7. Three Days
THREE DAYS
EMILIA
He stayed.
The thing about being someone whose nights end alone for a decade is that you stop expecting the morning to arrive with company.
Bergamot in my hair, his arm under my neck, light through the curtain at the angle that means seven.
The phone on the nightstand is mine. The one on the floor in the next room is his, going off in a register I am training myself to recognize.
Lying still becomes a strategy because moving will make him a man who has to leave, and the morning is not ready for that yet.
His breathing changes.
"You're awake." His voice at my hairline, like a man who has not slept in a year.
"I have been."
"How long?" His thumb finds my shoulder.
"Not long."
The arm under my neck shifts. He props himself up on one elbow. Looking at him in daylight is the second hardest thing I have done this morning. The hardest was opening my eyes.
"Review," he says gravely, like a man reading a verdict. "For the file."
"The file."
"You snore."
"I do not."
"Like a small mechanical device."
A laugh bursts out of me before I can stop it, the kind that turns into the next laugh, and the next, until my ribs ache and I have to bury my face in his shoulder to make it stop.
His chest moves under my cheek once, the way a man's does when he isn't laughing on the outside but is on the inside. He lets me have it.
When I surface, he is looking at me the way a man looks when he is about to explain something.
"We need to talk."
My laugh is dry. "I am familiar with the form."
"Not the form." The way he says it makes me sit up. "The surveillance hasn't stopped. The man with the camera is one of three so far. The paymaster is someone whose relationship to me complicates the response. You need to be somewhere other than here for a few days."
He says it the way he says all his work things. Level, surgical, even.
"How not-here are we talking?" The question comes out at the right level.
"Brooklyn. My place. The block is mine. Three of the doors. The basement has its own exit."
The word basement gets noted. So does the own way out. So does the absence of any version of this where I get to argue.
"For how long?"
"Until I move the paymaster off you. It could be days. It could be a week."
Sitting fully up drops the sheet, which keeps him from looking. The not-looking is its own kind of compliment at 7:43 a.m.
"Okay."
"Okay?" His composure cracks half an inch.
"Leo." The sheet stays where it is. "A man broke into my apartment twice. Another took my picture twice. The first man, you, left me a sentence in my own handwriting, which is currently in my bed. The pretending is over."
His face does what it did at the door at four. The look the writer in me has been told to stop trying to name.
"Pack a bag," he tells me. "Three days' worth. The notebook you write in. Whatever you cannot replace."
Packing happens at the pace of a woman who has been waiting to be moved.
Into the duffel go the heavy pen from nowhere, the notebook I am halfway through, two changes of clothes, the paperback by the lamp, the laptop, the charger, a toothbrush, and deodorant.
Everything else stays out. Twenty-nine years of a woman’s life are in this apartment. Three days' worth fits.
He has put his coat back on, not his shirt. The duality is doing things to me at 7:51 a.m. that I did not know were possible.
The corner of his mouth moves a sixteenth of an inch when he sees me see it.
"Later," he tells me, and the word lands the way a hand does.
The car at the curb is a Mercedes, the color of nothing. Sal is at the wheel. The man at the lit window has the morning shift, too.
"Ma'am." He doesn't look at me when he says it.
"Emilia."
"Emilia." His eyes meet mine in the mirror once, the look in them belonging to a man who has worked for Leo longer than most marriages endure.
The Brooklyn block has trees old enough to remember other wars, and houses to match. People here have known one another for three generations. The brownstone sits on the corner, three steps up. The door is heavier than mine.
Inside is the home of a man who has lived alone in the same place for a long time and has stopped pretending he might fill it with someone someday.
Two walls of books, a kitchen with signs of use, and a piano in the front room kept tuned by someone who knows what they are doing.
The smell of bergamot, of ink, of coffee made hours ago.
"You have a piano."
"It came with the house."
"Do you play?"
A pause that costs him something. "Yes."
The most personal thing he has told me in five weeks feels like a small grenade between us.
He walks me through the house. Kitchen, parlor, and the back study with a desk by a window. A narrow staircase that one of us has to climb sideways. His bedroom is the one he takes me to. The bed is large, the sheets are good, and the closet has three drawers, all emptied for me.
All of which has been planned.
He does not open the cellar door. A brushed-steel handle bears the patina of frequent use. The moment we approach, his hand goes to the small of my back, his stride does not change, and the door is behind us before either of us has to acknowledge it.
"What's down there?"
"Storage." He says it without looking at the door.
"Storage," I repeat.
"That's right."
The look he gives me is one I have not seen him use on me before. It says drop it. The pan-drop instinct fires before any decision.
