Page 16 of Truth in the Treme

He carried the notebook to the office and pinned her sketch of the boarding house to the board, beside the fire maps and the district line and the photographs of the burned. He stepped back and looked at what he had built. For the first time the board held both halves of it at once, the evidence and the memories, the fires and the house with the green door, side by side under the lamp, refusing to become one thing and refusing to let him put either of them down.

TEN

He closed the notebook on purpose, and he left it closed.

The phone had rung twice with Maya's name, and he had watched it ring and let it go to nothing, which he had not done in longer than he could remember. The board could keep until morning. The district lines and the witness sheets and the impossible drawing of a house with a green door would all be exactly where he had left them. Tonight he wanted one evening that belonged to neither the fires nor the things rising up out of her, one evening that was only theirs.

“No case,” he told her. “No notebook, no phone, no Maya. One night where we are just two people who live here.”

“Who are you,” Delphine said, “and what have you done with the man who slept sitting up against the headboard?” But she was already smiling, already reaching for the apron on its hook, already his. “All right. Two people who live here. We will need wine for that. And you are not allowed to investigate the wine.”

They cooked together, badly, on purpose.

She put him in charge of a sauce and corrected him constantly. He put her in charge of the music and pretended to disapprove of all of it. The kitchen filled with the smell of garlic and butter and the heat of the closed-up rooms, and somewhere in the middle of it the strain of the last days loosened its grip on him for the first time since the smoke first took her. They talked about nothing that mattered. A novel she wanted him to read and he refused to on principle. A city neither of them had seen, somewhere with cold winters, where he claimed he had once been almost happy. A song she loved and he mocked until she turned it up to spite him.

He laughed. He heard himself do it and did not stop it. For one evening he let the world be small and warm and full of her, and he let himself believe he was allowed to keep it.

She caught him watching her again, and this time it was not fear in it, and she knew the difference. She set down the spoon. She crossed the kitchen and put her hands flat on his chest, and she looked up at him with the lamplight gold on her face, and the cooking forgot itself.

He let her undress him without hurry, and he made himself stand still for it, which was its own surrender. For two hundred years he had held every part of himself in reserve, braced against the next loss, never once fully in the room. With her hands on him he set that down. He let her see all of it, the want and the fear and the bottomless gratitude, and he did not armor any of it over.

She drew him to the bed and he followed. He learned her again slowly, with his mouth and his hands, relearning what he already knew because knowing it had never once stopped being a wonder. She said his name into the dark and he answered with his whole body. When they came together at last there was no distance left in him, none of the careful space he kept around himself against the world. There was only her breath against his throat and her hands fisted in his hair and the long, unguarded fall of being completely known and wanted anyway.

Afterward he held her against his chest in the tangle of the sheets and felt his own heart slow under her ear, and for a while the only sound in the apartment was the two of them breathing and the city murmuring beyond the shutters.

“I love you,” she said into his skin. “I want you to know I would choose this. All of it. Even the part where my own head turns on me. I would still choose every day of this with you.”

“I know,” he said, and for once it cost him nothing to believe her.

They went back to the kitchen laughing, wrapped in whatever they had grabbed off the floor, to rescue a dinner that had long since stopped being rescuable.

“We forgot the bread,” she said, peering into the oven's dark. “We absolutely forgot the bread.”

“We had other concerns.”

“We are very bad at dinner.” She bumped him with her hip and reached for the wine. “We have always been very bad at⁠—”

He caught the smell before she finished the sentence.

Smoke. Real smoke, sharp and wrong, threading out from the seam of the oven door. He crossed the kitchen and pulled it open, and a gray cloud rolled up into his face, the bread gone to coal on the rack, and he turned his head and coughed and waved it back from the both of them.

He turned to tell her it was nothing, only the bread, only their own carelessness.

She was already gone.

She stood at the counter with the wine bottle still in her hand and her eyes open on nothing, and this time the stillness came down on her harder than he had ever seen it. The bottle slid out of her fingers. He caught it against his hip without looking and got his arms around her as her knees buckled, and he lowered her with him to the kitchen floor, her head against his shoulder, her body gone slack and far away.

“Delphine. Come back. It is only the bread, it is only smoke, come back to me.”

He reached for the part of himself that read the unseen, frantic with it now, here in his own home with his own hands shaking. He searched her and the room and the air between them. He searched for a curse, a hand, a shadow, anything at all he could name and fight. He found the smell of burned bread and the warmth of her body and not one trace of magic anywhere in his apartment. There was nothing here to have done this. There was no fire but the one they had made themselves out of carelessness, and it had reached into her exactly as the burning houses had, and there was no scene, no arson, no working, nothing. Only smoke. Only smoke in an ordinary kitchen on the best night they had been given in days.

He held her on the floor and waited, and the waiting ran long, longer than the fairgrounds, until at last she dragged in the deep tearing breath and came back to him.

She was crying before her eyes opened, and she was smiling through it, that same terrible joy.

“You were learning to cook,” she whispered. “For me. You were so bad at it, Bastien, you were so wonderfully bad. There was flour everywhere, in your hair, on the ceiling, how did you get it on the ceiling. And I was laughing at you and you would not give up. You kept saying you had time. You kept saying you would have it perfect by the time we were old, because you meant to cook for me for the rest of our lives.” Her hand found his face. “You wanted it so much. An ordinary life. Just an ordinary, endless, ordinary life. I could feel how much you wanted it. It was the most wanted I have ever felt.”

He had forgotten that night.