Page 51 of Sparrow

I start laughing at this, and once I start, I can’t seem to stop. Rain is sheeting off the roof in front of us and the night is black with the storm. The porch is sheltered, yes, but sitting out here feels both dangerous and cozy, sheltered and exposed, and the whole picture is so ridiculous that it’s sent something shooting through my veins.

Something that feels a whole lot like giddiness.

I try to remember how much whiskey she poured in my mug, and put my mood down to that. Because it certainly isn’t due to yet another nighttime date with Arden.

She of the mysterious fainting episode.

“This town looks different when it rains,” she says suddenly, like she’s heading me off from saying anything about that thought.

“All towns look different in the rain,” I note.

“Yeah but not all towns look better,” she argues. “New York looks grimy and sad in the rain. Hawke’s Wood looks... sparkly.”

“Sparkly?” I ask. I look out at the town doubtfully, trying to understand the label, but it’s no good; we can’t see the town from here.

She’s talking more about New York than Wood, I think.

“The city looks bad at the best of times,” I say quietly. “I’ve always hated that place.”

“You’re from New York?” This is a surprise to her, evidently, and I realize that I haven’t talked to her about my history. She doesn’t know where I’m from or what I did there.

For her, I’m a blank slate. A story waiting to be written.

And gods, I didn’t realize how much I needed that to be the case until right now.

“Born and raised there,” I say. “Until I was nineteen, when Mars found and brought me back.”

She skips over the dangerous parts of that, like asking why I didn’t want to stay with my real family, and asks the most Arden question ever. “He found you? Like you find a stray dog?”

“Exactly like a stray dog.”

She sips at her cocoa. “Can I start calling you Rover?”

This hits me in a place that’s both funny and tragic, this idea of an entirely different name, and I wonder again if she knows more about me than she’s letting on.

But she can’t. There’s no way.

“So why don’t you like the city?” she asks.

This... is harder to explain than it should be. “Because no one looks at anyone else. Everyone just walks past each other, always in a hurry. No one notices anything. No one would notice if you disappeared. If you needed help.”

“I noticed.”

The answer is so quiet, so firm, that I almost miss it, and I look at her, trying to figure out what she means. If she was in New York up until she was kidnapped, that would mean we might have been there at the same time. Did we cross paths somehow? Did she actually know of me there?

Impossible. She must mean something else.

“You noticed what?” I ask, my voice hoarse.

“I noticed you. I notice when you disappear. And I’m from the city.”

“You’re not like anyone else there, though.”

She laughs at that, and tells me she’s exactly like other people from the city. This is when I learn that she’s more like me than I realized. She’s from the criminal world, too. We may have known some of the same people.

We may have existed in the same space.

But we were on different sides of the road. She’s a Rossi. Mafia royalty. A princess.