28. Kat
twenty-eight
Kat
"What do you want?"
The question lands in the middle of my loft like something dropped from a height.
I have my back to him, hands braced on the counter, the wine I poured ten minutes ago still full and going warm. The radiator ticks. Outside, someone's car alarm gives up halfway through its second cycle.
"Say that again."
"What do you want, Kat."
Not what's safe, here's what we're doing. Not the sentence I have been bracing for since he walked in with his coat still on and his boots leaving wet prints by the door.
My ribs shrink two sizes.
I have been asked a lot of questions by a lot of powerful men.
Every one of them came with a hook in it.
What do you want, Ms. Romero, meaning what will it take to make you go away.
What do you need from us, meaning tell us your price so we can decide whether you're expensive.
Even my editor, who loves me, asks what I want and means what can we survive.
Nobody asks it clean. Nobody hands you the whole thing and then stands there with nothing. Everyone has an agenda, an answer they are expecting.
I turn around.
He is by the door, just standing there with his hands loose at his sides, and that breaks me open because I know what his hands do when he is holding something back. I have watched those fists close a dozen times. They are open now.
"You don't ask," I whisper. "That's not a thing you do."
"No."
"You decide. You add security details and forget to mention it. You classify my own story out from under me."
"Yes."
"So what is this? What game are you playing at now?"
An emotion runs the length of his face, the corner of his mouth lifts and is gone before I can define it.
"This is me asking."
Heat crawls up my nape, floods my cheeks and my eyes sting before I have decided to let them.
So humiliating, I look at the ceiling for two full seconds to get my emotions under control.
Being handled I could survive in my sleep.
I have a whole apparatus for it, the deflection, the joke with an edge, the pivot back to the work, it has never once failed me.
Every man who ever handled me wanted something, and wanting something makes a person legible.
This is worse than any threat he has ever carried into a room, and I finally understand why my hands will not settle: a man who hands you the entire decision and keeps nothing back for himself has taken away the one thing I know how to fight, which is his agenda.
There is no hook in it. Nothing to brace against. He has walked straight past every defense I own by the simple, unbearable trick of not wanting anything from me except to know what I want and I am coming apart at my own counter over it.
It turns out the thing I built the thickest walls against was never cruelty.
Cruelty I could have parried in my sleep. It was this. It was being asked.
My hands are shaking. I fold them under my arms away from his prying eyes, he sees anyway. Yet, he stays where he is, giving me space I did not ask for and my whole-body catalogs it like a hand pressed flat to my stomach.
"I don't know," I say.
"That's allowed."
"No, it isn't." A laugh scrapes out of me, wet and ugly. "I've had an answer ready my entire life. Ask me what I want and I say the story. Every time. It's the only thing I've ever been sure of."
"And now?"
I open my mouth. What comes out is not one thing. It comes in pieces.
I push past him to the window and shove it up, because I cannot say any of this standing in a kitchen with my own wine going warm on the counter.
The cold hits my face like a slap of sense.
I climb out onto the fire escape and the metal grate bites through my socks and I do not care.
Below, Bedford is doing its nightly-routine thing, a delivery bike weaving, somebody laughing outside the bar on the corner.
Above us the sky is that orange-brown city color that never goes fully dark.
He follows. The frame groans under his weight and he settles against the rail with his back to the drop facing me and the window at the same time. I know him well enough now to understand that is not an accident.
"Three things." My breath ghosts out white. "You asked. I'm answering. Don't interrupt me or I'll lose my nerve."
He does the thing where he goes completely still to show he is listening.
"One. I want the story to survive. Not me, not my article, the story.
Clean enough that no lawyer can gut it and no one in a nice suit can stand in front of a camera and call it a jealous reporter with a grudge.
If it goes out dirty it's worse than not going out at all, because then they get to point at it forever as proof that people like me make things up. "
"Two."
"I said don't interrupt."
"That wasn't an interruption. That was a prompt."
I laugh out loud. It helps. "Two. I want the dead to matter.
Not as a paragraph. Not as a number in a caption.
My parents got four inches on page nine and the company that killed them got a press release with a photo of a groundbreaking.
I want somebody to have to say their names out loud.
Acknowledge they were wrong, that my parents mattered. "
The cold wind comes up off the river, gets under my shirt. His cheeks turn granite. He does not reach for me, and I am grateful, because if he touched me right now I would stop.
Say it. Say the third one.
It sits behind my teeth. The first two are things I have pledged from the moment I made the decision to avenge them. The third one is new, soft, mine and if he answers it wrong I will have handed him the only unguarded thing I own.
"Three." My voice comes out wrong. I clear my throat and try again and it's worse. "I don't want you to turn this into something you're ashamed of."
His eyes rise to meet mine.
"You offered to deny it. To go on record and say it never happened, and you meant it as a gift, I know that, but it still gutted me.
Because the version of this where you protect my career is where I sat down one night, let a man matter and then had to pretend I didn't." My throat closes.
"I've been erased before. I can't be the secret. Not yours."
I have been a secret before. The source who loved the sound of his own bravery right up until the lawyers called and my name came out of his mouth like a stain.
The men who wanted me in private and a cleaner woman at the dinner where it counted.
My own parents, at the end, sanded down into a thing the neighbors half-remembered and mostly misfiled.
I know exactly what it is to be the version of a story that gets scrubbed for a tidier one, I would genuinely rather he stood in front of a camera and called me a mistake to my face than protect me by quietly deciding, for my own good, that the two of us are a liability best kept off the record.
