Empty.
The bed stripped and squared. The closet standing open and bare. Two small suitcases' worth of an enormous life, gone, and where all of it used to be there was a single envelope propped against the pillow with his name on it in her round, hopeful handwriting.
He opened it standing up. He didn't sit down, not even for this.
Thank you for protecting me.
I'm sorry I forgot whose heart this really is.
That was all. No blame. No fury. Not one line of the thousand furious things she had every right on earth to write. Only gratitude, and an apology, from the girl he had spent an entire night teaching that her own heartbeat was a debt.
Maximo lowered himself to the floor of the empty room, into the exact spot where she used to drop those ridiculous suitcases, and understood, far too late to be any use to either of them, what he had actually done.
He'd told her she existed because Mary died. And she had believed him. Thanked him, even. Then taken herself out of his life so she'd stop stealing one she had been made to think was never hers.
BY THE TIME THESEUSlet himself in, the study looked like the inside of a man coming apart at every seam.
The desk was swept clean, everything that had been on it now on the floor. A glass had gone into the fireplace and stayed there in pieces. Maximo stood at the black window with his hands braced on the sill and his shoulders working like a man hauling something up out of deep water, and he did not turn around.
"You haven't been taking my calls."
The other man still didn't say anything, but truthfully, he didn't have to. Ever since Theseus had learned about Jassy having Mary's heart, the writing was on the wall. And now...
"Mary would never have asked you to stop living. You and I both know that."
Maximo slowly turned to face him, and the expression on his face was one Theseus had never seen before. Not even on the day Mary had died.
"I lost my mind, Theseus," Maximo said rawly. "I love her. Jassy. I know that now. But I lost my mind, and all I could think of at that time was...hurting her."
Chapter Thirty
MAXIMO COULD FIND ANYONE. It was, in its way, the whole engine of his life. A man with his money and his contacts could locate a debtor in Zurich, a witness who didn't want witnessing, a single container lost somewhere across an ocean. Never in his life had he needed a thing he couldn't put his hands on.
He needed her. And she was gone.
He started with the hospitals because a transplant patient couldn't simply vanish, not really, not without the medicine that kept the borrowed heart from turning on her. He made the calls himself, which was the first thing that would have told anyone who knew him how far past saving he'd gone. Maximo, who had people for everything, sat at his own desk in the dark with a phone to his ear and a hold-line playing him tinny music, sayingpleaseto receptionists, spelling her name, a stranger with no right to ask. But the records that would have told him where she'd gone were the one kind of door his money wouldn't open, sealed off behind laws written exactly to protect people from men like him. They told him only the single thing they'd tell any stranger with no standing. No recipient by her name had died.
Alive, then. Somewhere. Taking her pills at a counter he would never get to stand at, in a kitchen he would never get to hear her sing in.
He tried the shelters because she was broke and proud and had left with two small suitcases and no cushion under her at all. The casting offices too, the temp agencies, the diner with the dumplings, every callback room she'd ever laughed her way into.He tried her mother, who took his call and his money both and offered him, in exchange, the information that she and Jassy weren't close, and had he thought to try the girl's friends. As if a mother should ever have to ask a stranger that about her own child.
There were no friends. That was the part that took him apart on the floor. She had let him learn her entire noisy life by living inside it, and the terrible thing under all the noise was that before him she had been almost entirely alone, and now she'd gone back to it on purpose, and she'd done it for no reason but to stop taking up room in his.
For two years he had guarded a locked door so nothing could ever get in and cost him again. He understood now, far too late to spend the knowing on anything, that he had bricked up the wrong wall in the wrong place. The thing he couldn't survive the loss of had never once been behind that door. It had been out here the whole time, sitting on his kitchen floor laughing until it cried, filling every silent room he owned with a noise he hadn't known he was starving for. And he had put it out on the curb himself and called the putting-out honor. The man who could find anything sat in a home gone silent the old way, the dead way, and made himself say the true thing, since there was no one left to say it to. He had been handed a whole life. He hadn't lost it the way he lost Mary, to the dark, with no say in the matter. This one he had given away on purpose, and there was no container lost across any ocean that he wanted back a fraction as badly.
Chapter Thirty-One
NEW CITY, NEW ME, ISthe plan.
I pick a place clear across the country from him, a city that's never heard me laugh, which turns out to be its own specific brand of lonely, and I get off the bus with my two suitcases and my orange pill bottle and my heart that isn't mine, and I start over the way I'm apparently very good at starting over.
I wait tables. I sleep on a cot in a share with four other girls chasing the same dream, and I audition for anything that'll hold still long enough to be auditioned for.
And I am, technically, fine.
That's the word I use in my head when the ache tries to start a conversation.Fine.I'm fine at the diner and fine on the cot and fine in the audition rooms. I'm fine right up until the smallest hours, when the four other girls are breathing slow and even and I catch myself doing the exact thing I swore on the bus I'd stop doing, which is lying still in the dark and listening for a man who used to move through his whole apartment without making a sound. Listening for footsteps on the far side of a wall that's three thousand miles away now and belongs to somebody else's life. And then I remember, fresh, every single time, like it's brand new every time, that this is the silence I picked. That nobody took him. That I set him down with my own two hands and walked, and a girl doesn't get to cry about a weight she chose to carry to the curb herself.
And the heart doesn't help. The one that was never even mine to give him picks those exact hours to go reaching after him, like it knows the way back even when I've made very sure the rest of me doesn't. It never once listened to me about him. I don't know why I thought leaving would teach it to start.
