Chapter 6
Declan
She's been here four days, and I've seen her face maybe six times.
Not because she stays in her room. She doesn't. She moves through the brownstone constantly—I can track her by the soft pad of her footsteps, the small displacement of air when she passes through a room.
But she times herself around me. When I'm in the kitchen, she's in the hallway.
When I come down the stairs, she's already gone.
She eats after I eat. Uses the bathroom after she hears my bedroom door close.
She’s like a ghost who haunts my house, leaving as small an impression as possible. She behaves as though she's running a calculation about how much space a person is allowed to occupy before they owe something for it.
I expected this behavior to an extent. The habit of smallness. A reflex worn so smooth by years of use that she probably doesn't know she's doing it.
What I didn't expect are her nightly habits.
She leaves.
She always comes back, but every night, past midnight, she slips out the front door and walks the neighborhood.
I know this because I'm always watching.
The feed from the exterior cameras shows her pulling the door shut with a careful, near-silent precision, then heading east toward the lakefront.
Hands in her pockets. Head down. No destination.
Corcoran, one of the two men I put on her rotation, tracks her on foot at a far enough distance she doesn't notice. He texts me updates.
Last night she walked to the lake, sat on a bench for a while, then walked home. The night before last, she went into a twenty-four-hour diner, ordered coffee, sat for two hours, and left without incident. Once, she circled the same eight-block radius three times, then came home.
She's not meeting anyone. Not scoping exit routes or gathering resources. She's walking. Moving through the dark like she can't get comfortable inside four walls.
Four walls probably feel like a trap to someone who's spent years on the streets.
I don't tell her I know. I don't tell her about Corcoran. I allow it, because what's the alternative—lock her in? She’s not a prisoner.
What I do instead is adjust.
I’ve started eating later, so she can have the kitchen in the late afternoon without navigating around me.
I announce myself when coming down the stairs—a cleared throat, a deliberate footfall—instead of moving the way I normally move, which is quiet by training.
I no longer carry my weapon openly inside the house.
The holster goes under my jacket or stays in the bedroom, because I noticed the way her eyes cut to it the first time she saw it on the kitchen counter.
Small modifications. I just want her to become more comfortable here.
I'm in my office working through warehouse logs when I hear the shower run. Her routine is reliable. Every late afternoon, she showers for about twenty minutes.
I take the stairs quietly and enter her bedroom. I don't know what I'm doing snooping like this. I don't know what I'm looking for, just something to help me understand my wife, the stranger who lives with me.
I find both the closet and the dresser drawers empty. My eyes catch on her duffel bag in a corner just under the window. It looks full. She hasn't unpacked her things?
But actually…
The bag looks larger than when she arrived.
That catches my attention. She came with almost nothing. Now the bag bulges. Does she think she’s stealing?
I shake my head. She doesn’t get it. Stealing implies a lack of ownership. As my wife, everything in this house belongs to her. She doesn’t need to steal what’s already hers.
Reilly's on Milwaukee is the only pawnshop in a four-block radius. I’ll give the old man a call and tell him to offer her three times the value for any item she brings in, and tell him I’ll cover the cost.
I crouch beside the bag and unzip it.
What I see floors me.
There are no valuables inside. No silver, no electronics, nothing with any resale value to speak of.
I stare at the contents for a long time.
Granola bars. Packets of trail mix. Protein bars. Small, portable, high-calorie food items with long shelf lives.
She's stockpiling.
This is another response to living on the streets.
She must be building a go-bag the way she's probably built several go-bags in her life, getting ready for the moment this arrangement falls apart, and she has to survive again with nothing.
I stay crouched over the bag for a long moment. This is a trauma response that comes from knowing what true hunger is.
A feeling I can't name spreads through me—not anger, more like grief. Every single day, my wife must wake up expecting this life to be ripped away from her.
Not wanting to get caught snooping, I quickly zip the bag back up and leave it at exactly the same angle and in the same position as when I found it.
I’m heading back toward my office when the bathroom door opens, and Saoirse takes a few steps forward, followed by a cloud of steam.
The hallway is narrow—built in 1920, when people were apparently smaller, or at least someone wearing only a towel wasn’t expected to share a corridor with someone whose shoulders span half the available space.
The geometry is awkward, and we both stop.
She’s close enough that I can see a water droplet trailing from her hair down her temple to her jawline.
The awkwardness continues. Then, we both turn sideways slightly and attempt to shimmy past one another.
My arm brushes hers. Bare skin—she’s in a towel, I’m in a T-shirt—and the quarter-second of contact sends a jolt up my arm that registers in my teeth. Her skin is warm.
She looks up at me. The height difference is extreme in this space. Her chin lifts. Her face angles up to find my eyes, and the movement exposes her throat. The line of it. The hollow where her pulse undulates quickly.
Her lips part, but no words emerge.
My hand twitches at my side. Whether it’s trying to move toward her or away from her, I don’t know.
Finally, she slips past, and I hear her exhale—a long, controlled release, the sound of someone resetting their nervous system after a near-miss.
I remain in the hallway, the warmth of her still surrounding me, with my jaw locked hard enough to ache.
An hour later, I find her standing at the kitchen counter with a glass of water she isn't drinking. I pull an envelope from my jacket pocket and set it on the counter beside her, then put a credit card down next to it.
She stares at both without touching them.
"That's twelve hundred dollars cash," I say. “There’s plenty more whenever you need it. The card has a fifty thousand dollar a month limit."
Her gaze comes up to mine, confused but guarded.
"I don't need—"
“Maybe not.” I hold her gaze and keep my voice level. "Take it anyway. You're my wife. My wife doesn't walk around this city without money. It's not up for negotiation."
She looks down at the envelope. Her fingers don't move toward it.
I tap the card once. Twice. "If something happens to me, that card keeps working. The account it draws from is in your name as well as mine. You could walk out that door right now and never come back, and it would still work."
Something moves across her face—not warmth, not gratitude. A sharp, rapid reassessment, the way a chess player looks at a board when a piece moves somewhere they didn't predict.
"I'm not trying to buy you," I say, because I can see the thought forming. "You're already my wife. I’m simply explaining the reality of our situation.”
Her hand moves, slowly, and her fingers close around the envelope.
She doesn't say thank you. She doesn't say anything.
But after she picks up the credit card too, I leave.
In the hallway, I stop to look back. She's still at the counter, and she's looking at the money and the credit card with an expression I've never seen on her face before.
Not relief. She's looking at it the way a person looks at something they've stopped believing existed.
I move before she notices me watching, striding up the stairs and into my room, where I pull out my phone and open my grocery app.
I select protein bars, two types, the dense kind. Peanut butter, the large jar. Mixed nuts. Crackers, three varieties. Dried fruit. Jerky. Individual oat packets. Shelf-stable items that keep well, travel well, and don't need refrigeration. I add them all to my standing order, and close the app.
I don’t intend to say anything about her food stash. I’ll just make sure the pantry is stocked so she can pack her duffel with whatever she wants.