"I'm not going anywhere," I say.
Something in his expression shifts. He squeezes my shoulder once and heads for the door.
Logan surprises me with a long, hard kiss.
"Home?" he says, quiet, just for me.
The word means something now. The penthouse with the rooftop pool and the marble floors and the bay going silver in the mornings. The place where his shirts are on the bathroom floor and my sketchbooks are on the dining table and his access code is my birthday because he knew it before I told him. Home. A word that used to feel like a lie I was telling a city that didn't know me. Not anymore.
"Yes," I say.
He holds the door and I step through into the main floor, dark and closed, the stage unlit, the chandelier hauled up. Emergency lighting casts everything in green shadow.
We walk through the dark floor together. His hand finds mine somewhere between the bar and the entrance.
The war continues. The world stays what it is.
But we have this. The sketchbook under my arm, the leather warm from my hands. His hand in mine. The family, dispersed into their own evenings, all of them carrying something — grief or fear or love or all three at once, which is, I'm learning, how it goes in a family that doesn't pretend otherwise.
I came here looking for fear. I came here looking to feel something after five years of nothing. I found everything else instead.
At the front door, we step out into the open night together, the city spreading out ahead of us, indifferent and bright, and we move into it without looking back.
Epilogue — Gunner
Monday morning. The family is back in their corners. I leave La Sirena on foot at ten.
The Miami light in late January is clean and white. Too much of it. August is better. People look at the ground in August.
The errand is two miles south. I walk it.
The woman with the stroller sees me at thirty feet. Her eyes do the small calculation — distance, trajectory, intercept time — and she swerves the front wheel to the curb side. The toddler doesn't notice. The mother smiles at no one and keeps moving and doesn't look back.
Two girls in sundresses cross the street mid-block. Sixteen, maybe seventeen. They have been laughing at something on a phone. Then one of them sees me and her hand finds the other's elbow and they cross without looking at the cars. A taxi brakes. The driver mouths something at them. They keep going.
I am not insulted. I have a face. People look at it.
Outside the coffee cart on the corner, three men are in line. Two are tourists. The third is local — short, dense, neck thick enough to take a bullet, prison ink crawling out of his collar. He clocks me at twenty feet. I watch him do it. The recognition: another bad man. He measures me. The measurement takes him longer than the women's did because he is doing it properly.
Then he steps wider in line. A full half pace.
He doesn't look up at me as I pass.
That one I file.
I keep walking.
A man in his sixties has a small dog on a leash, the kind of dog that is mostly hair. The dog growls. The man tugs the leash and crosses the street. The dog growls all the way across.
At the next corner, a mother is talking to her son. He is maybe seven, school uniform, on the way somewhere. He sees me first. He goes very still. His mother glances down to see what he is looking at, finds me, and her hand goes to the back of her son's head, fingers spreading wide across his hair. She turns him into her hip. She keeps her voice the same. She is good at it. Practiced.
I pass them at six feet.
The boy watches me go past with his face still pressed into her side.
I do not think about it. I have done this walk a thousand times. The thinking was finished a long time ago.
Outside a juice place a woman my own age is on her phone. She is leaning on the door. She is wearing the kind of clothes women wear when they are trying. When she sees me she lowers her phone an inch and looks at her own shoes until I am past. She lifts the phone again. I hear her resume the call. Her voice has the bright recovery in it. The lie of fine.
