37. Naveed #2
“Then here is mine,” she says. “I have never trusted a single person with my whole story. Not Sienna. Not Jonah. Not once.” Her eyes hold steady on me. “You get the whole thing. Everything I know. No source protection between us.”
Trust for trust. Door for door.
She holds my eyes a moment more, then she stands. Crosses to the shelf. The box is up high now, where I moved it that first week, she has to reach for it.
She sets it on the table between us. The fireproof box I would not open. The one I moved away from the glass because someone touched it and I could not stand that the dead had been reached.
She lifts the lid.
Inside, folded paper. Some yellowed. Some newer. A child's handwriting sliding into a teenager's sliding into an adult's. Years of it, letters written to two people who could never read them.
She takes one from near the bottom. Old. The fold worn soft from being opened and closed a thousand times. She holds it a second longer than she needs to, and then she puts it in my hands.
“Read it,” she says.
Not mine.
My whole body wants to give it back unread, because this is hers, and reaching into someone's grief without permission is the thing the intruder did, the very thing I have been guarding her against.
But she is not guarding it now. She is giving it.
I open it, my thumbs at the very edges, touching only what I have to.
Dear Mom and Dad. I got the highest grade in the class today. Mr. Alvarez said I have a nose for the truth. I do not know if that is a good thing to have.
A child's hand. Uneven letters. A period pressed so hard it tore the paper.
I read it. My eyes never leaving the page, this one small voice talking into a void that never answered. Some things you touch with your eyes only.
My chest does the thing it has been doing since the fire. She has handed me the softest part of herself, the part she has never let anyone else see. The grief she turned into a career because she had nowhere else to put it and she trusts me with it.
I fold it back along the worn line, exactly as it was, and give it back to her.
“Thank you,” I say. It is not enough. It is all I have.
She takes it back. Holds it against her body and breathes, then sets it in the box, closing the lid.
I look at her. At the box. At the door I have slept against these past weeks, gone now.
“There is one more thing,” I say. “Something I have never shown anyone.”
I stand. Cross to the window she loves and hates, the tall glass that let the city in and let the threat in with it. My hands find my pockets.
“My place in Brooklyn Heights,” I say. “You've seen it.”
She waits.
“You called it a hotel room with a gun safe.” The corner of my mouth moves, barely. “You were not wrong.”
I turn to face her. This is harder than the letter was. Harder than the classified file. Those were things I did. This is a thing I want.
“I bought it a little over eight years ago,” I say. “I sleep there. I have never lived in it. Not really.” My throat works. “I never learned how. I didn’t think a man like me was supposed to.”
Kat moves toward me slowly.
“I want you to move in,” I say. “Live there. With me.”
Her eyes hold mine, that stripped-to-the-studs look she gives me when she is deciding whether to believe a thing.
“Naveed.”
“Not to guard you.” I rush to continue. “I am done guarding you from a distance. I want you in my home. In my life. You're mine, Kat.”
I hear the possessive land, and I do not take it back, because for once it is the whole truth and not the wall the word usually hides.
Mine has meant a hundred cold things in my mouth across the years — mine to cover, mine to move, mine to keep breathing whether they wanted it or not, a designation on a detail sheet.
This time after a lifetime of making certain nothing could ever be used against me has walked, wide awake and on purpose, straight into loving the one person whose loss would simply end me.
It is the most reckless thing I have ever done in a life full of reckless things.
I would do it again tomorrow, and the day after.
You're mine, I tell her, and what I cannot fit into the two words is the rest of it: that I am so far gone into being hers there is no version of me left that could survive taking it back.
Something behind my ribs cracks open, waiting to be filled or refused. I keep painting the picture before she can say a word.
“There is an office,” I say. “Second floor. Faces the garden. It is empty.” I hold her look. “It is yours. Your desk. Your wall. Your files. A door that locks from the inside. You close it when you need to. A private place for your work.”
Her lips part.
“A room that is only yours,” I say, “in a home that is ours. That is not a cage. A cage does not come with a door you control.”
Jesus Christ. What is wrong with you, Naveed Safar. Shut the hell up. Even in my own head I'm talking like this woman now.
I learned it from her. From every time I mistook control for safety and she showed me the difference. She needs a room she can close to do her work. She can have that with me. My house is the most secure perimeter she will ever walk into — blame the paranoia.
“You do not have to answer now,” I say. “I know what your independence means to you. But I want to see where this goes, whatever this living, breathing thing between us is. I'm asking you to let me try. To let us try.”
She does not answer.
I have offered her the last locked room I own, left the door open, and told her the key is hers.