Chapter 29
The apartment still smelled faintly like Trent’s sweat, or maybe I only imagined that, the way a wound aches in a limb that isn’t there anymore.
The chain was on the door. I’d checked it myself when we came in, and checked the window latch in the kitchen while Josie ran water over a dish towel for her wrist, and texted Dani a single line letting her know Trent was in custody and Josie was safe at home.
Rosa had already knocked once to ask if everything was all right, and Josie had told her through the door that it was, and I’d believed that more than I believed most things people said through doors.
Josie sat on her couch with the ice pack pressed to her wrist, and I sat across from her in the chair she’d pointed me toward, which felt like being seated for an interview rather than invited to stay.
I understood the difference. I’d asked for the wrong thing and she’d corrected me, and now I was living inside the correction.
“You’re doing the thing,” she said, not looking up from the ice pack.
“What thing?”
“The thing where you go quiet and I can hear you building an argument behind your face.” She shifted the pack to a new angle on her wrist and finally looked at me. “Say it. Whatever it is. I’d rather have it out loud than watch you assemble it for twenty minutes.”
I’d spent most of the time sitting in the car outside, before I ever came up, turning over a version of this that sounded reasonable, and none of the versions had survived contact with her actually sitting in front of me, safe, stubborn, holding an ice pack against a bruise a man twice her size had left on her in under a minute.
“I want you to stay at my house. Not tonight only. Until this settles, at minimum, and I’d be lying if I told you I only meant until this settles. ”
“I know you would.” She said it without heat, which somehow made it land harder than if she’d been angry.
“And I already told you no once tonight, so I’m going to ask you something instead of arguing with you again.
Why your house? Specifically. Not a hotel, not somewhere neutral.
Your house, the one you’ve never once let me enter at all. ”
There it was, sitting in the room with us the way I’d known it would eventually sit there, and some part of me had been waiting for her to say it since the first night I’d let her past my front door and steered her, without ever quite admitting I was steering her, away from the hallway that led to my office.
“Because I can control who comes near you there,” I said. “Alarm system, sightlines, a door I trust.”
“That’s the true answer and it’s also not the whole answer.
” She set the ice pack down on the cushion beside her, done pretending the wrist needed her full attention, and gave me hers instead.
“You want me somewhere you can watch over completely. But you still haven’t shown me the parts of that house you don’t want watched.
You’re asking me to move my whole life inside walls you haven’t fully opened to me.
Do you hear how that sounds, coming from you specifically? ”
I heard it. “My father’s name is Patrick Rourke,” I said, because it was the only place I knew how to start. “He’s a confidence fraudster. Was, is, I don’t know what tense to use for a man who’s still out there doing it to somebody.”
Josie didn’t move, didn’t reach for a joke, just kept looking at me with a stillness I’d noticed in her before, the kind she seemed to save for the things that actually mattered.
“He used to take whatever he knew about the people closest to him and turn it into leverage,” I said.
“Not big things, at first. What worried my mother. What embarrassed my sister. What I was afraid of when I was nine. He’d file it away and use it later, exactly when it would do the most damage, or exactly when it would get him what he wanted. ”
I stopped there, and found I didn’t want to keep going in a straight line, so I didn’t.
“He opened accounts in my name when I was seventeen. And in Rachel’s, a few years later, after I thought I’d already gotten him out of our lives.
” I turned my hands over once, looked at them, put them flat on my knees.
“It took us most of a year to unwind it. Longer than that to stop flinching every time a collections call came in with an unfamiliar number.”
“That’s why you watch everyone,” Josie said quietly. “And tell almost nothing about yourself.”
“I learned to watch him first. Moods, receipts, whose car was in the driveway. I got good at it before I understood why I needed to be good at it.” I made myself keep going, because stopping now would have been another lie.
“Somewhere in there I decided that if I always knew more than the people around me, nobody could blindside me again. Nobody could use something against me that I hadn’t already accounted for. ”
“And that’s why you’ve asked for every corner of my life,” she said, “while never once letting me through your own front door.”
“Yes. Information is how I stay safe. I gather it, and I keep mine from being gathered. That is not a fair trade to ask anyone else to live inside, especially you.”
She was quiet a moment. “That explains where it started. It doesn’t fix you asking me to move into a house you still won’t let me see.” She picked up the ice pack again. “I’m not leaving my apartment. But if you need to know I’m safe more than you need your own bed, stay on the couch.”
“I’d like to stay,” I said, and meant it more plainly than I’d meant almost anything in longer than I could easily account for.
“Then stay.” She took my hand. “I’m not asking for client files. I’m asking to be let into your life the way you entered mine. Your house. Your history. Not tonight, but eventually. I’m not going to keep loving you through a hallway you won’t let me past.”
I didn’t answer right away. I sat with it instead, and understood, somewhere in the sitting, that what she was describing wasn’t a demand I needed to counter or manage or account for in advance.
It was just a door. One I could choose to open on my own terms, in my own time, without anyone taking anything from me by walking through it.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay,” she said back, and asked for nothing more that night.