All of those. None of those. I don't know.
I sit on Jess Rowe's bed for four minutes. I count the seconds the way I count everything—precisely, automatically, the operational clock that never stops.
Then I stand. I straighten the quilt where I sat, smoothing the fabric until no impression remains. I walk to the door. I check the apartment one more time—everything in its place, nothing moved, nothing taken, nothing left behind.
I let myself out. The Medeco locks behind me with a solid click. I descend the stairs in silence, exit the building, stand on the dark street outside.
The air is cold. November cold, the kind that punishes exposed skin. I welcome it. The cold is clean and external and it counteracts the heat in my chest, which is neither clean nor external but a fire that I set myself and can no longer control.
I look up at the fourth floor. Her window is dark. The streetlamp catches the glass, and I can see the faintest shape behind it—the jar of lavender on the sill.
My phone buzzes. The Order—a message from Abraham about the federal investigation, another complication requiring my attention. I read it, file it, compose a response in my head. The operative surfaces. The machinery engages.
But underneath it, deeper than the protocols and the strategies and the cold professional competence, I'm still in her apartment. Still sitting on her bed. Still touching the fabric of a green dress and imagining the woman inside it.
The show is in four days. I'm going to stand in a gallery and look at her art, and she's going to be there—wearing that dress, her bare arms, her sharp eyes—and she's going to look at me and try to read me the way she reads metal before she cuts it.
And I'm going to have to stand there and be read, knowing what I know. That I've been in her home. That I know the smell of her pillow and the title of her book and the flavour of her tea. That I've sat where she sleeps and felt the shape her body leaves in the mattress.
She'll look at me with those eyes—suspicious, analytical, searching for the seam in the performance—and I'll have to hold. Flawless. Seamless. The man in the expensive coat who nods at the bodega and says the right things and gives nothing away.
I've held under interrogation. Under torture, once, in a situation in Prague that the Order's files describe in clinical terms and my memory describes in nightmares. I've held through things that would break most people, because holding is what I do. It's what I was made for.
But holding under her gaze—knowing what I know, carrying what I carry—might be the hardest thing I've ever done.
I walk to the subway. The city moves around me, indifferent, enormous. I descend into the tunnel and wait for the train, and in the fluorescent light of the platform, I look at my hands.
Still trembling. Faintly. The ghost of her quilt under my palms.
Four days.
Chapter 9 - Jess
The dress fits differently when it matters.
I stand in front of the bathroom mirror at six o'clock and barely recognize myself. The green fabric does what Tess promised it would—warms my skin, follows my shape, makes me look like a woman who belongs in a gallery instead of a warehouse. My arms are bare. The scars and burns are visible, and I thought about covering them—a cardigan, a wrap—and then decided no. They're part of the story. They're part of me.
I've done my hair as well as short, self-cut hair can be done. A little product, a little effort. Mascara, which I own one tube of and use maybe four times a year. Lip color that Tess left at my apartment last month, a warm berry shade that I didn't think would work but does.
I look like Jess Rowe on her best day. That's going to have to be enough.
My hands are shaking. I press them flat against the sink and breathe. In four hours, this will be over. The work will be on the walls, people will have seen it, and whatever happens—good, bad, indifferent—it will be done.
Tess arrives at 6:30, wearing a red dress that's aggressively Tess—bright, a little too much, completely perfect on her. She takes one look at me and puts her hands on my shoulders.
"You look incredible," she says. "And you're going to be fine."
"I might throw up."
"That's allowed. Just not on the sculpture."
We take the subway. Tess talks the entire way—about the other artists, the turnout, a review she saw on a small art blog. I listen without hearing most of it. My body is humming at a frequency that makes ordinary conversation feel like it's happening behind glass.
The gallery is on a quiet block in the East Village. Small frontage, brick, a sign that reads NISH GALLERY in plain black letters. Nothing flashy. Nish doesn't do flashy. He does honest.
We arrive early, before the doors open. Nish meets us inside, vibrating with barely contained energy. He hugs me and then steps back and gestures toward the main space.
"Go look," he says. "Before anyone else gets here."
