Chapter 20
When you agree to go home with someone, it’s reasonable to assume you’ll end up in their bed, or at least at their house. Instead, I found myself at O’Hare International while Alaric carried my bag across a patch of iced-over tarmac.
The time was some hour that didn’t make sense—late enough that Chicago’s haze looked lavender, early enough that the airport was lit by overheads. Tiredly, I glanced at Alaric. His eyes were forward, trained on the private car waiting for us at the edge of a hanger, engine running.
I yawned so hard my jaw cracked. “When you agreed that we were going home, I thought you meant your house outside of Alenbach, not my apartment in Chicago.”
Alaric didn’t react much, just a faint curve of his lips that wasn’t reflected in his eyes.
He looked, if anything, even more tired than I was, but instead of manifesting as droopy eyelids or the slouch of defeat, it tightened his features to a glacial smoothness.
He held my hand with a grip that felt too tight, but I didn’t complain.
During the plane ride, he’d let me nap on his chest. But as soon as we’d landed, it was all business.
The car we approached was a black Lincoln. As we reached the curb, Alaric opened the back door for me. “Here you go.”
I slid into the back seat and accepting my bag from Alaric, clutching it on my lap. Alaric leaned in, pressed a kiss to my forehead, then pulled back and looked at me for a moment.
“Sleep if you can,” he said, then closed the door.
I nodded and closed my eyes, expecting him to circle the car, to get in on the other side. The engine shifted into gear, and we rolled forward. My eyes flew open because I realized I never heard the sound of Alaric opening the car door to climb inside. Glancing around, I realized I was alone.
The Lincoln traveled up a ramp, through a security gate. I craned my neck to see if Alaric was following, but there was no one, no car behind us. He’d vanished into the night.
I let my head loll against the seat rest, stared forward, and tried to make sense of it.
“Excuse me,” I leaned forward to address the driver. “Where is—where is Mr. Jordan?”
The driver flicked his eyes up, then back to the highway. “You’re Miss Alison Weston, right?”
“That’s right.”
“I don’t know anyone named Mr. Jordan, miss. I was hired to pick up just you.”
I frowned. “The man with me earlier, did you speak to him? Did he say where he was going?”
The driver shook his head. “He just said to take you home safe.”
Frowning, I pulled out my phone, then realized I didn’t have Alaric’s number. I didn’t even know if his phone had a normal phone number, or if he only communicated via encrypted signal flares. It was also the middle of the night, which ruled out calling anyone else for his number.
I let the phone fall to my lap, flexed my fingers, and closed my eyes again. My tired brain told me to relax. He’s probably on his way in a different car. He probably had to deal with private-jet matters. Calm down.
When I next opened my eyes, we were on the Kennedy.
I sat up, squinting. The city’s lights bleeding through the tinted windows, flashing by in streaks of sodium orange and blue.
I watched the familiar landmarks roll past: the industrial parks, the illuminated towers, the curve of the river as it cut a path through concrete and steel.
The driver took the route I would’ve chosen, no detours, no strange stops.
I was alone in the car, but it didn’t feel like solitude so much as a forced intermission, a holding pattern until the next act.
Again, I considered texting someone for Alaric’s number. Maybe Renee?
But no. It was very late. It wouldn’t be appropriate or kind to wake her just for a phone number. If I waited patiently, I’d see him soon.
We hit a stretch of road I knew intimately.
My neighborhood, which always looked ugly and cold from the outside, but which felt, for better or worse, like mine.
The driver, who hadn’t spoken a word since the airport, pulled up to my brownstone a half hour after the last vestiges of fatigue had abandoned me.
The engine idled, an ambient thrum that filled the dead space between us, and I became aware of just how awake I was.
So awake I could count the streetlights reflecting off the salt-streaked hood.
He turned and offered a ghost of a smile. “Have a good night, Miss Weston.”
I reached for the door handle, then hesitated. “Thank you,” I said, and tried to read in his expression any hint that he might be in on the joke, that this was all part of a script Alaric had left for him, some elaborate prelude to a surprise party. But the man was as impassive as airport carpet.
