CHAPTER 31
WREN
There’s a morning, in the two days I have left, that I keep folded up small and take out sometimes even now, the way I kept the candlelit kitchen, a morning I had no right to and stole anyway, knowing what I was going to do with the end of it.
I wake and for once I’m not the one awake first. He’s already up, which should be impossible for a man who didn’t sleep for six years, except he sleeps now, he sleeps because I’m here, and apparently a body that’s caught up on six years of rest wakes early and restless and doesn’t know what to do with a morning that isn’t a cell.
I find him in my kitchen in the grey light, too big for the room, going through my cupboards with the quiet methodical attention he gives everything, learning where I keep things, and he’s made coffee, badly, far too strong, the coffee of a man who learned to make it in a place where strong was the only point of it.
“You don’t have enough food,” he says, by way of good morning.
Not a complaint. An observation he’s clearly been brooding on.
“One person’s worth. Less. You eat like someone who’s decided not to take up much space.
” He sets a mug in front of me, the chipped one, my one nice one, he’s already learned which is mine, and stands there with his own, watching me drink, and I understand that he is cataloguing me the way he catalogued the deputy, the way he catalogues everything, except the data he’s gathering on me isn’t how to threaten.
It’s how to keep her alive. How to make her take up more space.
What she needs that she’s trained herself not to ask for.
It should frighten me. A man who watches you that closely. It does, a little. But mostly it does the other thing, the thing I have no defense against, the thing that’s going to make tomorrow night so much harder than it needs to be.
We don’t talk about Silas. We’ve signed an unspoken truce on it for the length of the morning, both of us pretending, me lying, him hoping, that there’s a version of the next two days that ends with us in a kitchen instead of a burnt house.
He fixes the cabinet hinge that’s been broken since I moved in, the one I stopped seeing years ago, with tools he finds in a drawer and a competence that makes something ache behind my sternum, because of course he can fix it, he wanted to build bridges, he wanted to be a man who refused to let the gap win, and instead he learned to fix what he could reach inside the width of a cell and now he’s fixing my cabinet because it’s the only bridge left to build.
He doesn’t make a thing of it. He just stops the small wrongness in my house that I’d given up on, quietly, the way he stopped his father’s footsteps in a hallway, and moves on to the next one.
I watch him move through my little life like he’s always been in it.
Like there’s a version of the world where this is just Tuesday.
Where Lazarus Frost fixes the hinge and complains about my groceries and learns which mug is mine, and I go to the sanctuary and come home to him, and nobody is dead and nobody is in a cell and the snow outside is just snow.
“Stop looking at me like that,” he says, without turning around, because he always knows.
“Like what.”
“Like you’re memorizing it.” Now he does turn, and his face is doing the thing it almost never does, the unguarded thing I last saw by candlelight when I was sixteen, and it undoes me.
“Like it’s already over and you’re keeping it for later.
” He crosses the kitchen and takes my face in his hands, gentle, reading me, always reading me.
“It’s not over, Wren. We’re going to be standing in this kitchen in a week.
In a month. I’m going to learn to make the coffee the way you like it.
I’m going to fill this house up with food until you have to take up space.
We get the kitchen this time. Do you hear me? We get to keep the kitchen.”
And I lie to him with my whole body, the way I’ve learned to.
I lean into his hands, I let him believe it, I say “okay” and I make it sound like hope instead of grief, because I cannot tell him that I’ve already decided to spend the kitchen, to trade this exact morning and every morning it promises for the truth in a tape up a mountain, because if I tell him he’ll stop me, gently, lovingly, deciding for me one last time that I’m too precious to risk, and I will not let even his love be the last hand that decides my life.
So I steal the morning instead. I let him fix my hinge and pour his terrible coffee and make his impossible promises about a kitchen we’re never going to get, and I memorize all of it, the grey light, the too-strong coffee, the competent quiet of his hands, the way he says my name like it’s a thing he’s still amazed he’s allowed to hold, and I fold it up small and put it next to the candlelit kitchen, in the place where I keep the things I’m going to need to survive losing.
Because that’s what I am. That’s what the whole house made me, and the witness stand, and the six years.
A woman who knows, even inside the best morning of her life, that she’s going to have to live on the memory of it.
Who can’t taste a good thing without already grieving it. Who keeps the coal in both hands.
“Okay,” I say again, into his palm, and he smiles, and he believes me, and the snow comes down outside, patient, erasing the world, and somewhere up the hill a man’s machine is counting down to a night I’m already walking toward.
One more day.
I let him keep the morning. I’d already spent the rest.