Owen is two years gone. Grady Sullivan is asleep in the too-small bed beside me, and he fills the quiet the way Owen filled it. I walked him up the stairs. I said his name. I stayed in it instead of watching it from the outside, which is what I’ve been doing with everything for two years, and the comparison isn’t abstract anymore.
It landed.
I do the math. Significant, every direction I run it.
I could still leave.
Not tonight. Tonight is its own data point, to be processed separately. But the mechanics exist. I know how to run an exit: the app, a new listing, the gap I’d leave closing behind me the way gaps close. Dr. Fenn back in the practice eventually. The dog with Cal. The crew back to whatever rhythm they had.
I’ve left messier situations than this one. I know how the gaps close.
I tell myself this.
His breathing is steady in the dark, one hand loose at his side, the restlessness entirely gone out of him. The mountains are dark outside the window.
I press my hand flat against my sternum and take inventory. Heart rate: elevated. Perimeter: breached. Patient: not going anywhere.
I don’t move.
Chapter 9
Grady
The ceiling is unfamiliar.
This is the first thing I register when I come awake—not where I am, not what time it is, not the weight of the morning. The ceiling. It’s wrong in the way of ceilings you haven’t spent enough time under to stop noticing: different water stain, different crack pattern, different quality of dark from a window facing a different direction than the one I’m used to.
I’ve woken up in a lot of places. I know how to orient.
I run the inventory the way I always run it: exits (door to my left, window behind me, fire escape I can’t see but know is there because every building in this town has one on account of the fire department requiring it), time (somewhere between six and seven based on the light), situation (need a moment to think about this one).
The apartment above Copper Ridge Veterinary. I know because: the ceiling, the quality of light coming around the curtain edge, the faint medicinal smell that gets into everything near a clinic the way smoke gets into everything near a fire. The month of August, which I know because my body knowsAugust, the low-grade vigilance of fire season, the way sleep runs shallower when the mountain is dry.
Sloane, who is not in the bed with me.
I lie there a beat longer than necessary. The window she faces is the one that gets the mountain in the morning, which I know because I’ve stood under that window once, when I brought the dog back and she hadn’t opened yet, and I looked up at it and thought: that’s a good window. I noticed the window before I noticed the apartment. I noticed the apartment before I clocked what I was doing, which was memorizing her building the way I memorize buildings.
I let my brain catch up. The sheet on her side is cool. She’s been up a while. The apartment is quiet, not empty. I know the difference. You spend enough years waking up in stations with twelve other people doing quiet things at odd hours, you learn to read the texture of occupied silence.
I get up.
The bathroom is easy to find; the apartment is not large. I wash my face and look at myself in the mirror, which I generally try to avoid on the basis that mornings are not my best context. I look like a person who made a decision. I look like a person who is going to have to think about that decision later, when he’s had a whole night’s sleep. I look like someone who doesn’t have a system for this.
The system, for reference: don’t stay. That’s been the system for three years and it worked cleanly because I’ve always had a reason to leave: another call, another shift, the understanding that anything I started would have to end before it got complicated. The system doesn’t account for a situation where you don’t want to use it, which is a design flaw I’m noting now, too late to be useful.
She’s in the kitchen. Standing at the window with a mug, watching the mountain light do its morning thing, the lightcoming in from the east, slow and specific, the ridge still dark against the brightening sky. She’s in a t-shirt and what are clearly pajama pants with small bears on them. This is information I’m going to be thinking about for a while.
“Morning,” I say.
She turns. She’s got that look she gets at the clinic, already running several thoughts, one of them about me, deciding how much of the deciding to show. The difference this morning is the bears.
“Morning,” she says. “Coffee’s on the counter.”
I find the coffee on the counter just like she said. I also find that she makes coffee the way a scientist makes coffee: a scale, a gooseneck kettle, a pour-over setup with at least four components. I look at all of this.
“Do you have a—” I start.
“Regular coffee?” she says. “No.”