Holding my bag, I stepped into the street, the wind flattening my jacket against my arms. The house looked exactly the same as when I’d left it, but now it seemed to loom, the top two floors receding into the yellow mist of streetlight while the basement blinked its tiny security light, the color of an emergency exit sign in a Soviet bunker.
There was no sign of Alaric. Or anyone, for that matter.
I felt foolish standing there, and the feeling metastasized when I realized I’d been hoping he’d pop out from behind the stoop or text me the second I arrived.
Instead, the only company was the hunched-over postal carrier braving the night shift, his bag slapping his hip as he trudged up the block.
I squared my shoulders and trudged up the steps, hating how automatic it all felt.
The familiar choreography: punch in the door code (I’d never gotten around to customizing it from the default), listen for the soft click, shoulder the door open.
Inside, the foyer was so dark that for a second I thought the power had gone out, but as my eyes adjusted, I made out the dim shapes of the mail bins, the smeared tile, the metal security grate that led down to my unit.
I was halfway across the tiny lobby when the building’s other main feature—its absolute lack of privacy—asserted itself. The door to the first floor apartment banged open, and out came a woman bundled in more layers than a lasagna, head down, keys already in hand. We nearly collided.
“Oh—sorry!” I said, my voice sounding too loud in the cavernous silence.
She startled, her face lost somewhere between “just mug me” and “I’m late to my job at the ER.” Her gaze flicked from my face to the duffel to my boots, then back up to my face.
I waved, which seemed to make it worse.
She offered a bland, “Hi,” then clomped out the door.
It took me a second to register the subtext: she didn’t recognize me at all.
I’d lived in this building for six years.
I owned this building. The whole thing. I’d seen her plenty of times.
And yet, clearly, she had no idea who I was.
I found this not even slightly surprising, but the realization left a hollow in my chest.
I watched her through the glass until she reached the street, and then I took the stairs down to my own basement apartment.
Inside, I flipped on the lights. They were those compact fluorescents that pretend to be bright but mostly provided only an apologetic yellow.
I expected to see everything exactly as I’d left it, and of course, that was what happened: sleeper sofa, table, desk, desk chair, stack of unread mail on the kitchenette counter. Yep. Nothing new here.
I’d been gone less than seventy-two hours, and in that time, the apartment had accumulated a staleness so profound I could taste it.
I dropped the duffel on the floor and stood there, taking inventory.
It wasn’t that the place was ugly—by any standard, it was a coup, a real brownstone with exposed brick, wood floors, and high ceilings.
. . for a basement studio. Moving through the room, I turned on the only other light, the one on the desk.
But the effect was the same as adding ice cubes to a bathtub: it only made things colder.
Even the bathroom, which I’d once prided myself on for its spa-like minimalism, now struck me as a mausoleum for the person I’d intended to become but never managed to like. I opened the medicine cabinet, confirmed that nothing had grown in my absence, and closed it again.
I found myself thinking about Sawyer’s house.
How even the chaos had a coherence, every object knotted into place by some invisible web of history and habit.
The way her stepmom Diane had stationed herself at the kitchen table, the children gathered around her.
Or Sal and Terri’s house, where every object had a story and the stories multiplied until you forgot what was fact and what was just a hand-me-down joke.
Alaric’s ranch, with its fortress of solitude vibe and aggressive lack of pretention, felt so much warmer than this, so much more welcoming.
It hit me then, with the force of a backhand, that I was genuinely, ferociously lonely. Not just in the poetic sense—oh, the existential ache of the urban single—but in the real, quantifiable way that I could vanish tomorrow and my only legacy would be. . . what?
A lot of money in a bank account?
I sat on the edge of my bed, which was not technically a bed but a sleeper sofa upgraded with a memory foam topper. I stared at the phone in my hand, hoping it would vibrate, or ding, or at least display some sign that Alaric was on his way.
It didn’t. The screen remained a void.
Tossing the phone onto the pillow, I lay back and stared at the ceiling. The plaster was cracked.
Feeling both tired and wired, I closed my eyes and let the day roll through me. It had been a fun day, a great day. . . until now.
I rolled over, curling into myself, and reached blindly for the phone and held it to my chest, once more closing my eyes. I tried to imagine a world in which I could wake up and have someone to call, or at least, someone to miss me
Sleep found me that way. Phone pressed to my heart, wishing there were someone to call.
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