14. Norah
Chapter fourteen
Norah
Ilook at Silas.
“Who was that?”
“Greer,” he says, the name carrying the economy of someone who doesn’t need to add anything to it. “My father’s older brother. He’s been with my father since before I was born.”
“And your father is going to know about me now.”
Silas looks at me steadily. “My father already knows about you. Not what happened tonight. You.”
That arrives with a weight I wasn’t prepared for—the awareness of existing in someone’s information before you’ve ever been in the same room with them.
“How?”
“Because he knows everything that happens in and around this operation,” Silas says, “and I’ve been spending time in a bookshop on Norwood for the past few weeks.”
The matter-of-factness of it is more unsettling than if he’d said it dramatically.
“And that’s a problem?” I ask.
He looks at me for a long moment. His expression says the present moment is more important than what it’s going to cost later.
“It’s complicated,” he says.
“You keep saying that.”
“It keeps being true.”
“Is it going to stay complicated?” I ask.
“Probably.”
“Okay.”
“Just okay?” he says.
“I’ve never been good at uncomplicated.”
His eyes light up.
“Your father’s waiting,” I say.
“He can wait another minute.”
His hands are still on my face. Mine are still on his jacket.
Because you matter to me.
I think: four words on a loading dock. I said them, and I meant them, and now they exist in a way they didn’t an hour ago. There is no version of putting them back.
I don’t want to put them back.
He reads my face. The guardedness goes out of him. Then he lets me go, steps back, and looks toward the building with the look of someone who has just remembered where he has to be.
“I have to go up,” he says.
“I know,” I say.
He holds my gaze for one more beat, then turns and walks back inside. The door closes. The dock is mine.
I stand there for a moment in the quiet of it, alone now, and I let the full weight of the last fifteen minutes move through me.
I get in my car and sit for a moment. Then I start the engine. When I take the turn out of the lot, I glance up at the building without meaning to.
In the far window, on the second floor is a figure. A man, standing still, looking down at my car. Not Greer. Not Silas. Older. He doesn’t move when I look up.
I face forward and drive. I’m three blocks away before it occurs to me that my hands are trembling.
I pull over, not because I need to—the light is green and the road is clear—but because I am not entirely sure I should be operating a vehicle right now. I put the hazards on and sit in the amber blink of them, looking at nothing and concentrating on my breathing.
Then I call Jewell.
It rings four times, which with Jewell means she’s deciding. On the fifth she picks up.
“You’re calling me,” she says. “With your actual voice.”
“I know. I’m sorry. It breaks our rule of texting only.”
“Are you dying?”
“No.”
“Then this is a significant imposition, and I want you to know I’m logging it.” A pause. “What happened?”
I look out the windshield at the street. It’s a perfectly ordinary afternoon that feels monumental in my head right now.
“And?”
“I did something,” I say.
“Define something.”
“I said what I needed to say, and now I’m pulled over on the side of the road because my hands are shaking.”
Silence. When Jewell goes silent, it means she’s processing information that doesn’t have sufficient context.
“Where did you go?” she says.
“Coulter Cleaners. The dry-cleaning operation. Their big warehouse. Silas and his family have apartments on the top floor.”
Another silence, longer.
“Norah,” she says. “You went to his house?”
“Technically, it’s not a house. It’s a warehouse with apartments upstairs, so…”
“I understand the distinction, and I’m telling you it doesn’t matter.” She says it without heat, as though she is simply reporting the facts. “You drove across the city to where he lives and works with his family. Were you invited? Of course you weren’t.” She pauses. “What did you say?”
I watch a dog walker turn the corner and disappear.
“I told him the truth,” I say.
“Norah.”
“It needed to be said.”
“I’m not arguing with that. What did you say?”
Jewell’s voice is so calm, so soft, the way a practiced parent does, trying to get their kid to admit to shoplifting.
I look at my hands on the wheel. They’ve stopped trembling, mostly. “I told him he matters to me. On the loading dock. I told him he matters to me.”
The silence that follows is different from the others. Longer. More loaded, like Jewell is turning the information over before she responds to it.
“Okay,” she says finally.
“What does that mean?”
“I’m computing. Give me a second.” Another beat. “And then what?”
“He kissed me.”
“On the loading dock?”
“Yes.”
“In front of his crew?”
“They found somewhere else to be.”
“Smart crew,” she says. Then: “There’s a but coming. I can hear it.”
I think about Greer in the doorway. Your father’s looking for you. The way the air on the dock changed when he appeared; the way Silas became guarded but stood his ground at the same time.
“Someone saw us,” I say. “His uncle. He sounds like his father’s henchman. And when I left…” I stop. “There was a man in a second-floor window. Looking down at the lot. Watching me.”
Jewell doesn’t say anything for a moment.
“His father,” she says.
“I don’t know that for certain.”
“But you think so.”
“Yes.”
“Your hands are shaking, aren’t they? And you’re pulled over on a side street, right?” Jewell doesn’t wait for an answer. “But you’re not pulled over because you’re afraid. You’re pulled over because of what you said on the dock.”
She might as well have said ’gotcha’ with the enthusiasm and pride I hear in her voice.
I open my mouth to deflect, and then close it tightly, because Jewell has no patience for deflection and also because she’s right.
“It came out of me before I’d finished deciding to say it,” I say. “But I didn’t take it back. And he kissed me. And now I’m sitting here and I don’t know what to do with any of it.”
“You don’t have to do anything with it today,” Jewell says.
“Since when are you the calm one?”
“I have my moments.”
“You answered a phone call.”
“Exactly. I’m basically a hero,” she says. “Norah. You drove across the city and walked onto a loading dock full of wolves and told a man he matters to you. His father most certainly already knows about you. And you’re not scared off.”
It isn’t a question, but it sits like one.
“No,” I say.
“Then you already know what this is,” she says. “You’re just not ready to name it yet.”
I don’t answer, which is its own kind of answer, and Jewell lets it be one.
“Go home,” she says. “Eat something. Call me tomorrow and tell me everything, in person, with snacks. I will answer the door because I’m a good friend who answered an actual phone call today and is therefore operating well above her baseline.”
“You are,” I say. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me,” she says. “Drive safely.”
She hangs up first, which is her thing, and I sit for another moment in the amber blink of my hazards. Then I turn them off and pull back into traffic and start the drive back home.
She’s right.
I already know what this is.
I’m just not ready to say it yet.
I think about what Silas said at Hannigan’s. About fated mates. The wolf recognizes first. It’s permanent.
I asked if he’d met his. He didn’t answer.
I filed that away as a no. I’m less sure about that now.