"Sleep okay?" he says.
"Deeply," I say. "You?"
A beat. "Not really."
I look at him over my mug. He looks back with the expression I've been trying to decode since this whole thing started.
"You should've woken me up," I say.
"You were asleep."
"That's sort of what waking someone up involves, Declan."
There’s a strangely comfortable silence as we drink our coffee.
Finally, he speaks again. "I have a nine o'clock call," he says.
"Okay."
"Billie."
"Declan." I set down my mug. "I'm not going to make you give a speech. We can skip the part where you try to construct a sentence about what happened and I watch you suffer through it. I've seen you try to give a toast at my dad's birthday. I know what that looks like and neither of us needs it this morning."
"Okay," he says.
"Okay."
Neither of us moves.
"I'll call you tonight," he says.
"Okay," I say, and I'm aware that we've turnedokayinto a load-bearing word. Some things are better left at “okay” until you know what they are.
He sets his mug in the sink. Picks up his jacket from the chair.
"You cancelled the account," I say.
He stops.
I didn't plan to say it. It came out the same way most of my important sentences come out: before the committee approves the wording.
"Didn't feel right," he says. "Keeping it."
I nod. DarkWatcher45, seven months, both tiers. Cancelled. Neither of us says what that means. Neither of us needs to.
He crosses to where I'm standing and puts his hand to my jaw. Just that. Just a moment. His thumb against my cheekbone,warm and careful, and I just let it happen, which is very unlike me and I'm choosing not to examine that right now.
Then he leaves.
I listen to his footsteps down to the lobby. The door. I do not follow him. I pour the rest of my coffee and stand in my kitchen and I do not think about any of the things that are now true, because there's an ordering problem: I need to think about them in the right sequence and I haven't worked out the sequence yet.
There's a glass of water I meant to get last night.
I go to get it.
My kitchen window looks down onto the street. I know this. I've stood at this window a hundred times in the two years I've lived here. Watching for delivery drivers, watching for weather, watching for nothing. I'm not thinking about the window at all when I arrive at it.
His car is still there.
