25. Brock
Brock
I fucking knew it.
I knew something was going on. Gunnar might be, well… him, but he sees things the rest of us don’t catch.
Gunnar’s question walks home with us.
Erik hasn’t answered yet. He’s just carrying the hardware bags like they weigh something, which they don’t, not to him, and Rayner’s got the door balanced on one shoulder. For two blocks it’s been nothing but the city and the feeling of eyes on us.
I could break the silence. I’m the one who usually does, but this one isn’t mine to break. Erik won’t answer until he’s good and ready and we all know it.
All of us do, except Gunnar.
“Well?” Gunnar says, finally. He wouldn’t be Gunnar if he didn’t.
Erik walks four more steps.
“She showed me the first one,” he says. “Four seconds after she opened her door. Asked me if I’d gotten one too.” Four more steps. “I said no.”
Nobody says anything to that.
“Then I asked her where it came from.”
Gunnar makes a sound. It sounds off, even for him.
“She’d already decided it was some brand being clever. Marketing. Not for her. Not really. She was sure.” Another step. “So I wrote the second one.”
He says it flat, like a report. But I know better.
Gunnar opens his mouth, and I already have an idea of what’s about to come out, because it’s the same question I’m holding in. He’s just louder.
“And when were you going to tell her?”
“When she’d believe it.”
“Why wouldn’t she believe it?” Gunnar, genuinely thrown, hands out like reality owes him an explanation. “Secret notes. Handwriting. Nice paper. Women love that. I have personally witnessed women loving that.”
Erik shakes his head. “You don’t know her. I’ve had three years.”
“Three years across a hall.”
“Shut up, Gunnar.”
Gunnar shuts up, which he only does when he’s already gotten what he wanted. He wanted Erik talking. Erik’s talking.
“She’s smart,” Erik says. Slower now, like he doesn’t want to be saying any of this, and he’s saying it anyway. “Smarter than she lets on. Head in the clouds half the day. And after Kyle, she—” He stops, like he’s trying to figure out how to say it. “She was never quite the same.”
“What happened with Kyle?” I ask.
“I don’t know. Whatever it was, it wore her down. By the end she wasn’t the same person I’d met in the beginning.”
“And now?”
“Now she doesn’t believe she deserves anything. Good things happen to other people. Not her.”
“Good things happen in her dreams,” Rayner says.
He’s smirking.
I stop. Everybody stops walking except Rayner.
“That’s not the same and you know it,” Erik says, and he doesn’t sound happy about it. “Besides, she doesn’t believe those dreams are real. Does she?”
“No.” Rayner keeps strolling, entirely at peace, an entire door on his shoulder. “But I think she’s starting to.”
I look at all of them — Erik wound tight, Rayner glowing, Gunnar suddenly very interested in traffic — and for once I decide to just open my mouth.
“Then we change her mind.”
They all look at me.
“Because we’re all gone for her. Right?” I hear myself ask it. “It’s not just me.”
“Not just you,” Erik says.
Rayner just smiles.
“Speak for yourselves.” Gunnar puts his hands in his pockets. “Beautiful is a complication.”
He calls her Beautiful and denies her in the same sentence. Nobody points it out. That’s probably going to come back to bite him at some point.
We’re half a block out when I see them.
Four men outside the corner market, spread across the sidewalk, too far apart to be friends. Not one of them looks at us.
Everybody looks at us in this realm. It’s like they cannot help themselves and today we’re four large men carrying a door. But these guys? These guys are the only people in Chicago not looking, and that means somebody told them not to.
This should be fun.
The big one in front has decided he’s the leader. He’s still convincing himself.
“Left one’s about to be sick,” Gunnar says, low, almost cheerful.
He’s right. The one at the leader’s shoulder wants to be anywhere else and came anyway. Loyalty, the cheap kind — the kind that’s mostly fear of being left out.
“Company,” I say, pleasant, for the group.
The big one steps up as we reach them. Chin first. “You’re the guy.” He’s talking to Erik. “From the building. Kyle’s told us all about you, man.”
Erik stops. The whole sidewalk feels it.
“Move,” Erik says.
“Or what?”
The small one. Smallest of the four, biggest mouth, the most to prove. He was always going to be the one who talked. “There’s four of us.”
Gunnar laughs. It’s a real laugh, delighted, from the belly, and it does more damage than a threat would. “There’s four of you,” he agrees, wiping his eye. “Rayner, there’s four of them.”
Rayner adjusts the door on his shoulder and says nothing, and the small one looks up at him, and up, and goes quiet.
But the big one plants his feet, and that’s the wrong note. He’s scared — I can see the swallow from here — and he’s holding ground anyway, and men like this don’t hold ground they can’t keep unless holding ground is the whole job.
And behind them all, the fourth one checks his phone again. Third time since we stopped. It’s the only thing on this street I can’t explain.
The phone buzzes.
He doesn’t like what it says.
That’s when I realize why they’re standing here. They’re not here to win. They’re not even here to fight. They’re spread across a sidewalk between us and her building, buying somebody time.
“They’re a delay. Kyle is up there,” I say, nodding to the apartment.
Erik goes still in a way I have seen exactly twice in all the years I’ve known him, and both times something ended shortly after.
The big one’s face confirms it — the flinch of a man watching the plan die out loud. And then, down the block, the door of her building swings open, and the plan walks out of it holding his own face.
Kyle. Moving fast, head down, one hand pressed to his cheek, and even from here the smell reaches me and I put my hand on Erik’s arm and say the only word that matters first.
“Not hers.”
The blood is not hers. Erik’s chest is moving like he’s about to lose it and I say it again, “Not hers,” and I watch him choose her over Kyle in real time — because Kyle is right there, bleeding and slow and alone, and Erik looks at him for a breath and then spends none of it on him. He’s already moving for the building.
We all are. The four in front of us stop mattering.
We go through the gaps between them and nobody slows us down.
The small one swings anyway — loyal to the last, and Rayner catches his fist out of the air one-handed, door still balanced on his shoulder, and sets him down on a bus bench like it’s not the kid’s fault.
Kyle sees us coming. To his credit, some deep animal part of him understands immediately and completely, and he’s gone down the side street. His crew folding after him to cover it.
Good, let them go.
I saw it. Four lines down his cheek. Parallel, clean, close together. Something clawed him, and he came out of her building wearing it.
Which means he got in. With Leif on watch.
That’s worse — Leif said he had her. Leif does not say that lightly and Leif does not miss. So either he stopped it, which is why Kyle is still walking, or Kyle got past him.
And that’s just absurd.
We go up the stairs at a run, door and all, and spill into her hallway, and Erik is first, and he stops so hard I nearly put the hardware bags through him.
Her doorway is open, because of course it is, the door is on Rayner’s shoulder.
Standing in the middle of the empty frame, parked facing out at the hallway —
her vacuum.
Huh.
Then from somewhere inside, her voice, too bright.
“Oh good, you’re back! Everything’s fine!”
I have read people for centuries, and I can tell you with certainty that everything is not fine.