Chapter 24 Dante
At five in the morning, I stop pretending there’s a version of this night where I sleep.
I’ve been on my back on the sleeping bag for two hours, listening to Levi breathe. In through his nose, out through his mouth, the rhythm I laid down for him still running in him like he took it in and kept it.
Every time the rhythm stutters — a catch, a turn, a long pause at the top of a breath — everything in me comes up off the floor an inch and waits. Then it evens out, and I lie back down, and we do it again.
I said I’d keep watch over him. I meant it.
I decide to get up, because the showing is at ten and twenty million dollars deserves an agent who’s showered, and because there’s nothing more I can do for him from the floor.
I get up the way you get up from beside a sleeping animal you don’t want to spook — weight on the hands first, then the feet, no sound. He doesn’t stir. He’s face to the open door the way I put him.
I don’t turn on a light anywhere in the apartment. Light travels, and he’s twelve feet from every wall. I shower with the bathroom door shut and the water run soft.
And that’s where I find it.
The stain is gone. The rust bloom at the drain end of the tub, the one that came with the unit, the one I’ve scrubbed at many times and finally made peace with.
It’s gone. The porcelain scoured back to white.
I stand there with the water going over me and I know exactly what happened, because there’s only one other set of hands in this apartment.
Levi did it yesterday. He didn’t mention it, and he isn’t going to, and if I brought it up, he’d shrug it off.
Which is when I understand he has learned my language.
Because that’s mine. The food that’s there when he opens the refrigerator, no note on it.
The sleeping bag that appeared. I leave them where he’ll find them.
And now there’s a scrubbed-white tub in my bathroom saying something back to me in perfect grammar, and no way to answer it out loud without breaking the rules.
I dress in the dark and skip the coffee. At the door I stop and look back at him one more time. A big man asleep on the floor of my living room with his face in a doorway, breathing deeply. And that’s when it hits me. What I’m actually doing.
I’m leaving him alone in this apartment with no phone.
His is at the house. Mine is in my pocket, going with me. Which means if whatever happened in the middle of the night comes back again — he can’t call me. He’d be exactly where he was last night except this time there’s no one down the hall to come with ice.
I stand at the door and run through the options.
Can’t take him with me. Can’t leave him my phone. Can’t bring his phone back here.
The only thing left to do is nothing. I take one last look at him sleeping, and I pull the door to behind me quietly.
When I arrive at the house, the first thing I do is take his phone out of the sectional.
It’s down in the same cushion, cracked corner up, the cheapest object in the house.
A buyer is going to sit on this sectional in two hours, and a phone going off under them ends the showing in the time it takes to say “what’s that buzzing?
” It comes with me, into my pocket, next to my own.
I do the last walk-through.
The house is perfection. I stand under the supply vent, the one that blew out the smell of weed for a week, and I breathe in. Nothing. Eucalyptus and cold clean air, and under it nothing at all.
The remediation took. So did the open door. Levi fought me for that terrace door every day he was in this house. Shoved it wide and dared me to close it. I priced it as damage from the start. Turns out a week of moving air does what a sealed room never could.
I note it and keep moving. Jonathan’s car is at the gate. They walk in at nine-fifty.
The broker, Jonathan Mitchell first, same resoled loafers, same loose old watch. Behind him the client, the divorce settlement behind her, a woman who’s simplified her life down to what she wants to wake up looking at. Linen, real pearls. She’s here to decide.
She wants to walk into a room where nothing has ever gone wrong. And she wants to believe she found it herself.
I step back and let the house sell itself without my help.
“Jonathan.” I shake his hand, then hers, brief and cool. “The light’s better than the photos. It usually isn’t.”
She’s already past us both, drawn across the room toward the glass, which is what the glass is for.
Jonathan hangs back half a step. He lifts his chin, the same place he found the weed a week ago, and I watch him hunt for it and not find it. His face lets it go. “You got your air sorted,” he says, only for me.
“Documented. It’s in the packet.”
“I believe you.” He drifts after her, hands behind his back, giving the client the room.
She stands there, looking at the Gulf, and says nothing. That’s what I want. The talkers talk themselves out of houses. The quiet ones are pricing the rest of their life against the view.
I let her have it.
It’s working. This is the job I was built for, and this morning I need it.
It’s ten. Levi’s been alone over four hours. I’m smiling at a woman on the edge of the biggest purchase of her life while part of me is standing in an apartment, counting someone else’s breaths.