I have spent my entire life dragging the erased back into print. I am not going to lie down and become the erasure to save my own byline. Not for the story. Not even for his hands.
He is off the rail and in front of me before the sentence has finished landing.
His hands come up and stop short of my face, hovering, then land on the rail on either side of me instead. Caging me without touching me. The metal creaks.
"I'm not ashamed."
"Then say it louder than that."
"I'm not ashamed of you." His voice drops into gravel. "Not for a minute, none of it. The offer wasn't shame Katarina. It's my way of protecting you. I'm afraid your involvement with me might make you seem compromised. They want a story about Echelon. I am Echelon. I'm one of the founders."
"That's worse."
His jaw works.
"You ran the numbers and decided that me having you costs more than me not having you.
" Cold air burns my throat on the way in.
"You do that with everything. Somewhere in your head there's a ledger, on one side is people you love, on the other side is what happens to them, and you keep balancing it by removing yourself. "
Nothing. He's watching me with hooded eyes.
"So stop." My hands find his chest, flat, not pushing.
"Stop treating love like a liability. Stop treating yourself like the risk factor.
You want to protect me? Then be the person I get to keep, out in the open where everyone can see it.
Because a man who disappears to keep me safe is just a slower way of losing him. "
He opens his mouth. Nothing comes out.
I have watched this man react to gunfire in under a second. I have watched him take a briefing from three brothers who wanted his blood and hand back four words that ended the argument. He has never once been without a response.
Now he says nothing when it matters most.
My body understands it before I do, a hot slide down through my stomach and out into my legs, I have to lock my knees against the rail.
My heart forgets its job, then does it double-time.
Because the silence is not refusal. The silence speaks like a man standing in the middle of his own house discovering the floor plan is wrong.
"Naveed."
"I don't have an answer for that." Barely audible. "I don't have one."
"Good."
"Good?"
"You've had an answer for everything since the second you walked into my apartment." My fingers curl into his shirt. "This is the first time you've had to actually think about it, instead of reaching for the version that keeps you safe."
His breath stutters against my forehead, and it does more to me than any speech would have.
He lifts one hand. Sets it against the side of my neck, thumb along my jaw, and just holds it there like he is proving something to himself.
"Okay," he says.
Everything in me liquefies and I'm warm at once. Then my phone buzzes against my hip. Twice. Then his, inside his coat, a half second behind.
We both go still. Two phones. Same instant. That never means anything good.
I pull mine out with fingers that will not cooperate, the screen lights the fire escape blue.
The message is from a number I do not know.
This is Amir Haddad. I have your notebook, #12. I also have the name of the man everything runs back to, and I can prove it. Alone, or not at all. I'll tell you where.
The cold from the fire escape is still in my skin, but this is a different cold, this one goes deeper.
I read it again and again, the reporter in me has already started working and she does not care that my body's nervous system is at an all-time high. This guy is good. Nobody knows I use a numbering system. That is not a detail you fake, it is a detail you get by holding the thing.
Proof of the man that sits at the pinnacle.
Everything I have been chasing since a warehouse burned in Red Hook and nobody wrote a real sentence about it.
Every dead end, every source who stopped answering, every night I stood in front of that wall talking to red thread like it might talk back, now within reach in the form of a text message from the last man in the world who should be offering it.
Take it.
The want is physical. It runs down through my stomach and into my legs like heat off a radiator, greedy and stupid and absolutely mine.
Then the small voice that has kept me alive more times than I thought it would interrupts. Alone is how sources die. Alone is how reporters die with them.
My body already knows. My arms have gone to goosebumps under my sleeves and it has nothing to do with the wind.
Standing on a fire escape with a dead man's handler offering me the last missing piece: I want to go, the pull toward the edge overwhelming, the same current that peeled three trained men off my own back and walked me into a lightless gym, the reckless thing I keep mistaking for freedom.
My body has read the danger of it as an invitation.
This exact reflex is how reporters end up found in basements with their recorders still running.
The one difference tonight is that for the first time I do not want to walk to the edge alone.
I cannot tell whether that is the first healthy instinct I have had in twenty years or just the most elaborate way I have yet invented to take someone I love over the edge with me.
I am standing here covered in goosebumps, not sure my body knows the difference either, or that it cares.
Naveed is reading his own screen. Motionless.
"He sent it to me too." His voice is low. "Same words."
"He wants me to know he's not hiding it from you."
"He wants me to know he's not lying."
I look up. The orange sky behind his head, his face all shadow except for the honey glint of his eyes, and I brace for it. The no. The negative. The three sentences that end with not a chance and a hand steering me back through the window.
He says none of that.
"You want to go."
"I want the notebook. I want the name." My throat is tight. "I don't want to go alone."
"Then don't go alone." His hand comes up, sets against my neck again, thumb along my jaw, and he keeps it there. "But if you decide to, I'm not going to stop you."
Air leaves me all at once.
"You just said something insane."
"I said something true." His expression runs a full gamut before he schools it. "You told me to stand beside you. This is what beside looks like. It's worse than I thought it would be."
I giggle, actually giggle this time. Typical Naveed. Never a straight answer.
Below us, Bedford has gone quiet. The laughing outside the bar has stopped. My phone screen dims, I tap it awake again, I need to see the words one more time, in a minute I am going to say yes, and I want to remember exactly how the calm felt right before I do.