"Get some rest," I say.
"You can call me now, you know? I have my phone."
I offer a small smile.
“We can stay on the phone all night while we sleep.”
I nod. “Yeah. I’ll call you.”
He kisses my forehead, and then I walk out.
Maeve links her arm through mine on the way out. In the elevator, she exhales slowly. "He really does look better."
"He does."
"You must feel so relieved."
"Yes."
She looks at me sideways. She knows me well enough to hear what's underneath the yes. She doesn't push it, which is one of a thousand reasons she is my best friend.
The doors open. Cold air hits us, and I walk through it and fill my lungs completely — one slow, private breath that has nothing to do with Cody or the room or the hour I just spent inside it.
In the parking lot, I stop beside my car and look at my hands.
Steady.
Completely steady. I held his hand, kissed his cheek, said, "Of course we're okay," and performed every second of it without flinching.
I have been so afraid of falling apart in front of him that I never considered the other possibility. That I wouldn't. That some part of me would be cold enough, careful enough, controlled enough to move through that room and give him absolutely nothing.
My mother built a weapon and thought she was raising a daughter.
I get in the car.
The library book is still in my bag on the passenger floor, spine up, annotations dense in the margins. My phone lights up on the seat beside me. Unknown contact.
I don't check it.
I start the engine.
Cody Ravenshaw has been performing his entire life. He is exceptional at it — the warmth, the charm, the perfectly calibrated vulnerability of a man who came back from the dead and learned in the same breath that his girlfriend moved her entire life here for him.
He smiled about it.
And I couldn't read the smile.
That's the part I can't stop turning over as I pull out of the parking lot and into the gray Seattle evening. Not that he was upset. Not that he was cold. That he smiled and I — who have been studying him for two years, who know the sound of every laugh and the weight of every silence — couldn't tell what it meant.
Cody Ravenshaw learned something today.
I just don't know yet what he's going to do with it.
Chapter 33: Cody
Theroomisquietnow.
It took long enough. Two hours of faces and voices and everyone needing something from me — a smile, a laugh, a sign that I'm still the person they came to see. I gave them all of it. I always do.
