Page 141 of Shatter

Aren stands beside it.

He isn't looking at us or at the men dragging Desmond's suits out of the building in zip ties.

He's staring up at the second floor of the building.

At the window, where the blinds hang half open.

A woman stands in it.

Young, with long dark hair, her face pale behind the glass.

One hand is pressed flat against the window.

For a long moment, she and Aren look at each other across the lot.

Then she steps back, and the blinds fall shut.

Aren doesn't move.

He stands beside his car with his big arms hanging at his sides, staring up at the empty window, like a man who's been hit by something he never saw coming.

Out on the road, a red pickup truck is already gone, nothing left of it but a long trail of dust hanging in the hot air.

He hasn't let go of my hand since the freezer.

Not in the truck, with Vail's hands checking my fingers and toes and her voice saying mild hypothermia, lucky, so lucky, and not in the shower, where he held my hand against the tile while Pierce's blood ran pink down the drain.

And not now.

We're sitting on his bed facing each other, cross-legged, knees touching, the lamp turned down low.

The ceiling fan ticks around overhead.

I'm in his T-shirt.

He's in a pair of gray sweatpants and nothing else, his hair still damp, a white bandage wrapped around his right palm where the knife bit into him.

My fingertips are pink and tender, stinging every time the blood pushes back into them.

He takes my hands in both of his.

He cups them together, like he's holding a bird, and breathes on them, warm and slow.

Then he lifts his T-shirt off my shoulder and presses my hands flat against his bare chest, over his heart, and holds them there.

His skin is so warm it almost hurts.

I feel his heart under my palms, steady and strong.

Pierce's heart stopped under these same hands this morning.

It comes up out of me so fast I can't stop it.

A sob, then a sound I don't recognize, an animal sound, and I fold forward until my forehead hits his chest.

He doesn't say anything.

He doesn't tell me it's okay, or say he's sorry.