I sat on the edge of my bed and let the quiet of the house settle around me. Real quiet this time, not the watchful pressurized silence of my father’s presence but actual absence, actual space, the house breathing differently without him in it.
I texted Dottie.Tomorrow. Lunch. Same place. I need you.
Her reply came in under a minute.
Dottie:ALWAYS. Also I want details. All of them. Every single one.
I sent back three words:I have some.
Her response was a string of emojis that communicated excitement in several languages simultaneously. Smiling, I set the phone down and looked at the ceiling and thought about what it meant that the two people I most wanted to talk to this morning were a woman I had known for three weeks and a man I had known for a few minutes less.
Then I picked the phone back up.
He’s gone for two nights.
The feeling lasted all of three seconds before another thought followed it.
Two nights.
Two nights was enough time for many things.
Enough time to make mistakes.
Enough time to be caught.
Enough time to start wanting something that could be taken away.
I folded the note again before the thought could grow teeth.
I sent it before I could consider the implications of how much I wanted to send it, what it said about where I was, how thoroughly the careful distance I had been maintaining had quietly failed to hold.
I set the phone on the bed beside me and looked at the window and the pale October sky beyond it and waited.
Outside, Philadelphia went about its morning. Ordinary lives making ordinary choices, people who moved through their days without a shadow at the door, without gates and codes and the particular weight of a father’s watchful silence at a breakfast table. People who reached for things and got them, sometimes, just because they reached.
I had spent twenty-four years watching from the window.
I picked up the note from the nightstand where I’d put it. Read it one more time.
Don’t wait for permission.
The reply hadn’t come yet. I wasn’t worried. He had somewhere to be. He was probably a busy guy, the shape of his life outside what little I knew of it was opaque and slightly intriguing and something I had decided, cautiously, that I wanted to understand better.
Two nights.
The thought came with a warmth I didn’t try to temper, and I sat with it in the quiet house and let myself, for the length of one October morning, simply want what I wanted without building a case against it first.
Chapter 14
Jared
I hadn’t texted her back.
That was a choice, made and remade across the length of a day that had no good reason to feel as long as it did. She had sent five words—he’s gone for two nights—and I had read them in the back of a cab and felt something shift in my chest that had nothing to do with operational opportunity and everything to do with the fact that I was apparently no longer capable of receiving information about her without my body having an opinion about it before my mind could weigh in.
I had not texted back.
I had spent the afternoon at Khaos Inc. reviewing the Morozov financial intercepts with the focused attention of a man who was absolutely not thinking about anything else. I had called Nikos with a status update that was professional and accurate and contained no information about where I had or hadn’t been the previous night. I had eaten something at some point. I had told myself, with considerable firmness, that two nights of Ivan’s absence was not an invitation and that showing up uninvited at a house I had no legitimate reason to be in was not a thing I was going to do.
