Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
He worked from the couch that evening because he could not make himself work anywhere she was not.
The notebook lay open on his knee, the witness sheets fanned across the cushion beside him, and he had read the same page four times without taking in a word of it.
The fourth fire and the carved ornaments and the ring under the floor had left him scraped down to nothing.
She watched him from the other end of the couch for a while. He felt her watching and did not look up, and that was his mistake, because she had reached a decision and he had missed his chance to brace for it.
She crossed the cushion, took the notebook out of his hands, closed it, and set it on the coffee table, out of reach. Then she climbed into his lap, facing him, a knee to either side of him, and made the spot her own.
“Delphine—”
“I miss my boyfriend.” She framed his face in both hands.
“Not the investigator. Not the man who has not slept. My boyfriend. The one who used to look at me like I was the case he actually wanted to solve.” She tilted her head, unhurried, sure of herself.
“I am going to have him back for one night. The notebook can wait.”
It caught him off guard. She always caught him off guard, not because he was a stranger to wanting her but because she wanted so openly.
There was no hesitation in her, no waiting to be invited, none of the careful borders the women he had loved before her had been bound inside.
She climbed into his lap and told him plainly what she wanted and waited for him to catch up, and he found that her certainty undid him faster than any seduction could have.
He let her lead, which was its own kind of letting go.
For most of two centuries he had held a part of himself in reserve even here, some last guarded room he never opened, braced always against the day she would be taken from him again.
She did not let him keep it tonight. She undressed him slowly and looked at him while she did it, and she said his name, and she asked him for what she wanted without lowering her eyes once, and the open want in her reached the room he kept locked and coaxed the door of it open.
He stopped holding himself apart. He gave her all of it, the want and the worship and the unhealed grief, and he let her see every part of him there was to see.
She moved over him with a confidence that took his breath, and he met it, learning her rhythm and answering it, his hands mapping her, his mouth at her throat, nothing held back and nothing braced against. When she came apart she said his name, sure of it, sure of him.
When he followed he was, for once, entirely in the room, entirely hers, with no part of him standing guard at the window against a future he could not stop.
It was not escape. It was the opposite of escape.
It was the two of them choosing, in the middle of everything trying to take them apart, to be wholly together.
Afterward they lay tangled in the dark and talked about nothing at all.
A leak in the bathroom tap he kept meaning to fix.
Whether the café down the block had changed its chicory blend.
A trip they would take when this was over, somewhere with mountains, where neither of them had a history.
The investigation did not come into the room until much later, and when it did, it came gently, and they let it wait outside the door a good while first.
In the morning they walked out for beignets, because she wanted them and because he had begun to believe again that they were allowed small ordinary things.
They took a table at the edge of the market with the awning snapping overhead and the chicory strong and bitter between them, and he was halfway through telling her how little the city's cameras had seen when she reached across the little table and brushed her thumb along the corner of his mouth, wiping the powdered sugar from his lip without breaking the sentence she was only half listening to.
Then her hand stopped against his jaw.
She did not go under. She stayed, her thumb resting where it had wiped the sugar away, her eyes gone soft and distant, and when she spoke her voice had dropped into that register he had learned to dread and hope for at once.
“I've done that before,” she said. “Exactly that. Reached over a little table with bad coffee on it and wiped sugar off your mouth, and you let me, like you always let me.” She blinked, and her own hand seemed strange to her.
“I don't mean since we've been together.
I mean before. It's the same gesture, Bastien. The same table, almost. How is it the same table?”
“I don't know,” he said, which was the lie he had decided he could live with, because the truth was that she had done it a hundred times across a little café table in a century she did not remember, that the gesture had survived two deaths and come back up through her hand into the morning light, and he could not give her that over beignets without giving her all the rest.
She let her hand fall and looked at it, and then she shook the strangeness off, the trick she was learning now, and reached for her coffee. “It is getting easier,” she said quietly. “Knowing things I have no business knowing. That should frighten me more than it does.”
Maya had a witness, the first one worth the word, and she caught him at the office to tell him.
“It is thin,” she warned, before she gave it to him.
“But it is the first thing that points at a man and not a building.” She slid a page across the desk.
“A fellow who lives a block off the second scene swears he saw the same car parked wrong twice. Older sedan, dark, maybe gray, maybe green, he is not sure, his words. No plate he can give me. No make he will commit to. But he saw it before the second fire and he saw it again the week of the fourth, in a neighborhood it had no reason to be in, and it bothered him enough to remember.”
“A car that does not belong, twice,” Bastien said. “Near two of the four.”
“It is almost nothing.” Maya allowed herself the smallest grim satisfaction. “But it is almost nothing with four wheels and a driver, which is more than I had yesterday. Somebody sat in that car and watched. Somebody chose. I will take a car I cannot name over a ghost any day of the week.”
He spent the rest of the day chasing the car and learning how little the modern world could see when it was not pointed the right way.
He pulled what footage there was, and there was almost none.
The old blocks of the district had grown up long before anyone thought to watch them.
The corner stores that might have had a camera had cameras that pointed at their own registers.
A bank machine two streets from the fairgrounds had recorded a slice of empty sidewalk for years and caught nothing he could use.
Half the lenses in the city were ornamental, dead boxes bolted up to frighten thieves, and the half that worked had been aimed at doors and tills and never at the dark stretch of street where a patient man might park a dark sedan and wait.
He worked it for hours and came away with a smudge of motion on one grainy frame that might have been a car and might have been a shadow.
The investigation moved, but it moved at the speed of a city that had never expected to need to look this closely at itself.
It struck him, closing the last useless file, that he was losing a race he had not known he was running.
The human case crawled. A car no one could name, a witness who would not commit, a city that had never thought to watch itself.
And on the far side of the red string the memories ran and ran, a mug, a language, a gesture, a page, surer every day and faster every day, sprinting toward the end of a life while he plodded after an arsonist one grainy frame at a time.
One of his two investigations would finish long before the other.
He had begun to be afraid he knew which.
She was on the couch with one of his books when he came home, and that, in the end, was the thing that stayed with him longest from the whole long day.
It was an old book, one he had read so many times the spine had given up, a thing he came back to whenever the years pressed on him.
She had it open near the middle, a finger holding her place, her eyes far away over the top of the page.
When he sat beside her he saw where her finger rested, and his chest went tight.
She had stopped on the exact page he always stopped on.
The passage he came back to and could never read past without setting the book down a while, the one paragraph in three hundred that undid him every time.
She had no way of knowing it was his. She had pulled it off his shelf at random and walked straight to the one page in it that was his alone, and she sat now with her finger on it and her mind somewhere he could not follow.
“This is a sad one,” she murmured, not looking up. “I had to stop here. I don't know why. It just felt like the place to stop.”
“It is the place to stop,” he said. “I always stop there too.”
She smiled, pleased, and did not find it strange, and went back to the page.
He sat beside her and did not reach for the notebook for a long while, and when he finally did, later, after she slept, he wrote the book and the page beneath the powdered sugar and the borrowed gesture and the morning coffee.
He looked at the right side of the board before he closed the notebook.
The melody. The waltz. The mug, the language, the green door, the sugar, the page.
He had been adding them as separate wonders, each one its own small impossibility.
Tonight he saw what they were becoming together.
They were not random anymore. They were not scattered.
Set side by side in his careful hand, they had begun to line up, one into the next, a season following a season, a life telling itself back to her in order.
The memories were no longer pieces. They were becoming a life, and a life, he knew better than anyone, has an end as well as a beginning.