Looking for the seam.
I clean up. Tools racked, torch secured, floor swept. The motions are automatic—the closing ritual that tells my body the workday is done, that it's time to transition from the woman who makes things to the woman who exists in the rest of the world. I pull on my jacket, roll down the cargo door, test the latch.
The street is dark. Seven o'clock in November, and the city has already pulled its curtains. I scan the sidewalk—left, right, the doorways, the parked cars. No Kyle. No one. Just the cold and the streetlights and the distant sound of traffic on the avenue.
I start walking. Not toward my apartment. Toward the subway.
I don't decide to go to his apartment. My feet decide. The way my hands decide where a weld goes sometimes—not through conscious planning but through a knowledge that lives below thought, in the body, in the muscles that have learned a route and follow it without being told.
The jacket is over my arm. His jacket, the one I've been carrying back and forth like a passport between two countries. I should stop pretending it's about returning the jacket. It was never about the jacket. It's about the fact that his apartment, empty and cold and too large for one person, has started to feel like a place I belong. Not because of the windows or the Italian coffee machine. Because he's in it. Because the silence in hisapartment, when I'm there, isn't the silence of absence. It's the silence of two people who don't need to fill the space.
The subway carries me across the river. I ride with the jacket on my lap and my hands in my pockets and the soreness in my shoulders from four hours of welding, and the soreness feels good. Earned. The body of a woman who worked today, who made something, who came back from the place Kyle sent her.
I buzz his intercom at seven forty-five. He answers on the first ring.
"It's me," I say.
He doesn't ask why. The door clicks open.
In the elevator, I catch my reflection in the mirrored wall—work clothes, grime on my neck, my hair a disaster, his jacket over my arm. I look like exactly what I am: a woman who spent the day welding and then got on the subway to see a man because her body needed to be near his.
He's in the doorway when the elevator opens. Dark trousers, a shirt with the sleeves rolled to the forearms. His face does the thing—the brief, involuntary crack in the composure, the flash of something raw before the surface resets. He's been worried. I can see the evidence of it in the tension around his eyes, in the way his body shifts toward me before he catches himself.
I don't say anything. I walk into the apartment and put the jacket on the chair and go to the kitchen and take down the white mug—my mug—and start the coffee machine.
He watches me from the doorway. I can feel his attention the way I always feel it—total, focused, the weight of a man who sees everything and says nothing until he's certain of what he's seeing.
"I welded today," I say, pressing the buttons on the machine in the sequence I've memorized. "Four hours. The piece is coming back."
"Good." He comes into the kitchen. Stands on the other side of the island. Close enough to touch, far enough to give me room. The calibration is so precise it would annoy me on any other night. Tonight it feels like kindness.
"I'm going to stay," I say. Not a question. Not a request. A statement, the way he makes statements—with certainty, without apology.
Something moves across his face. Not surprise—he knew I was staying the moment I buzzed the intercom. Something deeper. Relief, maybe. Or the particular pain of a man who's getting what he wants and knows he doesn't deserve it.
"Stay," he says. The word he keeps giving me. The only honest word he has.
I take my coffee to the couch. He sits beside me. I tuck myself against his side the way I've learned to—legs curled, head on his shoulder, my body fitting into the space his body makes. His arm comes around me. His hand finds my hair.
We don't talk. The city hums outside the windows. The coffee is warm in my hands. His heartbeat is steady against my shoulder.
I close my eyes. The twelve-year-old girl is quiet tonight. Not gone—she's never gone. But she's sitting in a room that feels safe, with a man whose heartbeat is steady, and for now that's enough.
Tomorrow I'll ask the questions. Tomorrow I'll push on the locked doors and the vague answers and the things that don't add up.
Tonight, I'm here. In his apartment, against his side, with my mug and his heartbeat and the knowledge that I made something today.
Chapter 24 - Damien
She falls asleep on my couch at nine thirty.
I watch it happen the way I've watched it happen before—the gradual softening, the weight shifting, the moment her body decides it's done consulting her brain and simply shuts down. She's been running on welding fumes and adrenaline and whatever reserves a woman like Jess keeps in storage for emergencies, and my apartment is warm and my shoulder is solid and the combination is enough.
Her coffee cup tilts in her hand. I take it before it spills. Set it on the table. She murmurs something—not a word, just a sound of protest at the minor disruption—and settles deeper against me, her head finding the hollow of my shoulder, her hand curling against my chest.
The crooked finger against my ribs. The signature Kyle Purcell left on her body.
I sit with her for twenty minutes. I count them. Her breathing deepens and steadies and her body goes heavy with the particular density of real sleep—not the shallow collapse of Wednesday night on the studio crate, but something fuller. Safer. The sleep of a woman who's in a space she's chosen, next to a person she's chosen, and the choosing has made the difference.
