Page 132

I close the distance. Half a block. A few houses.

“Tessa.”

She spins around.

“What?”

It comes out of her like a slap. Her face is red from the cold, and her eyes are bright and hard, and for half a second, I don’t know if it’s for me. I stop where I am on the sidewalk ten feet back.

I hold out the coat.

“You forgot this.”

She stares at it. Then at me. Then back at the coat, hanging off my arm, with the wrong-colored thread on the cuff.

“What the fuck?” she says, and I don’t think I’ve heard her swear in weeks.

“You left it.”

“How did you—”

She stops. I watch her get there. Her eyes go to the phone in her own hand.

“You were checking my location?”

“Yeah.” I don’t say anything else. I don’t say sorry because I’m not sorry.

“Why?”

“You left a party without your coat,” I say. “It’s fifteen degrees out.”

She looks at me for a long second. Her jaw is tight. Her arms are shaking. I can see the goosebumps from here. Then she snatches the coat off my arm and shoves her arms into it, hard, one and then the other, and yanks the zipper up to her chin.

“Thanks,” she says. It isn’t warm. It isn’t anything. She turns around and starts walking again, just as fast as before.

I stand there for a second.

Then I walk, too.

She hears me. She doesn’t turn around. “You don’t have to walk with me.”

“I know.”

And I keep walking.

I stay a step behind her and a little to the side. Not close. Just there. We go past the bike racks and the dark windows of a house where everybody’s already gone home, and the only sounds are our shoes on the sidewalk and the snow coming down so quiet it doesn’t make any noise at all.

Her jaw is tight. She’s got her phone still in her fist, inside the coat pocket now. Every few steps, she shakes her head, like she’s arguing with somebody who isn’t here.

“What happened?” I ask.

“Nothing.”

I let it go. I don’t push. I just walk.

Half a block. The corner. The light turns red with nobody at it, and she stops at it anyway, the way she does everything, by the rules.

She stands there at the crosswalk with her hands in her pockets and her breath going up white.