It hurts more than Kyle. That's the part I wasn't prepared for. Kyle was a child's nightmare—enormous at twelve, diminished by time and distance and the woman I've become. Kyle hurt the girl I was.
Damien hurt the woman I am. The woman who chose him. The woman who held out her wrists and saidpleaseand meant it with her whole body. The woman who, for the first time in twenty-eight years, let someone past every wall.
That woman is sitting on a subway crying, and the girl she was is sitting beside her, and neither of them knows how to make it stop.
Brooklyn. The studio. The cargo door rolls up and the studio is dark and cold and mine. Except it's not entirely mine anymore. The latch is his. The show was his. The career that grew from the show was fed by his money and his invisible hand.
I sit on the concrete floor. Back against the wall. Knees to my chest.
Different man. Different cage. Same girl on the floor.
The sculpture stands in the center of the room. The yielding forms, bending toward each other. I made this piece while he watched. Every weld, every join, every hour—he was there. Not because I showed him. Because he was looking without asking.
The cargo door is down but not latched. I didn't latch it when I came in. I always latch it. But my hands were shaking and my eyes were blurred and the discipline that governs every other part of my life failed me at the one moment it mattered.
I should get up. I should lock the door. I should—
The cargo door rolls up.
Not all the way. Three feet, maybe four. Enough for a man to duck under. Enough for the streetlight to cut across the concrete floor in a yellow slash that reaches almost to my boots.
I know before I see him. The way my body knew on the sidewalk. Before the face, before the name. My body knows.
Kyle Purcell ducks under the cargo door and straightens up inside my studio.
He looks different. The easy smile is gone. His face is harder, tighter, and there's something wrong with his right hand—wrapped in a bandage, dirty white, the fingers splinted and held against his chest. The way you hold a hand that's been broken. The way I held mine, at twelve, after the door.
His other hand holds a knife.
Not a large knife—a folding blade, the kind you buy at a hardware store. He's holding it low, by his thigh, the blade open and catching the streetlight.
I'm on the floor. Back against the wall. Knees to my chest. The worst possible position—low, compressed, no leverage. The welding tools are on the bench, six feet away. The torch. The hammer. The angle grinder. Six feet might as well be six miles.
He looks at me with an expression I haven't seen since I was twelve. The mask is off. The easy charm, the real estate smile, theI'd love to catch up—all of it stripped away. What's underneath is flat and empty and furious.
He holds up his bandaged hand. The splinted fingers. The ruin of it.
"Someone broke my hand," he says. His voice is quiet. Conversational. The tone of a man discussing the weather while holding a knife. "Friday night. In an alley. A man I've never seen before broke three of my fingers and said your name."
My stomach drops through the concrete floor.
"He saidJess Rowe," Kyle says. "He said he knew about the sketchbook. About the hallway. About the finger." He takes a step closer. "Nobody knows about that, Jess. Nobody except you."
The cargo door is open behind him. The street is dark. The studio is dark. And Kyle Purcell is standing in the only space I have left with a broken hand and a knife and the understanding that I told someone, and the someone found him.
"So I thought I'd come catch up," he says. "The way I said I would."
He takes another step.
I press my back against the wall and my crooked finger throbs and the twelve-year-old girl inside me starts to scream.
Chapter 28 - Damien
She closes the door and the sound of it is the loudest thing I've ever heard.
I stand in the hallway. The apartment is silent. The closet is open—I can see it from here, the bedroom door ajar, the cloth on the floor where she unwrapped the mirror piece. My face in the broken glass, staring up from the carpet. Fractured. Rearranged. The way she sees me now.
I don't move for a long time. The operative should be engaging—damage assessment, containment protocols, the systematic response to a compromised position. The machinery should be running. It's not. What's left is a man standing in a hallway in socks and a sweater, listening to the ghost of a door closing.
