CHAPTER 1 #2
Miso blinked up at me, thoroughly unimpressed, the way cats are with anything that isn't dinner. I laughed, once, quiet, and closed the book with my finger holding the page.
I knew exactly what my college roommate would say if she could see me now.
Tea. Cat. Poetry. A stack of medical paperwork.
In bed by eleven on a Tuesday. You need a life, Naomi.
She had been telling me that since we were twenty-two, half joking and half not, and I never argued because the sentence missed the point entirely.
I was twenty-four, and at twenty I might have been disappointed by the quiet shape of this Tuesday night.
But quiet was not the same as small. Most of my college friends were engaged or living in cities that made Boston look modest. I did not envy them, though some nights I wondered what it said about me that I never wanted to be anywhere else.
Two friends from graduate school called every few weeks to make sure I had not vanished into my own four walls, and that felt like exactly enough people to keep track of.
I had a life. I loved its radiator, its rain, and the daily miracle of doing careful work that mattered to people who would never know my name.
I had built a place where no one arranged my hours without asking and everyone let me finish my sentences—everyone except, apparently, my father.
That had felt like enough for a long time.
Tonight, for reasons I could not name, a hairline crack seemed to run through the middle of it.
I meant to go to bed early. I always meant to.
Instead I read three more pages of the cardiology paper out of pure habit, then found myself just sitting with it instead of working, watching the rain thin to almost nothing against the glass, my mind circling back to three flat sentences and refusing to land anywhere useful.
By the time I finally gave up and went to bed, it was well past midnight, and sleep, when it agreed to show up at all, was thin and unconvincing, the kind you keep almost waking out of.
I woke sometime after two, the way you do when your body decides on its own that enough is enough.
My mouth was dry. The mug of chamomile on my nightstand had gone syrupy and cold, and I didn't want it anymore.
I lay there a minute, listening to the building's small nighttime sounds: a pipe somewhere, wind testing the window frame, the couple upstairs' television murmuring through the floor the way it always did until one or the other of them fell asleep on the couch.
None of it was strange. I gave up on sleep anyway and padded out to the kitchen in my socks for a glass of water.
The apartment was dark except for the orange wash of the streetlamp through the window over the sink, quiet in the specific way Cambridge gets quiet at two in the morning: not silent, exactly, just paused, like the whole street was holding its breath between one car passing and the next.
The tile was cold under my socked feet, colder than it should have been in a heated building, and for one strange second I almost laughed at myself for noticing something so small at two in the morning.
I filled a glass at the tap and was halfway through drinking it when I noticed the strip of light under my front door had gone strange.
The hallway bulb outside my apartment was flickering, stuttering on and off, on and off, the way a bulb does right before it finally gives out.
Except it kept doing that instead of just dying, longer than a dying bulb should.
I stood very still and watched it, the glass cold against my palm, telling myself it was nothing.
Old building. Old wiring. I'd already complained about that hallway light to the super twice.
My phone sat on the coffee table across the room, out of reach, and some small animal part of me noted that fact before I'd even decided it mattered.
Then I heard it. A small, careful sound at the door, metal shifting against metal, so soft I almost convinced myself I'd imagined it.
Not a knock. Not someone fumbling with keys.
Something patient and precise, working the pins of my deadbolt one at a time, the way you'd move if you had all the time in the world and no interest in anyone hearing you use it.
Someone was picking my lock.
I didn't scream. I didn't move. My whole body went cold and still at once, the water forgotten in my hand, my heart slamming hard enough that I felt it in my throat.
I pressed my thumb into the center of my palm, an old habit, the thing my mother taught me to do when the world got too loud to think through, find one small thing and hold onto it, and without meaning to, I started counting in my head.
Ichi, ni, san, shi, go. One, two, three, four, five.
I didn't get past four before the sound at the door stopped.
There was no time to reach the phone across the room, and some clear, cold part of my mind understood that a half second before the rest of me caught up.
Running for the bedroom would only trap me in a smaller room with fewer doors, farther from anyone who might hear me.
So I stayed exactly where I was, glass in hand, and listened to the deadbolt turn.
The door swung open, slow and measured, like whoever stood on the other side had every right in the world to be there.
Three men stepped into my apartment, one slightly ahead of the other two.
All three wore black suits, pressed and unremarkable, the kind you'd see in a law office or a funeral home.
None of them hurried. None of them looked surprised to find me standing barefoot in my own kitchen with a glass shaking in my hand.
One of the two behind the lead man glanced once toward the hallway that led to my bedroom, a quick, practiced sweep, like he was confirming the apartment matched a floor plan he'd already memorized.
Then his attention came back to me and stayed there, patient and unbothered, like I was simply the last item left to check off a very short list.
The glass slipped. I heard it break against the floor somewhere far away, like it belonged to someone else. Behind me, on the couch, I heard Miso's weight shift and go still, the way animals do when they decide, faster than any person in the room, that the safest thing left is to disappear.
“Who—” My voice came out smaller than I meant it to. “Who are you? How did you get in here?”
The one in front didn't answer that, not directly.
He looked to be about my father's age, silver at the temples, his hands loose and open at his sides in a way that was probably meant to be reassuring and wasn't, not even a little.
He met my eyes the way you'd look at something breakable you'd been asked to carry carefully down a long flight of stairs.
“You're not in danger tonight, Miss Bell.” His English was precise, almost without an accent at all, the kind you learn in a classroom and then perfect somewhere else entirely. He said my name like he'd practiced saying it.
“What do you want?” I asked, clipped and almost businesslike. My hands wouldn't stop shaking. My voice, apparently, hadn't gotten the message.
“Only to see you safely on your way, Miss Bell.” He said it the way you'd soothe a spooked horse, gentle and final at once, offering nothing else.
He knew my name. He knew my father's name. He'd let himself into my apartment like the lock had never been a serious question in the first place, and his voice was still that same unhurried calm when he said the rest of it.
“Miss Bell,” he said. “Your father has arranged your travel. You have thirty minutes to pack.”