came back, was stripped to a register Hakeem had only heard once before, when blood was between them.

"Nobody has ever described my writing the way you did."

The sentence hung in the air of the room, and Hakeem felt it behind his sternum.