I step back because if I don’t, the part of me that thinks the best way to win a fight is to end it will pick a fight I didn’t intend to start. Her shoulder brushes my chest when she passes. The contact is nothing and it is everything. She doesn’t look back at the door. It closes with the soft click the hinges were designed for.
I set my palms flat on the table where she sat. The wood is warm. The glass shows two prints where her hands were. The room smells like cedar and her skin. The wine is half drunk, the fruit plate down one wedge of pear. The candles throwmovements on the windows that make the rain look like it’s deciding.
In the silence the house hums. In the clinic a boy pretends to sleep so his body can practice feeling unobserved. In the control room Reid is building a map of leaks. In a Senate office Caldwell is editing a line for morning that will let him saysafetywhile people with microphones nod.
“Tomorrow,” I tell the empty room, because saying it out loud makes the plan settle into bone. “I take her.”
Chapter 31 – Aurora
The rain hasn’t taken a breath since dinner. It needles the windows and then slides down them in tired sheets, like the weather tried to start an argument and bored itself half to sleep. The guest-room lamp throws a clean circle of gold across the table. My black dress is half unzipped, the zipper caught on a thread, and my hair has slipped out of its pins in a slow, stubborn collapse.
My lips still taste like red wine and the edge of his thumb. I want to be mad at the air and myself. Nadia’s warning is a burn under my skin. I can see the clauses stacked like bricks, and behind them a man who sets tables like tests. I should pull the black dress off, wash my face, text Lila something ordinary to prove I am okay. I should turn the lamp off and sleep with the light off like he said.
Instead I pace. Three lengths from bed to window and back, the hem of the dress catching my knees, the robe I threw on over it gaping and then closing as I move. The mirror catches me on the third turn: hair half down, mouth set, the zipper stuck at the place my fingers couldn’t reach without help. I picture going back down the hall and knocking on a staff door, asking a stranger to tug a piece of metal up or down my spine so I can pretend the stuck part is mechanical and not moral.
I pick up my pencil. If I can’t sleep, I can work. I start with a straight line to teach my hand obedience. It curves right away. It becomes his jaw by itself. I block it out with hard strokes to make it stop being a man and start being shapes. It grows a mouth anyway. I press hard enough to snap the lead. It breaks with a pop that’s too loud for a quiet room.
The rain ticks, ticks, ticks. That steady metronome you can pretend is calming if you want it to be. I cross to the window and press my forehead to the glass. The gardens are blackcutouts—hedges with no volume, paths that think they’re rivers. Somewhere in the trees a branch shakes and releases a handful of water.
“I should leave,” I say to the glass. “I should run.”
Nothing happens. The words don’t materialize a suitcase. They don’t conjure a cab or a spine I’ve never had. I watch my breath fog the pane and use the cuff of my robe to write a line through the mist, then another. A cage, I realize. I draw cages when my body wants out. I drag the cuff down to wipe the lines away and find myself looking at my own reflection again.
I picture Nadia’s face when I told her nine a.m. joint call. I picture Lila on the couch, loyal even when she’s unpersuaded. I picture a boy in the clinic holding water like it was heavy and choosing to lift it anyway.
I put the pencil down. I grip the edge of the desk with both hands. It doesn’t hurt even though I want it to. I want friction to decide something for me.
The robe belt hangs loose. I tie it, then untie it. I tug the zipper of the dress until it gives a centimeter and then stops again. The stuck place reminds me of the way he put his hands on my shoulders and told mechoicelike it wasn’t a word he’d practiced in a mirror. I hear myself saykiss meand him saytomorrowand I’m so angry I want to spit, and I’m so grateful I want to sit down on the floor.
The room holds its breath with me for three seconds. Then my body moves like it knows what it’s doing, and I am not invited to narrate. I slip my feet out of the flats, shrug into the robe and pull it closed.
The hallway is empty. Sconces throw pools of light that leave the corners in shadow on purpose. The rain is louder here, like the East Wing collects it and plays it back. The house’s hush feels like it’s chewing on the same thought I am:this is a bad idea; this is the only idea that will let you sleep.
My bare feet are silent on the runner. His private studio is at the end of the corridor past a framed photograph of a harbor with no boats. The door isn’t locked.
He’s at the desk when I slip inside and close the door with my hand on the handle to blunt the latch. He looks up. Surprise moves across his face and then a dark recognition. He sees what I am here to do before I say it.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” he says. His voice is lower than it was at dinner. My heart stumbles.
“I’m tired of being summoned,” I say, shutting the door quietly but not delicately. “If something’s going to happen, it happens on my terms.”
He rises without pushing his chair back. He doesn’t come straight at me. He rounds the side of the desk like a person who has had to learn how to avoid spooking other people. He stops when the distance between us is two steps and a decision.
“On your terms,” he repeats without sarcasm. “Say them.”
“I came to you,” I say, because I refuse to make it more complicated before I make it clear.
His face changes like the subtle release a surgeon makes in his shoulders before he cuts. He closes one of the two steps. The room gets smaller without the walls moving.
“You came to me,” he echoes, a confirmation stone set in a sentence so neither of us can misread what the next thing means.
He waits.
“I don’t want to be handled,” I say. “I want to be met.”
“Understood,” he says, and I believe him because my body does.
I back up until my spine finds the cold of the wall. It’s a stupid comfort. It tells me how far I can go in one direction. He comes close enough that the air between us is heat and not air.The sound of the rain is loud enough that I can feel it in my throat now.
