Chapter 1 Reece #2
The way he always does. Not weighted, not a thing, not a moment. Just true. The way he has said it for six years.
“I love you,” I say.
I say it like I’ll say it tomorrow. Like I’ll say it next Wednesday. Like a man with a future. If I say it any other way he’ll hear it. He cannot hear it.
“I love you,” I say again.
He smiles. “Yeah. I know.”
He kisses my forehead. He pulls out, careful, slow. He gets up and goes to the bathroom. I hear water. I hear him rinse the condom and throw it away. I hear him brush his teeth. I lie on the couch and look at the ceiling and let myself, for one minute, let my face do whatever it’s going to do.
It does nothing. My face is still. I’m too tired to cry, or my body is saving it for later. I lie there.
He comes back with a wet washcloth. He cleans me off, gentle. Gets me a glass of water. Pulls a blanket off the back of the couch and tucks it around me. Kisses my mouth, briefly.
“Bed?”
“In a minute.”
“Don’t fall asleep on the couch.”
“I won’t.”
“You always do.”
“Not tonight.”
“Mm.” He kisses me again. “I’ll warm the bed up.”
He goes. I hear the small thump of his hip against the doorframe — the same thump I have heard for six years, because he doesn’t account for the angle. I close my eyes for one second.
Then I open them, because I do not have time to close them.
I clean up in the bathroom. I put on his sweatshirt, the gray one, mine now, that I’ll leave folded on the chair by the door because I cannot take anything from this apartment with me. Mendez was clear. Nothing. Not a photo. Not a shirt. Nothing.
I go to bed.
He’s on his side. The lamp is off. He pulls back the covers without opening his eyes.
I get in. He pulls me against his chest. His arm goes over my waist, his hand finds my hip.
His thumb moves once, twice, the small absent sweep, and stops.
He’s asleep inside a minute. He has always been able to sleep after sex. It’s one of the things about him.
I do not sleep.
I lie in our bed in the dark. His breath is slow and even against the back of my neck. His arm is heavy across my waist. I do not sleep. I do not cry. I do not move, because moving would wake him. If I wake him he’ll look at me and ask. And I’ll tell him.
If I tell him he’ll fight me. He’ll fight Mendez.
He’ll fight the FBI. He’ll fight every person who tries to take me from him.
He’ll lose. The people who are looking will use him to find me.
They’ll hurt him to find me. Mendez said it like that, this afternoon, in the voice he uses when he isn’t being kind.
They will hurt him to get to you, Reece.
That is what these people do. You do not get to bring him.
I do not get to bring him.
Three weeks ago I sat at our kitchen table at three in the morning and tried to write him a letter.
Back when I still thought I might be coming back in six months.
I wrote it twice. Crossed it out twice. He never knew.
He has never known. The kitchen table is six feet from the bedroom door.
He was asleep on the other side of it. I was sitting at our table writing him a letter, and he never woke up.
I tore the pages into squares and ran them under the faucet until the ink dissolved.
I lie in our bed and I memorize him. The weight of his arm.
The temperature of his skin against my back.
The smell of his hair against my neck — the shampoo with the green label that I have bought for him for two years because he forgets to.
His hand on my hip. The thumb. The way one of his legs is between mine. His knee against the back of my knee.
The clock by the bed says 11:47.
I have until five.
I lie in the dark and I memorize him and I do not cry. I’m holding the way I haven’t cried very carefully.
At three-fifteen I get up.
I get up in inches. I lift his arm a half-centimeter at a time. I slide out from under it. I replace the space my body has been with a pillow. He shifts. He sighs. He pulls the pillow against his chest. He doesn’t wake.
I stand by the bed in the dark.
I look at him. His mouth has come open, the way it does when he’s deeply asleep.
The small line between his eyebrows is there even sleeping.
The freckle behind his left ear that I’ve known for six years.
Nobody else in the world is ever going to know about it.
It was just him and me, and he doesn’t even know about it. So it’s just me.
I bend down. I do not kiss him. If I kiss him he’ll half-wake. He’ll mumble my name. I will not get out of this room. I lean my forehead against the side of his head, where I can smell his hair, and I breathe in once. Twice. Three times.
I straighten up. I leave the bedroom.
I do not turn on the lights. I have moved through this apartment in the dark for two years. I know the chair I’ll hit my hip on if I cut the corner too tight. I know the rug that bunches up by the kitchen door. I know the third floorboard from the bathroom that creaks. I avoid them all.
I get dressed in the kitchen. The clothes I packed are in the bottom of the laundry hamper, in a plastic bag, where he wouldn’t have looked.
I put them on at the counter in the dark.
I do not look at the things in the kitchen.
The mug he uses. The dishrag he leaves balled up on the edge of the sink the way I have asked him a hundred times not to.
If I look at any of it I’ll sit down on the floor and not get up.
The bag is in the front hall closet, behind his coats. I pull it out. It’s the smallest bag I’ve ever packed. Mendez told me what to bring. The list was three items long. I bring the three items.
I put on my shoes by the door. I pick up the bag. I open the front door.
The hallway light is on, the way it always is, the building bulb that never goes off. The carpet smell. The faint old-cigarette smell from two doors down. I have hated this hallway for two years. I would give anything to walk it every day for the rest of my life.
I step into the hallway. I turn back to the doorway. I look in one more time.
The corner of the couch I can see from here.
The blanket still bunched up from earlier.
The cushion still indented where my body was.
Three rooms away, in the dark, a man is asleep with a pillow against his chest. He’s going to wake up at six and reach for me.
He’s going to find the pillow. He’s going to call my name into the apartment.
The apartment is going to give him nothing back.
No note. Nothing on the counter. Nothing on the bathroom mirror.
Nothing folded into his coat pocket. Mendez was clear about that too.
The tears come.
I had not let them. Hadn’t let them for thirteen hours. I let them now because they are coming whether I let them or not. They come down my face in two clean lines. I do not move to wipe them. I do not make a sound.
I open my mouth.
“Goodbye.”
I say it quiet. I say it to him, asleep, three rooms away, who will not hear it. I say it to the apartment. I say it to the version of me lived here. I say it because if I don’t say it once, out loud, I’m going to carry it the rest of my life as the thing I did not say. I have enough of those.
“Goodbye, Griffin.”
I close the door. I close it slow, with both hands, so the latch does not click loud enough to wake him. I close it until the seam disappears.
I take my hand off the knob.
I turn. I walk down the hall. I do not look back.
I go down the stairs and out the front door of the building.
The street is empty. The sky over the buildings across the way is starting, just barely, to go gray.
The car is at the corner where Mendez said it would be.
The driver doesn’t look at me. I get in.
I put the bag at my feet. The driver pulls away from the curb without a word.
I look out the back window. Our building gets smaller. The light in our bedroom does not come on. He won’t wake up for two more hours.
The car turns onto the avenue. The building goes out of sight. I face forward. I put my hands flat on my thighs.
I do not cry anymore. The two lines are drying on my face. I do not wipe them. Let them dry.
I close my eyes.
The car drives.