“I’ll work on it,” I said.
A beat that lasted slightly too long. “Are you alright, Jared?”
The question arrived with a neutrality so precise it was its own kind of answer—the tone of a man who was not asking after my health.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll be in touch.”
I ended the call before he could say what he was thinking.
The city moved past the window. The first light of dawn was beginning to flatten the shadows, and the streets were starting their slow morning return to life. I sat in the back of the car with my hand in my left jacket pocket and looked at nothing in particular.
The opportunity had been there. The choice had been not to take it. There was no version of that fact that fit under operational or professional or any other label that put it at a manageable distance.
The city moved past the window.
A left jacket pocket drew my attention, along with the thought of a woman asleep on the third floor of a house that had never really belonged to her.
At some point, the pretense that the decision had come as a surprise became impossible to maintain.
I did not examine the thought. I simply held it, the way you hold something that arrives without warning and proves heavier than expected.
The city moved past the window.
In a few hours, Polina would find a note tucked beneath her phone.Don’t wait for permission.
I wondered if it would be enough to plant something that might grow in the space between now and the moment I would have to tell her the truth.
It wasn’t enough. Nothing was going to be enough for that conversation.
But it was what I had.
Chapter 13
Polina
I woke, reaching for my phone before I was fully conscious.
The space beside me was empty and cool. Not the warmth of recent absence, but the settled cool of hours, which meant he had been gone for a while, which meant he had left while I was still sleeping, which meant—
I sat up.
The room was gray and quiet in the early morning light, curtains still drawn, everything exactly as it should be and nothing as it had been yesterday. For one awful, suspended moment I sat with the silence and let my mind go to the place it had been trained to go by twenty-four years of living in myfather’s world. The place that said—it meant nothing, you were convenient, you are always only ever convenient—and felt the familiar cold of it moving through my chest.
When I picked up my phone, I saw a note tucked under it.
Small. Folded once. My name wasn’t on it—just the fold, tucked under the edge of my phone where only I would find it. I opened it.
The Barnes. Tomorrow. Don’t wait for permission.
I’ll find a way back. — J
I read it twice. Then a third time, because the third time was when it landed properly. Not the words themselves but the specificity of them. Not last night was wonderful. Not you are beautiful or I had a remarkable time or any of the smooth composed things a man like him could have written in his sleep. The Barnes. The exact thing I had said, in the dark, without thinking, the thing that had come out of me before I’d decided to say it.
He had been listening.
I sat on the edge of the bed with the note still in my hand.
It was absurd, objectively.
