Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
CHARLOTTE
The last volunteer leaves at nine thirteen, dragging a trash bag behind her and apologizing three times for abandoning me with the donation envelopes.
“Go,” I tell Marianne, forcing my smile to stay normal. “Your children have probably launching a coup at home.”
She laughs, tired and fond, and steps out through the front doors into the wet black shine of the parking lot. Her taillights smear red across the glass as she pulls away. Then the Conservatory settles.
It's not quiet. Old buildings are never quiet.
They tick and breathe and shift in their sleep.
Water slides down the panes from the evening rain.
Somewhere high above me, a repaired frame gives a soft metallic pop as the temperature drops.
The river moves beyond the west wall, dark and steady. Usually, I love this hour.
After people leave, Devane feels like it trusts me again. Ferns hunched in their beds. Ladders folded against the walls. The smell of damp soil, old iron, and fresh paint. My place. My landmark. The one thing I fought for that didn't ask whether I was enough to keep it.
Tonight, I keep looking at the doors. I check my phone. One bar. Of course.
Lucy has texted four times.
Tell me when you leave.
Actually tell me before you leave.
No weird bravery.
Charlotte, I know you read these.
I type back.
Five minutes. Locking up now.
The message hangs, unsent, then finally goes through.
My keys are on the folding table beside the cash box. My coat is over the back of a chair. I gather the envelopes first because money has rules and panic doesn't get to eat the rules. Then I turn off the first row of work lights. Dark folds into the corners.
I stop with my hand on the next switch. For one second, I hear nothing but rain and river. Then a sound comes from the orchid room. It's not loud or dramatic. Just a soft scrape, like a shoe sole against stone. My body knows before my mind agrees.
“Dale?” My voice comes out too thin. No answer.
I reach for my phone. The screen lights my palm, bright enough to show my shaking thumb. Still one bar. I press Lucy’s name. Calling. Calling. The line fails.
A colder, cleaner fear moves through me.
Not dread. Not anxiety. This is fear. Stone cold fear.
I put the phone in my coat pocket because dropping it would be worse, then pick up the nearest thing on the table: a metal donation sign on a thin stake.
It's ridiculous, but it's sharp enough at the end to matter.
My hand closes around it with the hope that 'sharp enough' won't fail me.
“I’m leaving now,” I call, louder. “So whoever is back there, the building is closed.” The orchid room answers with silence.
I move toward the front doors. Slow at first, then faster.
A man steps out from behind the palm screen. I stop so hard the edge of the sign bites my palm.
He's smaller than terror should be. Medium height.
Dark jacket. Baseball cap in one hand now, like he has decided manners matter.
Ordinary beard. Narrow mouth. A face I could pass on the sidewalk and forget by the next block.
Except I know him. Not his name, not yet, but I recognize him from reflections, from the edge of crowds, and from the place near the sycamores where I convinced myself shadow was only shadow.
He smiles. “Don’t look like that, Charlotte.”
My stomach drops through me. He says my name like he has practiced it alone.
“Who are you?” I ask.
“You know who I am.”
“I don’t.”
His smile twitches. “That’s not true.”
I take one step back. He takes one forward.
“Stay where you are.”
His eyes flick to the sign in my hand, and something ugly passes through his face. It's not fear, but offense.
“I’m not going to hurt you.”
Every woman alive knows that sentence can mean anything except safety.
“I said stay there.”
“I came to talk.” His voice stays soft, almost wounded. “You keep making that impossible.”
“I don’t know you.”
The offense deepens. “My name is Greg.”
The name lands nowhere. It should help. Names make people human, but this one only pins him closer to the real world.
“Greg Norris,” he says, like I’ve been rude not to recognize it. “I comment all the time. I sent you the fern bracelet.”
My throat tightens. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
“You liked it.”
“I didn’t.”
His face changes again, so fast I almost miss it. A flash of rage under the skin, then the calm slides right back over it.
“You’re scared because people keep getting between us,” he says. “Your friend. That restaurant guy. Him.”
I don't ask which him. I can't say Logan's name in the space where he isn't. Where I have to admit I need him.
“No one is between us,” I say. “There is no us.”
Greg laughs once, softly, as if I’m being stubborn in a way he finds intimate. “You write to me every week.”
“I write a public blog.”
“You show me where you are. What you love. What hurts you.” He gestures around the Conservatory, and the movement makes me flinch. “This place. You didn’t save it for them. They don’t understand it.”
I take another step back. My heel hits the leg of a chair, and the sound cracks through the glass house. Greg’s eyes sharpen.
“Don’t run.”
The words empty my mind. Then I run.
The chair goes over behind me. I hear him swear. I bolt down the central aisle, past fern beds and stacked crates, my boots slipping on damp stone. The donation sign clatters from my hand. My breath tears in and out so loud I can't hear his feet at first. Then I can. Fast. Close.
I cut left toward the service hall. The door there sticks. It always sticks. I know this building. I know the stubborn latch, the uneven tile, and the place where the ceiling leaks near the old propagation room. My hand hits the knob. Locked.
No. No, no.
I yank once, twice. The door doesn't move. Behind me, Greg’s footsteps slow.
“Charlotte.”
I turn and throw the cash box at him. It catches his shoulder, not his face, but hard enough to make him grunt. Envelopes burst across the floor. I'm already moving, back through the west aisle, toward the side exit by the river path.
My phone. I dig into my pocket while I run, my fingers closing around it. Greg catches my coat from behind.
The fabric jerks me backward. I twist out of it on instinct, one sleeve turning inside out as I tear free. His hand scrapes my wrist. Pain flashes bright, but I don't stop. I hit the side exit with my shoulder. Chained.
For a second, I stare at the chain looped through the handles.
I did that. I chained it after the last tour group left because Dale said the latch was unreliable.
Because I'm careful. Because I'm competent. Because I’ve spent weeks trying to prove fear doesn't get to shrink my life, and now my own good sense has locked me inside with him.
A sound comes out of me. Small. Animal. Mine.
Greg is at the end of the aisle, holding my coat. His breathing is rough now. The softness is gone. “You made me chase you.”
I back away from the chained door. “Let me leave.”
“I came here because you need to understand.” He drops my coat. “You keep choosing the wrong people.”
“I’m married.” The words come before I can stop them.
His mouth twists. “No,” he says. “He doesn’t get that word anymore.”
I feel the Conservatory around me then, all glass and black iron, rain-streaked, beautiful, and useless. A place made to hold light, with nowhere solid to hide. Greg moves toward me.
I grab a clay pot from the nearest bench and hurl it. It shatters against the floor between us, soil exploding over his shoes. He lunges through it. I run for the front.
My lungs burn. My injured wrist throbs. I can see the doors ahead, the parking lot beyond them, empty and slick and impossibly far. If I can get outside, I can scream. I can reach the road. I can be a person in public again.
My foot slips on spilled soil. I slam into a worktable, hip first. Pain bursts white along my side. A stack of plant trays crashes down. I catch myself, sobbing once, and push off.
His hand closes around my arm. Hard. The world narrows to his fingers digging through my sleeve.
“Stop,” he snarls.
I fight like there is no dignity left to save. I twist, claw, kick backward, and catch his shin. He curses and yanks me against him, his breath hot near my ear.
“You were supposed to see me,” he says.
“I see you,” I gasp. “I see exactly what you are.”
His grip tightens until pain shoots to my shoulder. Then white light explodes across the glass.
Headlights. Brilliant. Sudden. Blinding. They spear through the front doors and turn every pane of the dark Conservatory silver. Greg freezes, his hand still locked on my arm. Outside, an engine roars closer.
Only seconds later, the doors blow open.