17. Jules
— ? —
Jules
I wake up alone in the guest room.
Harry isn’t in the armchair outside my door, and he isn’t in the kitchen when I make my way down the hall on my crutches. The coffee maker is cold and empty.
I make my own coffee, and I don’t think about yesterday.
I’m standing at the counter, staring out the window, when he comes in through the front door. He’s wearing running clothes, and his hair is damp with sweat.
“Morning,” he says.
“Morning.”
He moves to the refrigerator and pulls out a bottle of water. Neither of us mentions yesterday, and neither of us looks at the other for too long.
“I want to go to the office today,” I say.
He pauses with the bottle halfway to his mouth. “The office.”
“The building. Your building. I want to see it.”
“Jules, the tenth floor is still being cleaned out. It’s not safe.”
“I don’t care if it’s safe. I want to see it.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m finished being afraid of a building.” I set down my coffee cup. “Because I need to see it with my own eyes instead of imagining it every time I close them. Because I need to stand in that space and know that it can’t hurt me anymore.”
Harry is quiet for a moment, and then he nods.
“Okay. Let me shower and change.”
“Fine.”
He goes upstairs. I finish my coffee and think about what I’m doing.
I’m going back to the place where I almost died. I’m going to walk through what’s left of my office and stand in the bathroom where I was trapped. I’m going to make myself see it and face it.
And I’m going to make Harry see it too, through my eyes, so he understands what he’s spent the last four weeks apologizing for.
***
The building looks normal from the outside.
It has the same glass and steel facade, the same revolving doors and the same security desk in the lobby. You wouldn’t know anything had happened just by looking at it.
But the moment we step through the doors, the lobby goes quiet.
People stop talking and stop walking. They stop whatever they were doing and turn to stare at us, and at me specifically, the woman who almost died in the fire, making her way across the marble floor on crutches.
Harry’s hand finds the small of my back and stays there.
I keep my chin up and my eyes forward.
The whispers start behind us while we wait for the elevator, pitched low enough that they think I can’t hear.
“That’s her. That’s the wife.”
“I heard she was sleeping with someone in accounting before he married her.”
“Avery said she makes things up for attention.”
“Can you believe she’s showing her face here?”
I keep walking. Harry’s hand presses more firmly against my back, and I can feel the tension in him. He wants to speak up, to shut them down and defend me.
I shake my head slightly. Not now, and not here.
The elevator doors close behind us and cut the whispers off.
“I’m going to find out who said that,” Harry says with his jaw tight.
“You’re going to do nothing. They’ve been listening to Avery’s version for two years. One day isn’t going to change their minds.”
“Jules.”
“I don’t care what they think of me, Harry. I care about seeing that floor.”
The elevator rises and the numbers climb, and the doors open onto the tenth floor.
It’s worse than I imagined.
The walls are blackened. The ceiling tiles are gone, exposing charred beams and dangling wires. Everything that was furniture or carpet or office equipment has been reduced to ash and twisted metal.
The smell of smoke is everywhere, even now, weeks later. Harry’s office is at the other end of the floor behind a sheet of plastic, and he doesn’t even glance that way.
I move forward on my crutches, with the rubber tips crunching on debris. Harry walks beside me. He isn’t touching me now, but he stays close.
“My office was there,” I say, pointing to a doorway that no longer has a door. “The meeting room was next to it. The kitchenette was across the hall.”
We pick our way through the destruction. My desk is a twisted wreck of metal and melted laminate, my chair is nothing but a blackened frame, and the bookshelf where I kept my project binders has collapsed against the wall.
On the surface of the ruined desk, half buried in ash, I see a shape I recognize. It’s glass, cracked and blackened by heat, but still holding its form.
I reach down and pick it up.
It’s a vase, heavy and plain, the one that came from the florist. I turn it over in my hands. The glass is warped from the heat and the surface is crazed with tiny fractures, but I can still remember what it looked like sitting on my desk, full of pink and white blooms.
Twenty-four peonies, one for every month.
Harry is standing behind me, and I can feel him looking at the vase in my hands. He knows what it is, because he’s the one who sent it.
Neither of us says a word about it.
I set the vase back down on the ruined desk, in the exact spot where it sat the afternoon the peonies arrived, when I picked one out of the bunch and walked down the hall to his office to thank him.
I take hold of my crutches again and keep walking.
“The bathroom is at the end of the hall,” I say.
Harry doesn’t respond. He just follows me.
The bathroom door is still standing.
The wood is scorched black and the paint is blistered and peeling, but the frame is intact. And on the outside, clearly visible even through the fire damage, is the deadbolt.
I pull the door open and step inside.
The room is small, smaller than I remembered. There’s a toilet, a sink and a small window. Everything is covered in soot and ash, but the shape of the space is still there.
I make my way to the window and look out. The glass is gone now. From here I can see the street below, and the assembly area where people gathered during the evacuation, and the spot where I saw Harry standing.
“Come here,” I say.
He crosses the room and stands beside me.
“This is where I was,” I say. “This is what I saw.”
We look down at the street together. In my memory it’s chaos, all fire trucks and ambulances and people running. Now it’s just a normal street on a normal day.
“I saw you down there,” I say. “I saw you look around. And then I saw her grab your arm.”
Harry is very still beside me.
“You bent down to her.” I point to a spot on the street below. “You were standing right there.”
“I was asking her, again, exactly where she’d seen you,” he says quietly. “That’s what that was. I bent down because she was coughing so hard I couldn’t hear her answer.”
