He opens his eyes.
“That’s a hell of a sales pitch.”
“I’m not selling anything.I’m telling you the door is open.You can walk through it or you can sit here and wait for whatever comes next.But I’m telling you right now—what comes next isn’t better than this.”
He looks at the stairs one more time.Long.Hard.The look of a man measuring the distance between where he is and where he could be.
“No,” he says.
“No?”
“I don’t trust you.I don’t trust her.I don’t trust this house or your so-called deal or anything that’s happened since I woke up in a trailer with a headache and a woman who thinks love is a felony.”
He settles back against the wall.“And you don’t take deals from people you don’t trust.First thing they teach you in law school.”
I stand there.Looking at a man who just turned down freedom.
“Your call,” I say.
I go upstairs.Close the basement door.
He had the door.He had the road.He had everything he’s been asking for since that night at dinner when he told Marin he was leaving her.
And he said no.
I stand in the kitchen and think about Marin.About every meal she carried down those stairs.Every movie night.Every cuff she adjusted.Every time she tried to fix a man who wouldn’t leave but wouldn’t stay.And now I’ve offered him the door and he won’t walk through it.
No wonder she lost her mind.
Because Charles doesn’t take deals he can’t control.Even when the deal is his life.
58
Marin
The flight takes forever.Everything takes forever when you’ve finally decided something.
I have a job.A real one.Remote, Texas-based, with a man who trusts me enough to let me build something from the ground up.I have a farmhouse.I have a plan—not the old plan, not the basement plan, not the kidnap-your-boyfriend-and-love-him-into-submission plan.A real plan.One that doesn’t require restraints or cover stories or prayer beads.
I have a future that doesn’t include Charles.
That sentence should hurt more than it does.
I land at nine.The drive from the airport takes forty minutes.Dark roads.No traffic.The kind of Texas night that makes you feel like the only person left on earth.I drive with the windows down because the air smells like nothing—no exhaust, no garbage, no eight million people stacked on top of each other pretending they have enough room.Just heat and grass and distance.
I pull into the driveway.Luke’s truck is there.Parked like it owns the place.Which, in a way, it does.
He’s on the porch.Sitting in the chair I bought at Foster’s last week.He stands when I get out of the car, the way he stood the first time I opened the door—filling the space, quiet, waiting.
“How was New York?”he says.
“Loud.”
He nods.Doesn’t smile.Luke doesn’t smile when things go right.He just absorbs it, the way he absorbs everything.
“How’s Charles?”I say.
Something crosses his face.Fast.Gone before I can name it.
