Zeke was shaking. Anger was radiating from his pores. If he could levitate on rage, he would. He’d always known thatultimately, he was a commodity, but Timothy and his team had at least had the decency not to treat him like one.
He stared at Sybil, and he knew it wasn’t fair; he knew actually that he might be half in love with her by now, but he resented her presence so purely in this moment that it was all he could do to breathe the same air as she was.
“Zeke?” Her brow furrowed. Her hair was a hive from her hat, and he fought his impulse to take three long strides toward her, smooth it down, tuck it behind her ears.
“I have to go out of town for a while.”
“Oh.” A pause. “Okay.” Another one. “Is everything all right?”
“No, not really.” He started toward his bedroom, which required brushing past her to turn down the hall of his ridiculous apartment that his stupid salary negotiated by his stupid agent had paid for.
“Did I…” She followed him. “I’m sorry, are you mad at me?”
He didn’t know why she was apologizing to him, and that just made him angrier. She knew better than to apologize, and here she was, bringing herself down to his level.
“No,” he said. “And I have to pack.”
He opened the linen closet, pulled out a suitcase, unzipped it so violently that the zipper went off its track.
“Here,” she said. “Let me help.”
“I got it,” he said, though he clearly did not. His fingers were still trembling, and the zipper would not abide and realign with the teeth. He gave up and moved to his walk-in closet, where he pulled down clothes haphazardly and threw them the distance toward the bed, even when his elbow barked. When he emerged, Sybil was still standing in his doorframe, her hands on both hips, the apology clearly a distant memory.
“How long will you be gone for?”
“Awhile. Some time. I don’t know.” Zeke opened his bureau drawer, grabbed a pile of underwear, then socks, tossed those on his bed too.
“I wandered around Grand Central after meeting Caleb,” she said. “Did you know they have storage lockers? That require keys?”
“Sybil, honestly.” Zeke paused, squeezed the bridge of his nose like she was a headache. “I have to leave. And I can’t deal with this right now. We are not, like,CSIinvestigators. I have an actual job.”
He pretended not to see her wince.
“So am I tracking down Betty on my own?”
Zeke stilled. Then took what he knew was an exasperated inhale, but he didn’t feel like he was in control of himself, like he was witnessing this moment from the outside and would regret it, but fuck if he could do anything about it. Not the first time, he realized.
“Look, I’m sorry, but I have a real life to deal with right now. I can’t spend all my time chasing down a girl who might not even want to be found. Much less might be responsible for burning down a building with people inside of it.” He didn’t mean to say what he said next but did anyway. When he thought about it later, he’d blame his exhaustion, even though that was lousy reasoning for being awful to people you love. “This whole thing, this was all just supposed to below stakes. Not complicated, not anything that took me away from my actual obligations. I haverealobligations, you know.”
“You certainly do,” she said, and he retreated to the walk-in, so he didn’t have to see the judgment on her face.
A few minutes later he heard her in the kitchen, and then the front door closed, the latch clicking into place. Theevidence wall was dismantled; the postcards that Timothy had tossed and she had retrieved, similarly gone.
Zeke plodded back to his room and sank onto his bed, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. His phone buzzed, and he grabbed it, hoping it was Sybil, hoping she’d absolve him of what an utter asshole he had just been.
Timothy:I’m not fucking around. 7am. White Plains.
He stood, and his knee popped. He suddenly felt a hundred years old. He grabbed a pile of clothes from the bed, and that’s when he saw his suitcase.
While he had been tossing clothes from his closet, Sybil had fixed the zipper, and now, everything aligned perfectly. Like there wasn’t a problem with it in the first place. Like it had never been broken at all.
51
Night Twenty-One
Sybil
January 9th