“And she told you what she’d already told you. The east exit.”
“Yes.” His voice is rough. “And I looked up anyway.”
“I saw that. For a second I thought you were looking for me. I thought you might see me.”
“I was looking for you. I was counting windows, trying to work out which one was yours.”
“And then you looked away.”
“She kept talking to me. I don’t even remember what she said. I looked back down at her, and by the time I looked up again, all I could see was smoke.”
We stand there in silence, looking down at the street where it all happened.
“I was right here,” I say. “Pounding on this glass and screaming your name. And you couldn’t hear me.”
He doesn’t try to answer that.
“I watched you stop looking. And I thought…” My voice catches. “I thought that was going to be the last thing I ever saw. You and her.”
Harry doesn’t say anything. His hand finds mine in this ruined room, and he holds on tight.
“I believe all of that,” I say after a while. “What you were doing down there. The counting windows. That you were looking for me. It still doesn’t give me back those five minutes. It doesn’t undo what I felt, or what I was certain of when I believed I was going to die.”
“I know it doesn’t.”
We stand there for a long moment, and I’m fine until I look down.
There are marks on the window frame, low down, where the paint has bubbled. They’re dark and smeared, and it takes me a second to understand that they’re mine. That’s where my hands were.
My legs just go.
One crutch hits the floor and I follow it down, and I end up sitting in the ash in a gutted bathroom, making a noise I’ve never heard come out of me before.
It isn’t pretty crying. It’s loud and ugly and it hurts my ribs, and I can’t stop it.
I held it together through the hospital and the nightmares and that lobby full of whispers, and it turns out all of it was waiting for me right here.
Harry gets down on the floor with me, in his good pants, in the filth. He doesn’t tell me it’s okay, and he doesn’t say a word. He puts his arms around me, and I hit him in the chest with the side of my fist, once, and then I grab his shirt and hang on.
“I was so scared,” I get out. “I was so fucking scared, and I was all by myself.”
“I know,” he says into my hair. “I’m here. I’m right here.”
I don’t know how long we stay down there. When it’s finally over I feel emptied out, and steadier than I’ve been in weeks. I wipe my face on my sleeve and leave a black streak across it.
“Help me up,” I say.
He does, and he hands me my crutch, and neither of us says a thing about it. Then I turn away from the window and look at the door, and at the deadbolt.
Harry follows my gaze. He walks over to it and touches the metal, and his hand isn’t quite steady.
“It was a supply room before we redid this floor,” he says, without looking at me. “Nobody ever took the bolt off. I must have walked past it a thousand times.”
“She stood on the other side of this door,” I say. “With her hand on that bolt, while the alarm was going off.”
Harry doesn’t respond. He’s staring at the deadbolt with his jaw tight and his whole body rigid. He doesn’t fall apart. He goes quieter than I’ve ever seen him.
Then he pulls out his phone and makes a call.
“I need a maintenance crew on the tenth floor,” he says. “Now. The bathroom at the end of the east corridor. I want the door taken off its hinges and destroyed. Not stored. Destroyed.” He pauses, listening. “It’s my building. Take it down.”
He hangs up.
I didn’t ask him to do that, and I don’t say a word about it.
We wait in the corridor for the maintenance crew. It’s two men with tools, who look uncertain but aren’t willing to argue with the man who signs their paychecks. They start on the hinges, working carefully.
My arms are shaking by then. I’ve been on these crutches for most of an hour, and the rubber handles are digging into my palms and my shoulders are burning, and I’m not going to admit any of it.
Harry notices anyway.
“Here.” He moves closer and offers his arm. “Lean on me.”
I should refuse. I should tell him I’m fine, that I don’t need his help, that I’ve been managing on my own for weeks now.
But my arms are shaking and my shoulders are burning, and the crew is still working on the hinges.
I take his arm.
I lean my weight against him and let my crutches take less of the burden. His body is warm and solid beside me.
We stand there not talking while the crew works and the door comes off its hinges one at a time. I don’t let go of his arm until they carry it away.
The bathroom is just a room now, with four walls, a window, and an opening where a door used to be. Nobody can be locked in here anymore.
Harry’s phone rings.
He looks at the screen and his face changes. “Hazel.”
He answers. I can hear Hazel’s voice through the speaker, though not the words.
“She did what?” Harry’s jaw tightens. “No. I’m with Jules. We’re at the building.” He listens. “I understand she’s upset. Call a doctor if she needs one. I’m not coming.”
He hangs up.
“What happened?” I ask.
“Avery found out yesterday that she’s fired. She showed up at the children’s home this morning, hysterical, saying I’m the only one who can calm her down.”
He didn’t look at me before he answered Hazel. He didn’t ask me what I wanted him to do.
I watch his face. I watch him look at the phone with his knuckles white around it. I watch his shoulders tense and then, deliberately, release.
He puts the phone in his pocket.
“Let’s go home,” he says.
I see what that cost him, and I keep it to myself.
***
The car ride is quiet.
We pull out of the parking garage and into traffic, and I stare out the window at the city passing by. My hands are trembling slightly in my lap, the way they do when adrenaline wears off.
At a red light, Harry reaches over and takes my hand.
I don’t pull away immediately. I let him hold it for the length of the light, and I feel the warmth of his palm against mine and the steady pressure of his fingers.
When the light turns green, I take my hand back.
Neither of us says anything.