Page 9 of My Girl to Take

He doesn’t know me. I watch him not recognize me. There’s a stretch of about four seconds where he looks at me the way a man looks at a woman he has just met and finds interesting. I feel it land somewhere low and unfamiliar. I don’t know how to react and have no idea what to do with my hands.

Then I say my name.

I watch it land—the name, the house, the staircase. Then, he makes the connection to my last name, and everything in his face just…closes. Not slowly. Like a hand over a candle.

Ivy’s daughter.

He doesn’t say it. He doesn’t have to. It’s in his shoulders and the way his eyes go past me to the hall like there might be something in it more worth looking at.

I knew. I knew. I built the whole day around knowing.

It still takes the floor out from under me. Yet I still walk him up the stairs with my voice completely level—because that’s the thing I’m good at.

***

I don’t fall apart in the hallway afterward.

I go up to my room, and I sit on the end of my bed in the dark with my shoes still on. I stay there for a little over an hour, doing nothing whatsoever. Not crying. Just gone, the way I used to go when I was small, and my mother said she’d come and didn’t.

I tell myself it isn’t about him. It’s about the day and Garth’s face when the door opened.

At some point, I get up, take my shoes off, and go check on my stepfather like I do every night. He’s asleep, and his hand is outside the blanket. I put it back under.

I’ll come back tomorrow, Logan said.

That’s the only part that matters. That’s all of it.

I say that to myself about four times before I fall asleep.

***

He comes at ten, but Garth is asleep.

“The medication makes him drowsy,” I say. “He’ll be up within the hour, if you want to wait.”

I fully expect him to leave. He looks at me for a second, then says, “I’ll wait,” and steps past me into the house. My pulse does something stupid.

We end up in the front room. He takes the chair by the window without asking, which is one of the things I’m already learning about him. He commands a room like the question of whether he should has never once occurred to him. No jacket today. White shirt, sleeves buttoned at the wrist. I notice that, too, and I don’t know why.

“You’re still at Wilder House,” I say, because the quiet is doing something to me.

“For now.”

“You live in London.”

“Most of the time.”

“Doing what?”

He glances at me. “Finance. I run a firm.”

I wait. He doesn’t elaborate, which I find genuinely irritating, and something in me decides to be irritating back.

“I looked you up,” I say. “There isn’t much.”

The corner of his mouth moves. Barely.

“No,” he agrees. “There isn’t.”