The door closed. Not slammed, just pressed shut with a soft, definitive click. I heard the deadbolt turn.
I stood in the hallway for a while, staring at the closed door. The sconces buzzed, and a cockroach traced a confident path along the baseboard before vanishing beneath the stairwell door. There was a faint smell I couldn’t place. It was acrid, like charred sage mixed with something chemical and sour, and for a disorienting moment my upper lip pulled back from my teeth in a way that felt involuntary.
That was super strange.
But this was Albuquerque, so it was probably some hippie-but-for-bros-who-go-rock-climbing-and-shop-at-REI incense shit Mark was trying out. I did my best to shake it off and went back to my place.
In bed at last, I lay on my back and listened to the wall and heard nothing, which was somehow worse than the earlier scraping. Mark’s TV was off. There were no footsteps, no sounds of running water, nothing. The apartment next door had gone silent in a way that felt less like a person sleeping and more like an empty room pretending to be occupied.
He’s fine. He said he’s fine. People have weird nights.
I rolled onto my stomach and pressed my face into the pillow and breathed until my heartbeat slowed. Sometime well after midnight I fell asleep.
* * *
The knock came at six forty-five.
I was already half-awake, hovering in that gray zone between sleep and alarm clock where my brain rehearses every anxiety it couldn’t get to during the previous day. My Property Law exam, for example. And the way Mark had looked last night.
Like a stringless puppet. Or a newly sentient chatbot figuring out how humans are operated.
I wrapped myself in my robe and shuffled to the front door, checking the peephole out of habit. Mark was standing in the hallway with his hands in his jacket pockets, staring straight at the peephole as though he could see me through it.
I opened the door. “Hey. Little early for a Saturday.”
“Let’s go hiking.”
Nomorning, Kordude, you won’t believe what happenedor any of the other verbal runway Mark usually required before making a point. Just three words, delivered with the cadence of someone reading from a card.
“We just went hiking. Like three days ago.”
“Different trail. Jemez area. West of town. There’s a route I want to try.”
I leaned against the doorframe and studied him. He was wearing the same flannel, still buttoned to the throat. He had the same flattened hair. His eyes tracked my face without blinking, and I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Mark go this long without blinking.
“The Jemez? That’s like an hour and a half drive.”
“An hour forty. I already looked it up.”
“Mark, are you?—”
“I’d really like you to come.”
Something in the way he said it stopped me. He sounded like a man reciting a line he’d been given, and yet beneath the recitation there was an urgency that felt almost desperate.
He’s going through something. Maybe a bad breakup? He hasn’t mentioned that Stacy girl in a while. Or maybe his parents called again.
Mark’s relationship with his family was a subject he deflected with humor and beer, and I’d always respected that boundary because I had my own version of it. Orphans and the emotionally neglected recognized each other, even when neither felt like talking about it.
“Yeah, okay.” I ran a hand through my tangled hair. “Give me twenty minutes.”
“Fifteen.”
I blinked.
Mark grinned. Or at least his mouth did. The expression arrived on his face a beat too late and departed a beat too soon, like someone who’d studied how grins work in a textbook.
“Fifteen, then. Bossy.” I closed the door, dressed quickly in leggings, trail runners, and a long-sleeve base layer, then grabbed a Nalgene and a granola bar. I almost left my phone charging on the nightstand but shoved both it and my wallet into my pocket at the last second, driven by some impulse I didn’t examine too closely.
