I'm also not in a position to argue with it, which is possibly the most honest thing I can say about the state I'm in. The tears have stopped—not because the situation has changed but because the hands on my face and the scent in the room and the single word delivered with the absolute certainty of someone who has said it and means it have done something to the particular quality of the despair. Not fixed it. Changed its texture.
From the kind that swallows you to the kind you can stand in.
I give him a nod.
Small. But real.
His hands stay where they are for a moment longer—warm on my cold-rain cheeks, completely steady—and then they lower slowly, and he sits back on his heels, and the apartment is still ruined and the rain is still coming through the ceiling and there is a very long and complicated several months ahead of me that I cannot see clearly from this position.
But there is something else now.
Something that wasn't here before I opened the door, before I said all of it, before a stranger crouched on a wet floor and held my face and said the word we with the quiet conviction of someone who was not making a promise he wasn't prepared to keep.
I look at Rowan.
He's looking at the apartment—not at me, giving me the moment, reading the room the way he reads everything: completely, without display. The dark eyes moving across the ceiling holes and the floor and the scattered books and the forced lock with the focused, unsentimental attention of someone who is identifying the situation rather than reacting to it.
"The collectors did this?" he asks.
"Or someone they hired," I say. My voice is steadier. Not all the way steady, but enough. "There's a third notice. I knew something was coming. I didn't think—" I gesture at the ceiling. "I thought it would be a person at the door in the morning. Not this."
He nods.
The nod of a man cataloguing information.
I look around the apartment one more time.
The mop is still propped against the wall near the bathroom, which is the most consistent thing in the room. The floor it was for is now beyond mopping. "I have to call Elowen," I say. "She'll—" I stop. "She'll come. And she'll bring about fifteen thingsI don't need and one thing I do and she'll want to talk about all of it immediately and I don't have the energy for all of it immediately, but she's the call I make from here."
"Call her," Rowan says.
I look at him.
He's still in my apartment. Still in wet formal wear. Still with that controlled, watchful expression that I am beginning to understand is not the absence of feeling but the very deliberate management of it.
"You can go," I say. "You've done—you've done considerably more than you had any obligation to do tonight. You can go."
He looks at the apartment.
Then at me.
"Call your friend," he says. "I'll wait."
Two words, stated with the same matter-of-fact quality that he'd used to say he wasn't a serial killer and that the car would be towed. Not a negotiation. Not a declaration. A simple statement of what he's going to do, delivered as if the decision has been made and requires no further discussion.
I look at this man.
At the dark eyes and the wet coat and the hands that were warm on my face a minute ago and the complete, steady absence of anything that resembles performance.
I thought I'd used up whatever luck this night had to offer before I even got home.
I reach into my jacket pocket for my phone.
I'm thankful to have some luck finally on my side.
CHAPTER 16
Lucky Wish
