Chapter 15
HALLIE
"You don't have to help."
"I know."
Half past midnight, the reception still winding down across the lawn in ones and twos, and Elias Ravndahl stood in my kitchen doorway in his suit with the tie gone, sleeves already going up, because of course he'd come: the top tier has to be boxed and frozen the night of, that's the tradition, a year of marriage banked in buttercream, and the man audits traditions like contracts.
Somewhere out there the band was packing up.
In here it was steel and quiet and the walk-in's one note, and the two of us, and a cake with one tier left to save.
I hadn't spoken to him since the toast.
I'd left the tent at the toast. I want to be honest about that, since I'm being honest about everything else in here where nobody can hear it: he said a whole Sunday's worth of world to a tent full of people holding champagne, and sixty of them heard a nice line, and one of them put her glass down and walked out the far flap into the dark and stood on the cold sand doing the breathing they teach you in the videos.
Six years of never saying the word. Then he says it into a microphone, aimed at my brother, traveling through the whole room to land where it landed, and the worst part, the part I chewed on out there in the dark until Jenna's shadow appeared at a respectful distance and then went away again, the worst part is there's no charge I can file.
He toasted the groom. Everyone said it was beautiful.
It was beautiful. That's the whole crime, officer. The man said something beautiful.
So: the tier. Work. Flour instead of feelings, it's on the family crest.
We boxed it in parchment and cling film like evidence, which it is: evidence for a trial a year out, when Theo and Lauren thaw it and eat it and call each other wife and husband with their mouths full.
And the box needed the walk-in's back shelf, top left, behind Curro's lock, and the walk-in is four feet by six, and I did the math on all of that only after we were both inside it.
Cold. Close. The tier went on the shelf.
I turned with the empty tray and he was there, not looming, he's never loomed, just present, filling the doorway of a cold small room with his jacket off and the shelf light making a study of his face, and the door stood ajar behind him, propped on the mop bucket, four inches of warm kitchen showing through the gap.
Four inches. Doors and I have history.
Neither of us moved. The compressor hummed. I could see his breath, or mine, the cold making the air honest, and his eyes came down to me with the guard off for once, one second, two, eleven, and every stupid cell I own leaned like the whole body was going over, and his hand came up —
— and took the tray.
"It's freezing," Elias said, rough as a man coming up from underwater. "Go. I'll shut it."
He stepped back. Held the door. Out I went past him into the warm, furious.
And I want to be accurate about the target, because the fury deserves a clean address: not at him.
At my own pulse. At the mutinous, amnesiac, long-comatose pulse of me, banging away like the door hadn't happened, like Thornsea was somebody else's nightmare, like the hallway belonged to a story about two other people.
Bodies keep no files. Bodies would reoffend by Thursday.
That's why the paperwork has to live somewhere else.
He shut the walk-in properly, the lock catching with a sound like a sentence ending, and we said the goodnight we say, and I took the garden path instead of the gravel one because it was longer and I needed the yardage.
Jenna was on the colonnade with her shoes in her hand and a plate of stolen wedding cake, because leftovers are her love language, waiting up the way she has waited up since the fourth grade.
She looked at me for a long moment over the peonies. The scan. Part line, keys, pulse, all of it.
"Hm," she said. "You look like the before picture of a mistake."
"I boxed a cake."
"Sure."
"In a walk-in."
"Sure. How big's a walk-in."
"Four by six."
Jenna nodded slowly, ate a forkful of my own buttercream at me, and moved over on the bench, which is her version of a subpoena.
I sat. Down the lawn the last string lights were going out section by section, tidy, and the island did its night sounds, and somewhere in the dark a man in his shirtsleeves was walking the long way around a pool out of respect.
"I'm fine," I said. It was four inches, and I counted every one of them, and I have not stopped counting since. "Everything's fine."
"Uh-huh," said Jenna, and handed me the fork.