He makes coffee. The mug he hands me is heavy, blue-glazed ceramic, not the WORLD'S OKAYEST WRITER one that has stayed in my apartment, and the absence of that ugly thing between us is its own kind of presence.
"It's quieter than my place," I tell him, my palms on the kitchen counter.
"It's older." He sets his own cup down.
"Old enough that the floors complain when you step on them." My hand runs along the counter.
"Old enough."
His phone buzzes in his pocket. He looks at it, types something with one thumb, and puts it back.
"Work?"
"Work." He doesn't elaborate.
"The not-talking-about-work kind of work?"
"The not-yet kind." His eyes find mine briefly.
That's new. Not yet is a temperature change.
Settling at the kitchen table happens because the light is best there and because being there has become a preference in itself. Opening the laptop, taking out the pen, smoothing the notebook flat: the rituals of starting.
He works in the back study with the door half-shut, the way a man who used to work alone does when he's trying something new. Calls in two languages, none of which leak. The wall-voice is back, but the wall between us is now intentional, and the message is: keep going.
Writing happens. Not chapter nineteen of the in-progress book, which is in my apartment, in a panicked margin I cannot reach.
Something else has arrived, a scene I have been carrying for a week without permission to land.
The heroine sees the Don's house for the first time. The house turns out to know her.
The work is good. It is also a problem because the writing has stopped pretending and started telling.
Lunch happens at the kitchen table. The sandwiches he brings come from a deli on the next block, and the deli takes his order before he even speaks. He eats fast, watches me eat fast, and neither of us says anything that could be called conversation.
It should feel strange, but it does not.
By dusk, the brownstone has gone quiet around us. He takes a call in the front parlor with the door closed. His tone shifts for it. The Italian version of his voice, which I am not supposed to notice, has a different gear tonight.
The kitchen light is yellow. The pen runs out of ink on page six. A second pen, also from nowhere and fitting the hand as if poured, comes from the inside pocket of my coat, where I have apparently been carrying spares.
At 10 p.m., he comes in, finds me asleep at the table, and lifts me. The walk upstairs has a rhythm I am beginning to understand.
"Bed." His mouth rests at my temple.
The reply comes muffled into his shoulder.
"Tomorrow you write here; I work there. We figure the rest of it out as we go." His hand is at the back of my head.
"Mmm."
His mouth is at my temple, his hand at the back of my head. The mattress takes us. The light goes out.
Sleeping happens.
Waking at one a.m. also happens.
The brownstone at one a.m. is its own kind of room. The radiator does what radiators do. In the bedroom’s darkness, the man asleep beside me, one hand on my hip, even unconscious. The urge to stay in the warm shape of him is strong.
Strong enough that walking out of it requires a reason.
The reason is water. The reason is also the cellar door, which has been lingering in the back of my mind like a margin note since noon.
Kitchen tile is cold under my feet. The water from the tap is even colder. The cellar door is at the end of the hall.
The handle does not turn.
Locked.
Of course, locked.
Telling myself this is reasonable security takes ten seconds. Then the lie fails because the door is locked from the inside, which is a choice, not a precaution.
Across the hall is the study. The desk lamp is still on, the way men leave it when they have stopped expecting to return to a room. There are papers I do not let myself look at, because some lines I am still pretending to hold.
Instead, I look at the shelf above the desk. Books, two rows of them. The bottom row holds the kind of nonfiction a man like him would read: history, strategy, and a biography I half-remember from a list.
The top row is novels.
The third book from the left is mine.
The Deadline Superstition, by Bianca Cross. First edition. The dust jacket bears the small white nick on the back panel that I would recognize in the dark, the one that has been there since the box arrived at my apartment three years ago.
It has been missing from my shelf since the night of the elevator, three weeks ago. The morning I walked into my kitchen, I found the line about the bridge in the margin.
The book is here.
The pull of it is the wrong kind. Picking it up happens because the alternative is to stand there and pretend not to see it.
The pages open to one that has been read more than once. The bend at the spine is the kind a working reader leaves. There is a faint pencil mark in the margin, near a paragraph about a woman who cannot sleep because her apartment has been re-entered three nights in a row.
The pencil mark is a single word.
Cecilia.
The handwriting is the same as in my margin, the same as on the desk note, the hand of a man who has been collecting me, piece by piece, since before I had a name for him.
My mother's name is written in his handwriting in the margin of my own book.
The duffel I packed three days' worth of clothes into is upstairs in his bedroom, on the floor by his shoes.
Behind me, the kitchen is silent. The cellar door does not open. The book in my hand is the only thing in the room that breathes.