Chapter 8 - Damien #2
The bathroom is small. A shower stall, no tub.
A sink with a cracked mirror above it. On the shelf: soap, shampoo, a toothbrush in a cup, a bottle of lotion.
I pick up the lotion. The label says shea butter and vanilla.
I open it and the scent hits me—soft, warm, sweet.
This is what she puts on her hands at night.
The hands that weld steel and bend iron and made the sculpture that's going to fill a gallery in four days.
I put the lotion back. My hands are no longer steady. I notice this with the clinical detachment of a man observing his own unravelling. The tremor is slight—invisible to anyone watching. But I feel it. The first sign that control is slipping.
I go back to the main room. I should leave.
I've been here nine minutes and every second increases the risk.
She could come home early. A neighbour could hear movement.
The hallway light on the fourth floor could be fixed tonight by some miracle of civic maintenance, and my face would be visible on a landing I have no reason to be on.
I should leave.
Instead, I sit on her bed.
The mattress is firm. Cheap, probably, but well-kept. The quilt is soft under my hands—washed many times, the fabric thinning in places. I sit with my palms flat on it and breathe.
This is where she sleeps. Every night, she lies here in the dark, in this small room, in this cold apartment, and closes her eyes and lets the world go.
This is where she's most unguarded. Most vulnerable.
The place where the foster-care vigilance finally relaxes and she becomes just a woman, sleeping, dreaming, the lines of worry smoothing out of her face.
I've seen her sleep. Through the camera, on nights when she's worked late at the studio and fallen asleep on the crate with her jacket over her like a blanket.
Her face changes when she sleeps—softens, loses the watchful quality that defines her waking expression.
She looks younger. More open. Like the girl she might have been if the world had been kinder.
I'm sitting on her bed. In her apartment. Surrounded by her things. And the feeling that moves through me is so large and so complex that I can't reduce it to a single word.
Shame. That's the first layer. Deep, visceral shame—the knowledge that what I'm doing is indefensible by any moral framework.
This woman has built her life around the principle of self-sovereignty.
Her space, her choices, her boundaries. She locks her door every night—deadbolt and chain.
She keeps her world small and controlled because control is the only safety she's ever known.
And I've walked through her locks like they don't exist, because to me, they don't.
Beneath the shame: tenderness. Devastating, unwanted tenderness.
For the single pillow. For the empty tea mug.
For the green dress on the good hanger. For the jar of lavender and the postcard from Tess and the half-empty fridge and the lotion that smells like vanilla.
For the entire fragile ecosystem of a life built from nothing by a woman who was given nothing and made something anyway.
And beneath the tenderness, in the basement of whatever is happening inside me: hunger.
The old, vast, limitless hunger that started on a rainy street in Brooklyn and has been growing ever since.
The hunger to know her. To be near her. To occupy the spaces she occupies, breathe the air she breathes, understand every detail of the life she's built so that I can—what? Protect it? Possess it? Worship it?
All of those. None of those. I don't know.
I sit on Jess Rowe's bed for four minutes. I count the seconds the way I count everything—precisely, automatically, the operational clock that never stops.
Then I stand. I straighten the quilt where I sat, smoothing the fabric until no impression remains. I walk to the door. I check the apartment one more time—everything in its place, nothing moved, nothing taken, nothing left behind.
I let myself out. The Medeco locks behind me with a solid click. I descend the stairs in silence, exit the building, stand on the dark street outside.
The air is cold. November cold, the kind that punishes exposed skin. I welcome it. The cold is clean and external and it counteracts the heat in my chest, which is neither clean nor external but a fire that I set myself and can no longer control.
I look up at the fourth floor. Her window is dark. The streetlamp catches the glass, and I can see the faintest shape behind it—the jar of lavender on the sill.
My phone buzzes. The Order—a message from Abraham about the federal investigation, another complication requiring my attention. I read it, file it, compose a response in my head. The operative surfaces. The machinery engages.
But underneath it, deeper than the protocols and the strategies and the cold professional competence, I'm still in her apartment. Still sitting on her bed. Still touching the fabric of a green dress and imagining the woman inside it.
The show is in four days. I'm going to stand in a gallery and look at her art, and she's going to be there—wearing that dress, her bare arms, her sharp eyes—and she's going to look at me and try to read me the way she reads metal before she cuts it.
And I'm going to have to stand there and be read, knowing what I know. That I've been in her home. That I know the smell of her pillow and the title of her book and the flavour of her tea. That I've sat where she sleeps and felt the shape her body leaves in the mattress.
She'll look at me with those eyes—suspicious, analytical, searching for the seam in the performance—and I'll have to hold. Flawless. Seamless. The man in the expensive coat who nods at the bodega and says the right things and gives nothing away.
I've held under interrogation. Under torture, once, in a situation in Prague that the Order's files describe in clinical terms and my memory describes in nightmares. I've held through things that would break most people, because holding is what I do. It's what I was made for.
But holding under her gaze—knowing what I know, carrying what I carry—might be the hardest thing I've ever done.
I walk to the subway. The city moves around me, indifferent, enormous. I descend into the tunnel and wait for the train, and in the fluorescent light of the platform, I look at my hands.
Still trembling. Faintly. The ghost of her quilt under my palms.
Four days.