Page 40

"It's okay, Bean." His voice through the door. Muffled. The voice I've memorized in every intonation, and hearing it through wood instead of through a phone speaker is new. The vibration traveling through the door and into my chest.

The deadbolt turns, and the handle clicks. It feels like forever before the door opens four inches.

One eye, half his face, a gray shirt, exhaustion etched into the lines of hire forehead. He's looking through the gap with one eye and the eye is terrified. October 31. His door is open. Every cell in his body is screaming to close it.

Then the eye focuses. The terror reorganizes. I watch it happen in real time, the pupil adjusting, the lid widening, the face behind the chain shifting from fear to confusion to the thing I came here for.

Recognition.

"You." The word comes out on an exhale.

"Hey." One word. My voice. Not the phone voice. The in-person voice, the one he's heard twice at a coffee shop, the baritone without the speaker compression, the fullness that only exists in proximity.

Finally, the door opens.

He's standing in the doorway. Gray shirt, sweatpants, bare feet, Bean at his ankles, her body trying to push past his legs. This is the first time I'm seeing him see me standing tall. The full face, the mouth, the eyes, dark and wet and looking at me with something that doesn't have a name yet.

"What are you doing here? How… did you find me?" His voice is shaking. Not with fear. The shake is coming from somewhere else, somewhere lower.

"I live on Birch." The lie is smooth. "Two blocks over. I was walking past and saw you walking with Bean, and yeah, kind of creepy but I followed you because you caught my eye at the coffee shop.” The pause is deliberate. Engineered to read as genuine. "I don't know. I stood outside for a while, thinking how crazy this is, but then I just knocked."

"You just knocked." He repeats it. His hand is on the door frame. His knuckles are white. "On Halloween."

"I can go."

"No." The word is fast and forceful. His hand leaves the door frame. Bean pushes through the gap, nose on my boots, my jeans, her tail in wide arcs. He looks down at Bean, then back at me. The wetness in his eyes catches the hallway light. "No. Don't go."

I step inside. The apartment I've been inside before, in the dark, when his body was unconscious. The lights are off, but my eyes adjust fast. The couch. The kitchen counter. The candle, cedar and sage, the nub burned almost flat.

He closes the door behind me. The deadbolt turns, the handle clicks, two tests and turn he turns. The ritual that means safety. And now I'm inside the safety with him.

"How did you know which apartment?"

"Your name on the mailbox downstairs."

"I never told you my name."

"You did. At Groundwork."

He's reaching for it through the fog of fourteen hours of Halloween panic. Finding it.

"Right," he says. "I did."

Four feet between us, Bean at my feet. The apartment smells the way it smelled nights ago. Cedar. Dog. The sweetness of a person who showers before bed.

"I'm going to say something," I tell him. "And I need you to hear it before you react."

His body goes still.

"My name is Brantley."

The word enters the room and changes the pressure. His mouth opens and his eyes go wide. The recognition from the doorway was the first wave. This is the second.

"Brantley." His voice is shaky. "The coffee shop. The whole time... The coffee shop was you."

"Yes."

"You said Groundwork had the best outdoor table." The sentences are coming fast now, the editor's brain pulling threads, the chronology reconstructing itself in real time. "You told me about Groundwork. On the phone. And then you were there."