She's still on the couch. The throw has slipped to her waist and her arm is bare—the burn marks, the scars, the working muscle. Her face is turned toward the back of the cushion, her crooked finger curled against her sternum. The lamplight gilds the edge of her cheekbone. She looks young. She looks like someone who should have been protected by every adult in every room she ever entered, and wasn't.
I pull the throw back up to her shoulders. She stirs—a small sound, her hand reaching out—and I take it. Her fingers close around mine without waking. Reflex. The grip of a woman who's learned to hold on to things in her sleep because the things she holds tend to disappear by morning.
I stand beside the couch, her hand in mine, and I feel both things at once. The tenderness that makes my chest ache. And the cold, clean certainty of what I'm going to do on Friday night.
I bring her hand to my mouth. Press my lips to the crooked finger. The bone that healed wrong. The joint that will never straighten. His work. His signature.
I'm going to find the man who wrote this on her body and I'm going to write something on his.
She sleeps. I hold her hand. The city hums outside the windows.
Friday.
Chapter 25 - Jess
I wake up to the sound of water running.
Not the shower—the kitchen tap. The particular rhythm of someone filling a kettle, the tap shutting off, the click of the stove. Small sounds, domestic sounds, the sounds of a person making space for another person's morning. I lie on the couch with the cashmere throw pulled to my chin and listen, and the listening itself is a kind of luxury I'm still not used to—waking up in a place where someone else is already awake, already moving, already thinking about what I might need.
The apartment is bright. Morning sun through the east windows, low and amber, painting the white walls with light that makes them look warmer than they are. I stretch—my shoulders ache from yesterday's welding, a deep satisfying pain that tells me I worked well—and sit up.
He's in the kitchen. His back to me, dressed already—dark trousers, a gray sweater with the sleeves pushed to his forearms. He's making tea, not coffee. Chamomile. I can smell it from here—the faint, dusty sweetness that I associate with my own apartment, my own nightstand, my own ritual of winding down.
He bought chamomile. For me. This man who drinks espresso and scotch and nothing in between went out and bought a box of chamomile tea because I drink it, and the gesture is so small and so specific that it hits me harder than flowers or jewelry or any of the things men are supposed to do.
"Morning," I say.
He turns. The expression that crosses his face when he sees me is the one I've come to think of as the crack—that fraction of a second where the composure parts and somethingunguarded shows through. It's brief. It always is. But I catch it, the way I always catch it, and what I see this morning is relief. Pure, uncomplicated relief that I'm still here.
"How did you sleep?" he asks.
"Like someone hit me with a hammer." I push the throw off and stand, and my body protests in the way that means I need to stretch properly before I do anything else. I raise my arms above my head, twist at the waist, feel the vertebrae pop. He watches me from the kitchen—not looking away, not pretending not to look. Just watching, with that total attention that used to unsettle me and now feels like sunlight. Warm. Constant. Directed entirely at me.
He brings the tea. I take it with both hands and the warmth seeps into my palms, into the calluses and the dry skin and the crooked finger that aches in the cold. I drink standing at the window, looking out at Central Park in the morning light, and the view is absurd. The kind of view that belongs in a movie about someone else's life.
"I need to get to the studio," I say. "The piece is talking again. I don't want to lose the thread."
"I'll walk you to the subway."
"You don't have to—"
"I know."
The exchange has become a pattern. He offers. I resist. He acknowledges the resistance without withdrawing the offer. And I accept, because the truth is I like walking with him, like the warmth of his body beside mine on a cold street, like the way his stride shortens to match mine without him seeming to notice he's doing it.
I wash my face in his bathroom, borrow his toothbrush because I still haven't left one here and he hasn't suggested it and neither of us has acknowledged what it would mean if I did. I look at myself in his mirror—his enormous, spotless, perfectly lit mirror that's the opposite of my cracked bathroom mirror—and I see the same face I always see. Tired. A little gaunt. The short hair that's growing out unevenly because I can't be bothered to fix it. But something around the eyes that's new. Something that looks like a woman who slept well because she wasn't alone.
I pull on my clothes from yesterday—work pants, tank top, the canvas jacket. The green dress is at home. His jacket is on the chair where I left it last night, and I should stop carrying it back and forth like a talisman, but I pick it up anyway and fold it over my arm. Habit. Or something more than habit that I'm not examining too closely.
On my way to the front door, I pass the study.
The door is ajar. Not open—cracked, maybe two inches, the way a door settles when it hasn't been pulled fully closed. I've passed this door before. It's always been shut. The study is the one room I haven't been in—not because he's told me it's off limits, but because the closed door communicates its own boundary, and I've respected it the way I'd respect a closed door in anyone's home.
But it's not closed this morning. And I'm walking past it, and the crack is there, and my eyes do what my eyes always do—they look.
I see the desk. The laptop, closed, the power light pulsing in sleep mode. A glass with an inch of amber liquid—scotch, the drink he pours and doesn't finish. The desk lamp, still on. He was in there last night. After I fell asleep on the couch, he wentto the study and worked, and whatever he was doing kept him up late enough to leave the lamp on and the scotch unfinished and the door improperly closed.
None of this is remarkable. A man works late in his study. It happens.
