The train comes. I get on. The car is mostly empty—a couple leaning into each other, a man asleep against the window. I sit with his jacket around me like a second skin and watch the tunnel lights streak past.
I'm in trouble.
I know I'm in trouble because the jacket is warm and it smells like him and I have no intention of giving it back tomorrow or the next day. I'm going to hang it in my apartment and I'm going to look at it and I'm going to think about the way he said "brave" in front of my sculpture and the way he said my name like it was a complete sentence and the way he took off his jacket without asking because he knew I was cold before I admitted it.
I'm in trouble because I like the weight of it on my shoulders. I like that it's too big. I like that it smells like a man I don't trust, and the not-trusting doesn't make me want to take it off.
The train rocks through the dark. I press my face against the collar and breathe in.
I'm in so much trouble.
Chapter 10 - Damien
She walked down the stairs wearing my jacket and I stood on the sidewalk like a man who's been shot and hasn't realized it yet.
I'm still standing here. The green globe of the subway light hums above me, casting a sickly pallor over the pavement, and she's gone—swallowed by the station, carried away underground in a train I can't follow—and I'm wearing a white dress shirt in November with no jacket and I can't feel the cold because every nerve in my body is occupied with something else.
She put it on.
I need to say that again, because the fact of it is still detonating inside my chest. She fought me on it—of course she fought me, she fights everything, she's been fighting the world since she was seven years old—but she put it on. She pulled it around her shoulders and the fabric swallowed her and she looked up at me with those sharp, impossible eyes and said "fine" like she was surrendering a territory she'd defended for years.
And then she walked away wearing my clothes.
I start moving. Direction doesn't matter—I just need to move, because standing still with this feeling is like standing still inside a fire. My feet take me north, away from the subway, away from the gallery, into the grid of streets that will eventually lead me to a place where I can call my driver.
The cold finds me around the second block. The dress shirt is thin—Egyptian cotton, bespoke, the kind of shirt that costs what Jess spends on food in a month. It offers nothing against November air. My arms prickle. My jaw clenches againstthe chill. Good. The cold is useful. It gives me something physical to focus on while the rest of me burns.
I replay the evening the way I replay operations—methodically, sequentially, noting every point where the plan held and every point where it didn't.
The plan held through the first hour. I entered the gallery, moved through the other work, maintained appropriate distance. The plan held when I reached her sculpture, although what I felt in front of it was not part of any plan I've ever made. The piece is extraordinary—I knew it would be, I've watched it take shape through weeks of camera footage, but the camera didn't prepare me for the scale of it, the presence. The ribs reaching upward, the gap breathing at the top, the light falling through it like something sacred.
The plan did not hold when she crossed the gallery and stood beside me.
I should have anticipated this. I should have known that Jess Rowe, who spent the entire evening being brave—standing in front of strangers, letting them see her work, accepting praise she doesn't know how to receive—would channel that bravery toward me. Would walk up to me in her green dress and say "you came" with a steadiness that cost her more than anyone in that room understood.
She stood next to me and I could smell her—not the metal and soap of the warehouse, but something else. The berry lip color. A warmth underneath it that was just her skin, her body, the particular chemistry of Jess Rowe at close range.
The mask came off. I felt it go—the same feeling as losing your footing on ice, the split second where gravity takes over and control becomes irrelevant. She was standing in front of me and her sculpture was behind her and the light was in her hair andI felt everything I've spent twenty years refusing to feel, all at once, in the space of a single heartbeat.
She saw it. Those artist's eyes, which miss nothing, which read surfaces the way I read dossiers—they caught the moment my composure dropped and they held it. Recorded it. Filed it.
And she didn't step back.
That's the part I can't metabolize. I showed her something real—something ugly and raw and desperate—and she moved closer instead of away. She said I was more interesting than I wanted people to know, and the precision of that observation cut me open more cleanly than any blade.
I told her she wouldn't like what's underneath. She asked how I knew.
How do I know? Because what's underneath is a man who broke into her apartment and sat on her bed. A man who's been watching her through a camera for weeks. A man who bought her art through a proxy and funded her show without her knowledge and has been reshaping the conditions of her life with invisible hands. A man who is, by any reasonable definition, exactly the kind of threat her foster-care instincts have been warning her about.
That's what's underneath. That's what she almost saw tonight, in the gallery, when the mask slipped.
And she moved closer.
I reach a corner and stop. Take out my phone. Call my driver.
While I wait, I do the thing I shouldn't do. I open the camera feed. The warehouse is dark—she wouldn't have gone to the studio tonight. I switch to a different view—not a camera, just the map, the pin that marks her building. She's on thesubway right now, somewhere between the East Village and Brooklyn, in a train car that smells like metal and strangers, wearing my jacket over her green dress.
My phone buzzes before the driver arrives. Not the driver. Blackwood.
