Chapter 21
I woke up before Josie did, which was not unusual, except that instead of a windshield in front of me there was a wall painted the color of weak tea, and instead of a camera there was the weight of her arm thrown across my stomach, heavy and unselfconscious in sleep.
I lay there and cataloged the room out of old habit: closet door, half open.
Window, latched, the one I’d fixed myself not long after she’d first caught me watching her building.
Nightstand with a phone charger looped over the lamp base and a paperback with a cracked spine.
None of it was information I needed. I had it anyway, because that was how I was built.
The strange part wasn’t the room. The strange part was that I hadn’t moved to the chair by the window at some point in the night, the way I would have on a job.
I’d stayed exactly where she put me, on my back, her arm across me, her breath slow and even against my shoulder, and I had slept.
Actually slept, the kind that takes a piece out of you and gives it back rested, not the shallow watch-state I usually called sleep.
Lying beside a person you cared about was supposed to be the most ordinary transaction in the world. It felt, instead, like standing in a room with the lights on and the curtains open, which was a thing I had spent my whole life arranging never to do.
Josie stirred, made a low unhappy sound at the light coming through the blinds, and pressed her face into my shoulder like she was negotiating with the morning for five more minutes.
“You’re staring at the ceiling like it owes you money,” she said, muffled.
“I’m awake. That’s different from staring.”
“You’ve been awake and thinking for at least ten minutes, because your breathing changes when you start thinking.
I noticed that the night I sat across the street from you in your own van, if you want to know where I learned it.
” She pushed herself up on one elbow, hair a soft chaos against the pillow, and studied my face with the same unhurried attention she gave a jammed lock mechanism. “What’s the verdict?”
“No verdict. I was noticing that I didn’t get up in the night.”
“You mean you didn’t go sit in the corner like a gargoyle?”
“I mean I slept. Which doesn’t happen for me most nights, whether I’m on a job or not.” I said it plainly, because I’d promised her plain, and the promise was less than a day old and already asking things of me I hadn’t finished practicing.
She was quiet for a second, turning that over. “Was that hard? Doing it here, next to me, instead of watching?”
“Harder than the watching ever was.” I hadn’t meant to say it that directly. “Watching, I control the exchange. I decide what I notice, when I look away, when I write it down. Lying here, I don’t control anything. You could wake up and look at me without warning.”
“That’s the whole point of sleeping next to someone, Caleb.”
“I’m aware that’s the point. I’m telling you it’s new.”
She reached over and put her palm flat against my chest, the same gesture she’d used the night before, like she was checking a reading on some instrument only she knew how to interpret. “For what it’s worth, from where I’m lying, you looked like someone who’d finally stopped bracing for something.”
Words failed me, so I put my hand over hers instead, which she seemed to accept as an answer anyway.
She sat up properly then, pulling the sheet with her, and reached for the water glass from the night before, drinking half of it before she spoke again with the clarity of someone who’d been composing the sentence for a while.
“I want to talk about the rule. The one about you owing me an honest answer when you learn something private about me on purpose.”
“I remember it.”
“I want to make sure we’re using it the same way.
Because you’re the kind of person who’ll find a loophole in his own promise if I leave the wording loose enough to breathe.
So: it doesn’t matter how small the thing you learn is.
It doesn’t matter if the answer you owe me is ugly.
You don’t get to hand me water and change the subject, and you don’t get to decide on your own that something didn’t count as finding out. ”
It was a fair accounting, and fairness had never been the part that frightened me. The part that frightened me was that she intended to keep a ledger of exactly the kind I’d kept on other people my whole life, except this one ran against me. “That’s reasonable,” I said.
“You say that like it’s a legal document you’re agreeing to under duress.”
“I’m agreeing to it because it’s reasonable. I didn’t say I liked the position it puts me in.”
“Good. I don’t need you to like it. I need you to do it.” She said it lightly, but her eyes held mine.
The disclosure rule only covered facts I went looking for, and last night she had handed me things I had never earned. I did not want to wait for the ledger. “Ask me something anyway. You don’t have to earn it off the books. I’d rather give it to you.”
She considered that, turning the glass in her hands, and I understood she’d heard exactly what it cost me to offer it. “Who’s your family? You’ve mentioned your father, sort of, in the smallest possible sentence a person’s ever used to describe a parent. You’ve never once mentioned anyone else.”
“I have a sister. Rachel. Three years younger.” Saying her name here cost more than I expected. “She’s the only family I’d call close. We don’t see each other enough.”
“And your father?”
“Alive. Not welcome. Those aren’t contradictory statements, in case that wasn’t clear.”
“It was clear.” She didn’t push past that, which I noticed and was grateful for, though I didn’t say so.
She set the glass down and settled back against my side, her head finding the same spot on my shoulder like it had already been assigned to her by some quiet agreement neither of us had spoken aloud.
“Thank you. For Rachel. I know what it cost you to give me that.”
An uncomfortable, unfamiliar tightness caught in my chest at the sound of my sister’s name sitting easily in Josie’s mouth, like she already belonged in the same sentence as people who mattered to me, which she did, which was the whole problem and the whole point at once.
My phone buzzed on the nightstand, and old habit had my hand on it before I’d decided to move at all. Harland Mutual, the subject line blunt in the way insurance companies were blunt about everything except payment: Holloway claim, appeal filed, second documentation period requested.
“Work?” Josie asked, watching my face rather than the phone.
“Trent’s appealing. They want another round on him.” I set the phone down without answering it yet, because some things could wait the length of a morning, even for me. “Means I’m back on Rover Street. Officially, this time, in daylight, with a decal on the van and an invoice with my name on it.”
“So the neighborhood gets its stalker back,” she said, “except now there’s paperwork.”
“Something like that.”
She laughed, low and warm against my shoulder, and neither of us moved to get up yet, and for a little while longer I let myself stay exactly where she’d put me, visible and still watched over instead of watching, and against every old instinct I owned, entirely still.