Chapter 60
Saint
The last morning.
I watch her sleep for the final time in this room, and I think about the first time I stood outside her door, forty-five minutes in the dark, listening to a building settle, hearing her instead. The note I wrote in seven drafts. The decision I had already made before she arrived, before any of it.
I look at the room in the early gray light.
The bare desk. The empty shelf. The gap in the curtain that has let in the same wedge of streetlight for the duration of everything that has happened in this room, which is considerable.
Notes and nightmares and both hands on my chest and a library collection left open to a page, and the first time she said my name as I took her from behind.
I’m a different man from the one in the white room.
I’m not a simple man. I’m not a safe man. I’m not the kind of man who most people would look at and think, yes, that is what good looks like. I have broken things and people, and I have done it with an absolute absence of alternatives.
But I have also been the man who came back, and this is the part I’m still learning to hold without flinching.
She opens her eyes and finds me.
“You watched me sleep again,” she says, her voice with sleep.
“Always.”
She doesn’t tell me to stop. She never does.
She just lets me have it, the watching, the way she lets me have a lot of things that most people would find excessive because she knows the difference between watching that comes from possession and watching that comes from something else, and she has learned to tell the difference in me.
“Ready,” she says.