The buzz comes off my hip and for a split-second I don’t know whose phone it is. Mine and his sit in the same pocket and they buzz the same.
It’s his.
Freddie: Status
The phone opens on the thread, and the first thing it gives me is what Levi never did. A name.
Freddie.
Ten o’clock, to the minute. I knew it was coming and it still comes at a bad time. There’s no good moment when you’re two people at once.
“I’ll give you a chance to explore,” I murmur to Jonathan before stepping out onto the terrace.
A good agent gives buyers the space to fall in love without breathing on them. It’s also the cleanest cover there is.
I type in Levi’s passcode and open the text thread. There’s every message Freddie’s ever sent him, stacked up the screen. The answer to the only question I’ve carried since the night he told me somebody thinks he owns him. Right here. One scroll and I’d know everything.
I don’t scroll. I promised him I wouldn’t. I type the one word back.
Levi: good
I hit send and pray it’s true. I’m standing on a terrace telling the man who owns him that Levi is good, and the truth is I don’t know what Levi is.
The phone goes back in my pocket against my own, and through the glass the client is trailing her fingers along the stone island. She’s starting to think of it as hers.
I go back inside.
“Sorry. The office.” I say it light, to Jonathan, who nods.
The showing builds. She goes upstairs. I stay down and let Jonathan walk her, old money to old money, his drawl doing the slow work mine would crowd. I hear them moving overhead. Her heels on the stairs.
When they come back down, she’s different. Settled into it. She asks the questions buyers ask when they’ve stopped touring and started owning. Jonathan handles them at his unhurried pace. I supply two facts that matter and not one more. The deal tilts in my favor.
This could be the one. But I don’t spend a win before it’s closed, so I put it away and work.
The second buzz comes when there’s no gap to step into.
She’s at the glass again, Jonathan beside her, asking him something low. It’s the moment when a buyer says the private thing to her own broker, the one that means yes is coming, and the room should hold its breath. The phone buzzes against my leg again.
His phone. Again. Off the schedule.
Freddie: Status
And this time two things come up in me at once. The first is plain anger, fast — who does this? Who reaches into a Saturday morning twice in an hour? Who keeps a man on a string so short it twitches the second the one holding it gets uneasy?
The second is worse. What if he’s right? What if something is wrong with Levi? Why is he texting a second time?
There’s no natural exit for me, so I create one. “Let me grab the association docs for you,” I say, already moving toward the foyer and my bag. It buys me the eight feet of turned back I need. I punch in the six digits to open the phone. Go to the thread.
Levi: still good
Send. Close. Pocket the phone.
I’m back with the documents in my hand inside fifteen seconds, and Jonathan’s still talking, and she never looked over.
Cleaner than the first time. I hand the woman her association documents, and I keep my eyes off the clock, because the clock only confirms how long Levi’s been alone.
She’s not buying today and I don’t expect her to.
Jonathan wouldn’t let her if she tried; that’s not how his people do it.
But when she puts her hand out at the door it’s warm, and she holds my eye a moment longer, and she says the house is “very close.” From a woman who tours nothing that needs explaining, that’s almost a yes.
Jonathan lingers half a step behind her on the threshold.
“She’s between this and the blue house in Seaside,” he says.
“She’ll want a second look. I’d guess inside the week.
She’ll want to sleep on it, and then she’ll do it fast.” The drawl doesn’t hurry.
“Get me that packet and keep this air exactly like it is, son, and I believe we’re walking toward a number.
” He puts his hand out. Good grip, dry palm, two pumps, done.
“Well done. Truly. You’d never know a soul had set foot in it. ”
And then they’re gone, the car down the drive and through the gate. The house is mine, perfectly silent.
I’ve won.
I stand in the middle of the best room on this coast and let myself have it — and I can’t. Not all of it. Not the way I would have a month ago, when a morning like this would have been spectacular. A huge success.
I made the air smell like nothing. I made the room feel like nothing bad has ever happened here.
Best professional morning of my year, and I’m standing in it checking my phone out of habit for a call it can’t receive from a man who has no way to place one.
I take his phone out of my pocket. All of him locked behind six digits I know. The answer to who does this to you and why is in my hand, one thumb-swipe down. The pull to find out comes up one more time.
I don’t open it because I gave him my word. I put it back down under the cushions, and I lock the house behind me. Then I stop pretending I’m not in a hurry.
I’ve been in a hurry to get back since I left the apartment.
I pull out of the cul-de-sac fast, with the windows down and the win still warm on me, and I drive back to him.