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The word delivered comes up under it and sits there. I watch it for ten seconds, twenty, and the status doesn't change, and I think of my own question spending a night and a day at delivered while I bargained with a phone in an empty apartment, and how she answered it anyway, in person, in a warehouse, with her mouth. Fair is fair. She can leave me at delivered until two o'clock. I've already decided what I'll believe.

Then I do the part doctrine still gets to keep. I strip the case off the phone, crack the back, and send it end over end off the parapet and into the river, which has never once testified. No recall now, and no bargaining with a screen in the dark. I sent a place and a time to the only person alive who can put marshals on it, and the version of me that ran the last decade is down there sinking with the SIM, appalled at what I've become.

The Pinnacle hisses across the water, steam where the streams are winning, and the smoke banner has gone the color of slate, which means the fire is losing its grip on Carrow's paper right on schedule, late enough that nothing in those cabinets will ever testify for him again. Tomorrow, the relief tours will walk it in daylight. Maybe hers. She'll stand in my last fire with a hook in her hands and my name in her chest, and whatever she decides at two o'clock tonight, I'll have looked her in the eye first and told her the one thing the confession left out.

I pick up the bags. The shoebox shifts inside the go-bag, half a pound of girl against my spine as I swing it on, and I take one more look at the skyline, the burning tower, the lit city finding out at last what it's made of.

“We got them,” I tell her, and the wind takes it toward the fire. “Now watch me try to keep one.”

I go down the fire escape fast, and at the bottom I turn away from the glow, toward the south channel, toward water and a boathouse and two o'clock, walking out of eleven years the same as I walked into them, alone.

I have two more hours of alone left in me. Then we'll see.

25

DANI

At one in the morning, I tuck my phone under the couch cushion with the TV murmuring over it, in an apartment arranged to say the woman who lives there fell asleep to the news, and I go out the building's back stairs into the alley, already guilty of whatever they end up calling this.

I read her message four times and then deleted the thread, and the address is in my head now, where no warrant reaches. Wexford Marine, past the grain pier, the last dock, two o'clock. Across the river, the Pinnacle is still working, the glow gone from orange to a sullen red over the rooftops, and the sirens carry over the water the whole drive south, one box after another, relief companies and medics and the long grind of a city putting out the last fire Zara Delaney will ever light in it. If I believe her. I park the truck at an all-night diner eight blocks from the channel, order a coffee I leave full on the counter for cover, and walk.

I walk it like a search pattern, because that's the walking I know. Two blocks past the turn, double back, stand in a doorway and give the street time to make a mistake. Nothing moves but a cat and a newspaper truck. The boatyard comes up out of the dark past the grain pier right where she said, a sagging chain-link fence, a gravel lot of hulls on stands wearing winter canvas, an office shack with rose bushes planted in cut-down barrels, roses, of all things, in a place like this, and beyond it all the docks reaching out into black water. I stand in the shadow of the grain pier for twenty minutes, watching the gate, the fence line, the road. If they owned my phone, they're better than me and it's already over. Nobody comes. Either Val's people are slower than her reputation, or the only person who knows where I am is the arsonist.

The boathouse at the end of the last dock is a long wooden barn over the water, doors shut, one judas gate standing a hand's width open. I slip through it into the smell of diesel and cedar dust and river, and the dark inside is total for three heartbeats before a shape moves against the lesser dark of the water gate and says my name, quiet, like a hand held out.

“Dani.”

“I'm here.”

A battery lantern comes up to its lowest setting, a coin of amber light that barely reaches the rafters. There's a workboat moored inside the house, an old wooden launch with its canvas peeled half back, and beside it, standing on the duckboards with her hands visible at her sides again, the warehouse courtesy, is Zara. Dark clothes, hair tied back, two days of running on her face, her eyes ruined and steady at once. The go-bag and the duffel sit by the launch like luggage for a life I'm not in.

“You came,” she says.

“You doubted me?” I ask.

“I made myself doubt it.” Her mouth moves, not a smile, the failed start of one. “Believing was too expensive.”

The boathouse breathes around us, water moving under the duckboards, a halyard ticking against a mast somewhere outside in the wind. Two nights ago, I walked out of a warehouse and left her standing in the ash. She let me go then. She's standing apart now, letting me decide all over again.

“You were supposed to be gone.” I come down the duckboards slowly, and my heart is going like a fast attack line charging, and I let it. “You had a head start, a boat and a city looking the wrong direction. Every hour you're still here is an hour somebody can take you away from me in handcuffs. So tell me why I'm standing in a boathouse, Zara.”

“Because I got to the dock,” she says, “with everything I own on my back and the ebb three hours out, and I stood there looking at the boat, and I couldn't make my legs want it. Eleven years I've been able to leave anywhere in forty minutes. Tonight, I couldn't leave at all. Not without saying to your face the one thing I kept back in that warehouse.” She doesn't move toward me. She makes me hear it standing apart, with nothing touching, so I can't mistake it for just wanting. “I love you. That's it. I burned five buildings and I love you, and only one of those was ever a secret.”

The sirens find their range across the water while I stand there with it. Here's what I know, in the place where I know how buildings will fall. She's guilty. I stopped being able to pretend otherwise weeks ago, somewhere between a floorboard and a confession. Tonight, I watched her finale paint my skyline red. I don't believe she's innocent and I never will again.

She’s guilty.

And I love her anyway.

Both things are true. I've stopped waiting for one of them to break.

“I asked you for everything you'd done,” I say. “You answered like a lawyer.”

“I answered like a coward.” Her chin comes up. “This is the correction.”

I cross the duckboards and take her face in both hands and kiss her. There's no accusation in it this time, no brick at anyone's back, no glow through a torn roof. It tastes like river cold and salt where her tears have already started, and she makes a small wrecked sound against my mouth. Then her arms come around me like a rescue, and we stand there on the boards holding on while the city across the water hoses down everything she used to be.

I pull back, leaving the barest space between our lips. “I don't want to lose you,” I say into her jaw, and it comes out broken. “That's my whole inventory. I'm furious and I'm wrecked and I can't make any of it bigger than that one thing.”