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I shiver, despite the heat, despite the fact that we’re on dry land. “I don’t know how he survives it. I almost didn’t. I lost track of the shore.” It’s scarier now, in retrospect. I don’t think I had the strength to admit it to myself when I was out in the waves. “I was starting to sink, but—” I wasn’t starting to sink. I was sinking. My feet were headed toward the bottom. My head was next. “He came out to get me.”
Sin nods. “He would have known the risk he was taking.”
“I didn’t.” He opens a breadbox in the corner and takes out a package of English muffins. I’ve never thought much about English muffins before, but right now I could eat a thousand of them. “I didn’t know that until we were at the cave.”
Emerson’s brother puts four English muffins into the toaster and leans against the counter, studying me. “Last night wasn’t good.”
“For him or for me?”
“Are you going to try to escape again?”
From the island, I can see the window over the kitchen sink. A slice of the side yard. It’s all white out there. Snowflakes spiral down from the sky in brittle patterns. “I don’t know.” As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I know they’re not true. “No.”
“You sure about that?”
My heart aches. My throat tightens. And there’s a pull, like the undertow, like that electric gravity I felt in the gallery. It has nothing to do with escape and everything to do with Emerson. Maybe I had to be this tired and wrung out to get it.
“I don’t want to hurt him. I just want to be in a place where we can understand each other. And I guess this is the only place he can be.”
The English muffins pop up and Sin reaches for them without looking. He opens a cupboard and grabs for a plate with his other hand. My freakout about Emerson cooking eggs was foolish before. I see that now. Both he and his brother rush to put butter on the second the toaster’s finished.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” he says.
“I mean, you could tell me something, instead of being so cryptic.” Jesus, it’s frustrating. “I can’t live like this. Everyone is always keeping things from me. I don’t know anything until it’s too late.”
Sin arches an eyebrow. “Everyone?”
“My family. And—and Emerson. He didn’t tell me about needing to stay in his house.”
“Emerson doesn’t tell anyone about that. He’s got a whole thing around it.”
“What do you mean?”
He opens the fridge and pushes things aside on the shelves. Takes out orange juice. A glass next. “Where did you meet him the first time?”
“On the beach outside. He invited me there to paint. I didn’t—” It’s going to make me sound unbelievably naive and sheltered to say this, but whatever. “He bought one of my paintings from the gallery where I work, and he left a note with the time and place. I thought it was a commission. I saw him surfing but I didn’t know it was him.”
“What was the next time?” Sin doesn’t seem very surprised by any of this.
“He came back to the gallery.”
“Did you see how he got there?”
“No. I’m sure his driver dropped him off.”
“His driver dropped him off fifteen blocks away.” Sin pours the orange juice into the glass, then murmurs something to himself about English muffins not being enough. “It’s obnoxious when you’re waiting for him somewhere, but he always does that.”
“Then he must be used to it. Being outside. Being away from home. How could last night have been so bad?”
Sin pulls a box of frozen cinnamon rolls from the freezer and flips them over, scanning the instructions on the back.
“Daphne, he started with half a block.” That’s nothing. That’s a couple minutes at most. “I had to walk next to him the whole time.”
“Walk next to him for what?”
He hunts down a pan and puts it on top of the stove. Covers it with tin foil. “To stop him from throwing himself into traffic.”
Sin says this almost absently, but worry bolts through me. Emerson looked like that last night. He looked like he wanted to dive into the ocean. It was dark out. High, thrashing waves. Sin busies himself with preheating the oven and arranging the rolls in the pan like this is just random background noise to the rest of his life.
