I flinch. It’s small. Involuntary. There and gone. But she feels it.
Her eyes lift to mine at once. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing serious.”
“That wasn’t nothing.”
I should brush it off. Tell her I pulled a muscle, slept badly, walked into a door, any of the half-useful lies men use when they don’t want women worrying over them.
Instead I hear myself say, “Just a wound.”
She goes still. “What kind of wound?”
I look at her.
There are moments when lying becomes more work than truth. This is one of them. Maybe because she has already seen enough this morning to know my life is not clean. Maybe because she called a friend and heard the wordBratvaand then looked at me as if all the missing pieces had started to move. Maybe because she’s sitting in my room after nearly being shoved to the floor, carrying a child she still will not name for me, and somehow we are past the point where pretending helps either of us.
So I tell her, “Someone shot me.”
She stares.
The words hang there between us, plain and ugly.
I’m faintly surprised to hear them from my own mouth. Not because I’m ashamed of what happened. Because I don’t make a habit of telling women the truth when the truth has bullets in it. I especially don’t tell them while sitting three feet away from them, watching concern move over their faces as if they have any right to feel it.
And yet there it is.
She sets the water down carefully. “What?”
“Last night,” I add.And you came to me like an angel, and possibly saved my life. But I don’t say this part out loud.
“Someone shot you.” She says it like she’s trying to hear whether it sounds any less insane spoken back to me.
“Yes.”
“Why are you saying that like it’s a normal thing?”
“It’s not normal,” I say. “It is, unfortunately, familiar.”
That doesn’t help. If anything, it makes her look more unsettled.
“You were shot,” she repeats, more quietly this time. “And then you came to a wedding weekend and acted like that was just… background noise?”
“It missed anything important.”
Her eyes move over me, trying to decide whether she should be angry or horrified. “That’s not comforting.”
“No,” I say. “It rarely is.”
She sits back, looking at me in that intent, searching way of hers, and I know what she’s seeing now. Not just the tuxedo and the name and the money. The outline of the world beneath it. The part with blood in it.
“Was it because of…” She stops herself. She presses her lips together and looks away toward the windows.
For a moment neither of us speaks.
Then she says, “And you still think I should be answering your questions.”
I lean back in the chair and study her. “I think many things.”
