Chapter 16
Carrie
Finding Mason's apartment was easier than it should have been.
Location tags on team photos, a cross-reference with a fan account, and I had an address in twenty minutes.
The media strategist in me would have been appalled at the security lapse.
The desperate woman with a dog and a crumbling conscience was grateful for it.
Mason opened the door and his face told me everything. He didn't need to say a word. The hatred was right there, settled in like it had been practicing.
"You've got some nerve showing up here."
"I know."
"He told me everything. About you. About what you did. About how you set him up like a mark."
Bob pressed against my leg, sensing the temperature. I kept my voice level. Professional. Even though the professional was the part of me that had caused this.
"I didn't know they were using me, Mason. I thought I was arranging a meeting. I didn't know about the photos or the plan to tank his reputation."
He stared at me for a long beat. Reading me the way teammates read each other, looking for the tell, the false note.
"You really didn't know?"
"I found out when my boss called to congratulate me and told me to check Twitter. That's when I saw what I'd helped them do."
He leaned against the doorframe. Arms crossed. Not inviting me in, but not shutting the door.
"So what do you want?"
"I want to talk to him. Explain. Apologize." I swallowed. The honesty was the hard bit, always. "I want him not to hate me."
"Back in your bed?"
Heat climbed my neck. "It's not just that."
"But it's part of it."
"Yes. It's part of it. All of it. I want the whole thing back and I know I don't deserve any of it and I'm asking anyway."
Mason studied me. Bob wagged his tail between us, radiating the boundless optimism of a creature who thought all conversations ended in treats.
"You really hurt him," Mason said. Not accusing anymore. Just stating. "He doesn't let people in. Ever. And you got in, and then you blew the door off the hinges."
"I know."
He sighed. Long. Like he was about to do something he'd regret.
"If I give you his address, you didn't get it from me."
"Understood."
He gave me the address. Then, as I turned to leave, he called after me.
"For what it's worth? He could use someone who actually gives a damn about him instead of what he can do for them. Don't make me wrong about you."
* * *
Matt's neighborhood was everything mine wasn't. Tree-lined streets, historic brownstones, the kind of quiet that costs money. His building was beautiful in that old-Boston way that made my leaky apartment feel like a dorm room.
He wasn't home.
I buzzed twice. Nothing. And because I had apparently decided that today was the day I would abandon every remaining shred of dignity, I sat on his front steps with Bob and waited.
An hour passed. Two. Bob dozed with his head on my lap while I stared at the parking lot and rehearsed openings I knew wouldn't work. My ankle ached against the cold stone. My phone was dying. The rational part of my brain had filed a formal objection and been overruled.
At three hours, I reached for the leash to leave.
Matt's car pulled in.
My heart kicked so hard I felt it in my throat. He climbed out looking exhausted and hollowed, nothing like the man I'd met at the gas station, and the distance between who he'd been that night and who I'd helped make him was a distance I was going to have to live with.
He saw me. Stopped.
Bob's tail started going, pulling at the leash, whining to get to his favorite person.
Matt's expression hardened. "You need to leave."
"Five minutes."
"I don't have five minutes for you."
"Matt, please. You don't know the whole story."
"I know enough."
He was at the steps now, close enough for me to see the dark circles, the jaw tension, the careful distance he was holding like a man who'd learned what happened when he let me too close.
And I understood that the argument from my doorstep wasn't going to work again.
He'd heard my defense already. He'd weighed it. I wasn't going to talk my way back in.
So I said the other thing.
"I'm taking Bob to a shelter."
Matt stopped with his key halfway to the lock.
"What?"
"I can't keep him. I thought I could, but with the job, everything that's happened, the hours, the guilt, I'm not showing up for him the way he needs. He sits at the door and waits for me and I come home too late and too broken to be what he deserves."
My voice cracked on the last word and I let it. I was done performing.
"Don't do that," Matt said.
"I don't have a choice."
"There's always a choice."
"Then tell me what it is, because I am fresh out."
He looked down at Bob. The dog was leaning against Matt's leg, chin up, that golden-retriever adoration radiating from every cell.
"I'll take him."
Something in my chest gave way. Not surprise. Recognition. Of course he would. Of course, even while hating me, he'd still reach out for the one thing that needed him. That was who Matt was. Good past the point where it made strategic sense.
"Okay," I said. "Thank you."
I held out the leash. The blue one with the paw prints. The one he'd bought.
He reached for it. Our fingers met over the leather and I held on. Not pulling. Just holding. Long enough to look him in the eye. Long enough to feel the warmth of his hand and know it was the last time I'd have it.
"I swear to you," I said. "If I had known what they were planning, if I had known it would hurt you like this, I never would have done it."
His fingers tightened around the leash. Around my hand. And for one second, one half-second, his eyes softened. Something moved behind the wall, quick and unguarded, and my whole chest ached with the nearness of what we might have been if I hadn't blown it up.
Then he pulled away.
"Goodbye, Carrie."
He walked inside with Bob. The door closed with a soft click that went through me like a blade. Bob looked back at me once through the glass. Tail still going. Not understanding.
I stood on the steps and watched the door and let myself feel it. The full, specific weight of handing over the two things I'd come to love in this city and watching them both disappear into a building I couldn't follow them into.
Then I walked to my car. Got in. Sat there.
The driver's seat still had golden fur on it from the ride over.
I picked a single strand off the console and held it between my fingers and looked at the building where Matt had gone with the dog I'd rescued and the leash he'd bought and the last shred of something that had been, for one night in a rainstorm, the most real thing in my life.
I drove away.