He walks me to the back bedroom. The bed is made with fresh sheets that smell like sun. The window looks onto a yard and then trees, not another house. There’s a bathroom with a shower that has more water pressure than the entire staff housing in the back of the Titan-Wynn. There are four new T-shirts in a drawer in my size, and a package of hair ties on the nightstand.
A note rests under it in Spencer’s blocky handwriting:Figured you’d forget these. You always do.
“I’m touched and offended,” I say, throat burning.
“Good,” he says. “Means you’re still you.”
Zeus trots in stiffly and flops by the bed with an exaggerated groan, as thoughhehad carriedmeall day. I drop to my knees and kiss his nose and he bumps my chin like he’s making sure I’m real.
“There’s food in the fridge,” Spencer says, leaning on the doorframe. “And a list on the counter if you want to hand us errands we can pretend are for us and not you. Two sets of eyes will be on the road at all times. If you want to sit on the porch alone for five minutes, I will stand on the other side of the screen door and pretend I can’t hear you breathing. You’ll have one phone and only one. It’s in the kitchen drawer. It only calls three numbers, none of them your boys. If you want more, say more. If you want less, say less.”
“Who told you I don’t like being told what to do?” I ask, because the kindness makes me want to argue with something.
He smiles with his eyes. “A list of sources as long as the causeway.”
“I’m sorry,” I blurt, and I don’t know what I’m apologizing for—leaving, needing, taking this much responsibility out of other people’s hands and putting it into his.
“Don’t be sorry,” he says, easy. “Be sure.”
He leaves me with the room and the dog and a quiet that doesn’t feel like a trap.
I shower until my fingers prune, not because I’m dirty but because I like the sound of the water here. It’s not hotel water, running through pipes in a building that watches you. This is house water. I wash my hair and scrub the adhesive residue from the back of my neck, then I leave it alone. I put on one of the T-shirts and a pair of shorts.
In the kitchen I find the phone in the drawer, a cheap black candy bar that looks like it couldn’t show a picture if it tried. Spencer has written three numbers on masking tape stuck to the back: S (Spencer), J (Jace), O (Ortiz). Next to it there’s an envelope with my name on it and inside are a stack of crisp hundreds and a note:Petty cash makes people faster.
I stand at the sink and look out the little window over the yard. Someone has hung a bird feeder from a low branch. A squirrel is trying to con the design and failing with great dignity. If I press my forehead to the glass I can see a sliver of the river between the trees, steady as a pulse.
The back door creaks. Spencer steps in with a grocery bag and sets it on the table. He doesn’t say anything until I do.
“I want to go to the casino,” I say. It comes out quick, like ripping something off. “I want to go home.”
He doesn’t correct me for calling it that. “Tell me why.”
Because it’s mine, I think. Because I earned it. Because if I’m going to be hurt, I want to be hurt somewhere where I’m making a difference.
“Because I want to.” I meet his eyes. “And because I can’t stand waiting for other people to do things for me anymore. I can delegate. I can plan. I can hide, briefly, while we wait for this thing that might ruin me. But at the end of it, I’m going back. I want to run the Titan-Wynn with them.”
He pulls out a chair and sits. He doesn’t look surprised. He looks like a man checking the weather and seeing the same forecast he saw yesterday.
“You can do anything you want,” he says. “So long as you understand the cost and can afford to pay it.”
I realize my fingers are tapping a beat against my thigh and curl them into a fist. “What’s the cost?”
“Being watched forever,” he says. “By enemies who want you gone, by friends who want you safe, by men who love you and won’t ever stop flinching when you step too close to the edge. The cost is learning to be a person in a glass room without breaking every window you see.”
“What’s the other option?” I ask.
“A little house,” he says. “A dog who already loves you. A job that doesn’t require a board vote to approve your toothbrush. Two or three people who don’t care about your last name and will bring you soup when you’re sick. You write books under a name that makes you laugh. You disappear on purpose and only answer the phone when it’s someone who knows your favorite brand of tea.”
It’s a tempting picture. It catches on the same hook inside me that wanted to steal a watch and get on a bus not too long ago. It also makes me ache, because it’s small, and I am not. Not anymore.
“Is that what you want?” I ask him.
“No,” he says easily. “But I tried it for a while. It’s how I learned I like to see my son’s face even when he doesn’t like me very much. It’s how I learned I don’t need my name on a building. I just need a chair at a table and a person worth sitting next to.”
“You’ll get that,” I say.
“I already have,” he answers. His eyes soften. “That’s not the question.”
