Page 111

I don’t ask.

Instead, I sit there and start thinking about everything. The ride down. The ride he’s about to give me back. His Thanksgiving. His suit, the one his mother said was ruined. His car, with a dent in the door behind my seat. His face. His hand. A bed I didn’t sleep in and a couch I did, and clothes that cost more than anything I’ve sold on eBay, and a room with a lock. And then I get to the last thing on the list, the one I sent at eight-fifteen last night with one word on it, and I stop adding.

I don’t know how you pay somebody back for help.

There’s a knock on the door.

“Rafferty?”

His whole face changes to irritation, all at once. “Yeah?”

“Breakfast,” his mother says through the door.

“We’re fine.”

“That wasn’t a question.”

He closes his eyes.

“Your father’s gone. He went into the city early.”

That gets him. I watch it. His eyes open, and something in his shoulders lets go about an inch.

“Come down before you leave,” his mother says. “Both of you.”

Her footsteps go away down the hall.

I look at him. “When are we leaving?”

He looks at his phone. “An hour.”

I look at the clock on his nightstand.

“I have to—I need to shower, and I need to—” I look down at myself. His mother’s sweater, his mother’s pants rolled at the ankle, his mother’s socks. “I need to change.”

“So change,” he says, looking at me.

For a moment, I’m just staring back. I don’t know what to think, so I get up. My duffel is by the door where he put it last night. I can’t believe I’m in his bedroom right now. It’s massive in here. I unzip my bag, and it’s obvious somebody shoved everything in it in a hurry. I think about my grandma for a second. I glance at my phone. She’s texted me three times.

I take the jeans and the long-sleeve into the bathroom and lock the door.

When I come out, I fold his mother’s clothes on the end of the bed. The pants first, in thirds. The sweater, arms in, like they fold them at stores. The socks rolled together. I fold them very carefully. Too carefully, maybe. I fold them like if I get it exactly right, it’ll be like I was never in them.

“Where do I put these?”

“You can probably keep them,” Rafe says. “She wouldn’t notice.”

I look down at them. “I’m not taking your mom’s cashmere.”

“She has more.”

I blink. I pick up the stack and hold it against my chest, and I carry it out with us. When I step out, my heart’s racing. I follow behind him and let my eyes wander at all the details of the house. It’s beautiful in here.

Downstairs, breakfast isn’t in the dining room. I see the dining room on the way. Through a set of double doors, a long table, a chandelier, the chairs pushed in exactly even. It looks like nobody ate there last night. It looks like nobody’s ever eaten there.

Rafe takes me the other way. Down a hall, past a room full of books, into a kitchen with white cabinets and a stove with eight burners, and then through it into a smaller room off the side, all windows, with a round table and a view of the backyard. The yard goes all the way down a hill to a line of bare trees. There’s frost on the grass.

Holy shit.