Chapter 18 Maren #2
We fell asleep in a tangle that would have horrified a chiropractor, Brady's arm heavy across my waist, my cheek on Thomas's shoulder, Damian's hand loose around my ankle like he was keeping track of me even unconscious.
A few days later, I woke late at night to a house that was quiet in the wrong way.
The bedroom door across the hall stood ajar, the bed behind it untouched. Downstairs, a line of light showed under the door of what used to be my wine cellar and was now, after two days of cables and quiet swearing, something else entirely.
I went down barefoot. Damian sat in the glow of three monitors mounted where the wine racks used to be, the package from the studio gate in an evidence sleeve at his elbow. He didn't startle when I came in.
"You should be asleep," he said.
"So should you. When did you last sleep?"
"I wanted you to sleep."
"That's not what I asked, Damian."
He looked at me for a moment, then turned the right-hand monitor toward me instead of answering, which was its own answer.
Photographs filled the screen in a grid.
My front gate. My car at the studio. The bookshop on Larchmont.
The restaurant window, gold light, the four of us leaning together.
Thomas's hand on a gearshift. Brady in a grocery checkout line, laughing at something.
Damian carrying bags from my car last week, jaw set, unaware.
Then one near the bottom, and my hand came up over my mouth before I could stop it.
"That's my father's funeral. He was there!"
"Across the street." Damian's voice stayed level, the way it did when the thing underneath it wasn't. "He's been documenting you for years, Maren.
And for the last four days, I've been taking his eyes off you.
Every account he hid behind? They've gone dark one at a time. The last one went dark tonight."
I stared at the grid of my own life, photographed by a stranger, and felt the cold try to come up through the floor.
"He was never going to get to you," Damian said. "Understand that. To do it, he'd have had to stop my breathing first. That isn't a romantic statement. That's just the mechanics of how it ends."
I crossed the little room and kissed him. He made a low sound and his hand came up into my hair, careful.
Then I pulled the second chair over and sat down beside him and put my head on his shoulder, and the monitors hummed, and that's the last thing I remembered.
I woke in my own bed at sunrise with his jacket over me and no memory of being carried. I found him in the kitchen, still upright, which by then I considered a war crime.
I made his tea. "Milk first," I said, handing it over.
"Thank you." He held the mug like he wasn't sure of the protocol for receiving instead of giving.
I sat across from him. "Can I ask you something? What was it like, moving in with Thomas's family when you were a teen? At sixteen."
He was quiet long enough that I thought he might not answer.
"They used my name," he said. "Not off a form. Eleanor just knew it. You don't notice how many adults check the paperwork before they say your name until one doesn't."
"And the rest of it?"
"Every morning I woke up certain that was the day." He turned the mug a quarter turn. "The day they'd figure out what the other houses had figured out."
"Which was what?"
"That I was unlovable. That the whole thing was a long joke, and the punchline was coming, and they'd be tired of pretending by dinner.
" He said it flatly, like a date in a report.
"The day never came. Having Thomas helped, since a brother is evidence.
Hard to argue with evidence at the table every night. "
"Oh, Damian…"
"I'd been waiting since I was twelve for someone to tell me I could put something on a wall and the thing would stay," he said.
"It finally happened in that house. They adopted me.
The wall stayed." He looked up from the mug, and there it was, the thing he'd been carrying down in that glowing room for four days.
"Sometimes I'm afraid your house is the tenth placement. "
He held my eyes and didn't flinch, which I understood was the hardest thing he'd done all week.
"Then hear me say it plainly," I said, "because you're a man who likes things confirmed twice. This house is the last one. There's no form. There's no review period. I'm not a placement, Damian. I'm a person, and I'm keeping you."
His eyes went glassy, and he looked down at the tea like it had betrayed him.
"Okay," I said, standing, taking his hand. "Bed. Right now. You're a security risk to yourself and a menace to my electric bill."
He let me lead him up the stairs, which told me everything about how tired he was. He lay down. I climbed in behind him and wrapped my arm over his ribs and pressed a kiss to the back of his neck.
"Everyone in this house knows you care about us," I said into his skin. "You don't have to bleed sleep to prove it, and you don’t have to prove that you’re worthy of love. The caring shows up other ways. It shows up in mugs."
A breath went out of him, long, like a rope going slack. "Okay," he murmured.
"Sleep, Damian."
He nodded. Within a minute his breathing went long and even, the corpse hands unfolded for once, and I lay there holding the man who watched over all of us.
For once, I got to be the one who watched.