I don’t know which of us crosses the kitchen first. I’ve decided it doesn’t matter; I’ve decided I get to keep that, the not-knowing of who reached, the one merciful blank in a life I’ve spent clawing every other blank out of. His mouth on mine is angry and his hands are not gentle and that’s the truth of what I want from him in this moment, not the careful reverence of the first night but the fight made flesh, the argument we can’t win with words dragged down into the one place we’ve always understood each other. He lifts me onto the counter and I pull him in by the shirt and we are not making love, we are arguing, we are each trying to win the thing neither of us will say.
“You think holding me is the same as having me,” I get out against his jaw, and I bite it, and I feel him groan. “It isn’t. You can keep the door. You’ll never keep the choice. I’ll always be the one who decides to climb on.”
“I know.” His hands are everywhere, rough, worshipful, furious. “God help me, I know, that’s the whole, that’s the thing that’s wrong with me, you’re the one thing I can’t decide, you climbed on at eighteen and ruined me for owning anything that doesn’t choose it —” He pulls back just enough to look at me, wrecked, and the church-cold is gone, there’s nothing left in his face but the boy with blood on his teeth in a hallway. “So choose. Right now. With the whole truth between us and me deciding nothing. Choose, little lamb, and I’ll give you whatever you choose, even if it’s the door.”
“I choose this,” I say. “Tonight, I choose this.”
It’s a lie of omission and we both half-know it and we do it anyway.
What happens then is the cold war with the gloves off, him and me and three years of the wall and six years of the cage and two days of a truth we can’t get over, all of it turned into hands and teeth and the counter and then the floor because neither of us makes it anywhere with a bed in it. He’s not careful this time and I don’t want him careful; I want the fight, I want to feel that I’m winning something, I want him undone enough to forget for one hour that he’s appointed himself my doorway. And I get it. I get him shaking, get him saying my name like it’s the only word that survived prison,Wren, Wren, choose me, choose me,one hand splayed over my racing heart the way he always reads it,there itis, there’s my girl, still running too fast, and I do choose him, in the moment, with my whole body, because that part has never once been the lie. The lie is everything I’m not saying. The lie is the storm two days off and the hill and the tape and the thing I’m going to do the second he finally sleeps.
I come apart under the man I’m about to betray, again, saying yes, saying his name, and the yes is true and the betrayal is true and I have made a whole life out of holding two true things in the same cold hand.
After, he gathers me up off the floor and he carries me to bed and he folds the warm enormous cage of himself around me, and I feel the great tension of the day drain out of him, feel him start to go under, because I taught him how, because the one mercy I ever gave him is the one I’m going to use to leave him, and his breath slows against the back of my neck, in, and out, the metronome, the only quiet either of us has ever had.
“We’ll handle Silas together,” he murmurs, already going, believing it, the most honest man I know undone by the one woman who can lie to him. “Thursday. You and me. You won’t be alone in any room ever again. I promise. I’ll never decide for you again, I swear it, just, together. Say together.”
“Together,” I lie, into the dark, and I feel him smile against my neck and let go and sleep.
And I lie awake in the cage of his arms and I do the math I’ll be doing for the rest of my life.
The longest night is Thursday. Two days. He sleeps deeper each night now, six years of debt setting down its weight, the giftI gave him turning, slowly, into the door I’ll walk out of. Eli’s heavy flashlight is in my coat by the door. The music box is on the side table where Silas left it, where I wound it myself, where it sits like a small green witness that finally answers to me. I’ve looked up what’s left of Marrowfield. I know the pass. I know how long the plows hold out in a storm. I know exactly how far a wolf has to walk to follow a woman who’s learned, at last, to leave while the door is sleeping.
He thinks he won the kitchen. He thinkstogetherwas true. He thinks the worst thing I’m capable of is being decided-for.
He taught me everything I know about doorways. He never once considered that the student might learn to be the one who walks through.
Two days.
I match my breathing to his in the dark, in, and out, on purpose, the metronome, the lullaby with no notes, and I let the only safe thing I’ve ever known sleep against my spine, and I count down to the night I’m going to spend it to set us both free.
I’m sorry,I tell the dark, where he can’t hear it, where I’ll never have to mean it out loud.
I’d rather lose you to the truth than keep you in a lie.
You taught me that, too.
CHAPTER 31
WREN
There’s a morning, in the two days I have left, that I keep folded up small and take out sometimes even now, the way I kept the candlelit kitchen, a morning I had no right to and stole anyway, knowing what I was going to do with the end of it.
I wake and for once I’m not the one awake first. He’s already up, which should be impossible for a man who didn’t sleep for six years, except he sleeps now, he sleeps because I’m here, and apparently a body that’s caught up on six years of rest wakes early and restless and doesn’t know what to do with a morning that isn’t a cell. I find him in my kitchen in the grey light, too big for the room, going through my cupboards with the quiet methodical attention he gives everything, learning where I keep things, and he’s made coffee, badly, far too strong, the coffee of a man who learned to make it in a place where strong was the only point of it.
“You don’t have enough food,” he says, by way of good morning. Not a complaint. An observation he’s clearly been brooding on. “One person’s worth. Less. You eat like someone who’s decided not to take up much space.” He sets a mug in front of me, the chipped one, my one nice one, he’s already learned which is mine, and stands there with his own, watching me drink, and I understand that he is cataloguing me the way he catalogued the deputy, the way he catalogues everything, except the data he’s gathering on me isn’thow to threaten.It’show to keep her alive.How to make her take up more space. What she needs that she’s trained herself not to ask for.
It should frighten me. A man who watches you that closely. It does, a little. But mostly it does the other thing, the thing I have no defense against, the thing that’s going to make tomorrow night so much harder than it needs to be.
We don’t talk about Silas. We’ve signed an unspoken truce on it for the length of the morning, both of us pretending, me lying, him hoping, that there’s a version of the next two days that ends with us in a kitchen instead of a burnt house. He fixes the cabinet hinge that’s been broken since I moved in, the one I stopped seeing years ago, with tools he finds in a drawer and a competence that makes something ache behind my sternum, becauseof coursehe can fix it, he wanted to build bridges, he wanted to be a man who refused to let the gap win, and instead he learned to fix what he could reach inside the width of a cell and now he’s fixing my cabinet because it’s the only bridge left to build. He doesn’t make a thing of it. He just stops the small wrongness in my house that I’d given up on, quietly, the way he stopped his father’s footsteps in a hallway, and moves on to the next one.
I watch him move through my little life like he’s always been in it. Like there’s a version of the world where this is just Tuesday. Where Lazarus Frost fixes the hinge and complains about my groceries and learns which mug is mine, and I go to the sanctuary and come home to him, and nobody is dead and nobody is in a cell and the snow outside is just snow.
“Stop looking at me like that,” he says, without turning around, because he always knows.
“Like what.”
“Like you’re memorizing it.” Now he does turn, and his face is doing the thing it almost never does, the unguarded thing I last saw by candlelight when I was sixteen, and it undoes me. “Like it’s already over and you’re keeping it for later.” He crosses the kitchen and takes my face in his hands, gentle, reading me, always reading me. “It’s not over, Wren. We’re going to be standing in this kitchen in a week. In a month. I’m going to learn to make the coffee the way you like it. I’m going to fill this house up with food until you have to take up space. We get the kitchen this time. Do you hear me? We get to keep the kitchen.”
