Chapter Twenty-Eight
MAXIMO DROVE UNTIL the tank complained, and then he drove some more, and when he finally came back it was the ugly hour before dawn and every window in the penthouse was dark.
Good, he told himself. She's asleep. She'll have cried it out. In the morning she'll be furious, and furious he could survive; furious meant a fight, and a fight meant she was still here to have it.
He let himself in without a sound, braced for the wreckage. There wasn't any. That was the first wrong thing.
He stood in the entryway and listened to his own home and couldn't place, at first, what was missing. Then he had it, and it went through him colder than anything he'd said.
The silence.
Not the old silence, the one he had lived inside for two years, the one he had built the rules to protect.
A new silence, the shape of a girl who wasn't singing in the shower or heckling the television or laughing on a kitchen floor she wasn't supposed to sit on.
The apartment had learned her noise. Now the noise was gone, and the quiet it left behind had edges.
She's calming down, he told himself, standing in the dark. This is what calming down sounds like.
He almost believed it.
He went to bed telling himself it, and he lay awake telling himself it, and somewhere down the hall he could hear the smallest sounds, a drawer, a zipper, the careful movements of someone trying not to wake anyone.
He told himself that was calming down too.
It wasn't calming down.
Down the hall, in a room he had let her fill with her whole ridiculous life, the girl with his sister's heart was folding that life back into two small suitcases, and Maximo lay in the dark and listened to it happen and did the last unforgivable thing. Nothing.
He did nothing because he was a coward, and because some cruel private part of him thought the silence would keep. That she'd keep. That a girl who loved that loudly couldn't possibly, actually, leave.
He was wrong about that too.