Chapter 27 - Jess #2
"I don't want to hear what else you've done.
" I pick up my jacket from the chair. My boots are by the bed.
I pull them on and my hands are shaking but my hands have shaken before and I've still managed to weld and grind and build and I can manage to tie my boots.
"I don't want your explanations. I don't want your reasons.
I don't want to hear how it all makes sense from your side, how the watching was devotion and the lying was protection and the controlling was care. "
I stand. I'm dressed. I'm leaving.
"I know what it looks like when a man cages you," I say. "I learned it when I was twelve. The vocabulary is different. The scale is different. But the architecture is the same. A man who decides what you need. A man who arranges your world without asking. A man who watches."
He takes a step toward me. One step. His hand comes up—not reaching, just rising, the instinct of a man who is watching something precious fall and can't stop his hand from trying to catch it.
"Don't," I say.
His hand drops.
I walk past him. Through the hallway, through the living room with its empty walls and its Italian coffee machine and its cathedral windows that look out over a city he watches the way he watches everything—from above, at a distance, with the calm assurance of a man who believes his vantage point entitles him to see.
I open the front door.
"Jess." My name. The way he says it—rough, stripped, the single syllable carrying more weight than any sentence he's ever spoken. It sounds like a man drowning. It sounds like the word stay turned inside out.
I turn. He's in the hallway, three meters behind me, and his face is—open. Completely open. The mask is not just cracked, it's gone. What's underneath is devastation. Raw, total, the face of a man who is watching the only thing that matters to him walk through a door.
For one second—one terrible, traitorous second—I want to go back.
The pull is physical, gravitational, and my body leans toward him before my mind can intervene.
Because the devotion was real. The tenderness was real.
The way he held me in the studio when I told him about Kyle, the way his hand found my hair, the way he said brave in front of my sculpture—those were not performed.
I know this the way I know a clean weld. In my body. Below thought.
And he also bought my art through a proxy and broke into my apartment and leased an empty room across from my studio and funded my career and engineered every encounter and watched me—watched me work, watched me sleep, watched me live—from a distance I didn't know existed.
Both things are true. The devotion and the surveillance. The tenderness and the control.
I can't hold both. Not right now. Maybe not ever.
"Don't follow me," I say.
I close the door behind me. The elevator comes. The lobby, the street, the cold November air.
I don't cry until the subway. The train is half empty—Sunday afternoon, a few scattered passengers absorbed in their phones.
I sit in a plastic seat and the tears come silently, running down my face and dripping off my jaw, and I don't wipe them because wiping them would mean acknowledging them and acknowledging them would mean admitting how much this hurts.
It hurts more than Kyle. That's the part I wasn't prepared for. Kyle was a child's nightmare—enormous at twelve, diminished by time and distance and the woman I've become. Kyle hurt the girl I was.
Damien hurt the woman I am. The woman who chose him. The woman who held out her wrists and said please and meant it with her whole body. The woman who, for the first time in twenty-eight years, let someone past every wall.
That woman is sitting on a subway crying, and the girl she was is sitting beside her, and neither of them knows how to make it stop.
Brooklyn. The studio. The cargo door rolls up and the studio is dark and cold and mine. Except it's not entirely mine anymore. The latch is his. The show was his. The career that grew from the show was fed by his money and his invisible hand.
I sit on the concrete floor. Back against the wall. Knees to my chest.
Different man. Different cage. Same girl on the floor.
The sculpture stands in the center of the room. The yielding forms, bending toward each other. I made this piece while he watched. Every weld, every join, every hour—he was there. Not because I showed him. Because he was looking without asking.
The cargo door is down but not latched. I didn't latch it when I came in. I always latch it. But my hands were shaking and my eyes were blurred and the discipline that governs every other part of my life failed me at the one moment it mattered.
I should get up. I should lock the door. I should—
The cargo door rolls up.
Not all the way. Three feet, maybe four. Enough for a man to duck under. Enough for the streetlight to cut across the concrete floor in a yellow slash that reaches almost to my boots.
I know before I see him. The way my body knew on the sidewalk. Before the face, before the name. My body knows.
Kyle Purcell ducks under the cargo door and straightens up inside my studio.
He looks different. The easy smile is gone. His face is harder, tighter, and there's something wrong with his right hand—wrapped in a bandage, dirty white, the fingers splinted and held against his chest. The way you hold a hand that's been broken. The way I held mine, at twelve, after the door.
His other hand holds a knife.
Not a large knife—a folding blade, the kind you buy at a hardware store. He's holding it low, by his thigh, the blade open and catching the streetlight.
I'm on the floor. Back against the wall. Knees to my chest. The worst possible position—low, compressed, no leverage. The welding tools are on the bench, six feet away. The torch. The hammer. The angle grinder. Six feet might as well be six miles.
He looks at me with an expression I haven't seen since I was twelve. The mask is off. The easy charm, the real estate smile, the I'd love to catch up—all of it stripped away. What's underneath is flat and empty and furious.
He holds up his bandaged hand. The splinted fingers. The ruin of it.
"Someone broke my hand," he says. His voice is quiet. Conversational. The tone of a man discussing the weather while holding a knife. "Friday night. In an alley. A man I've never seen before broke three of my fingers and said your name."
My stomach drops through the concrete floor.
"He said Jess Rowe," Kyle says. "He said he knew about the sketchbook. About the hallway. About the finger." He takes a step closer. "Nobody knows about that, Jess. Nobody except you."
The cargo door is open behind him. The street is dark. The studio is dark. And Kyle Purcell is standing in the only space I have left with a broken hand and a knife and the understanding that I told someone, and the someone found him.
"So I thought I'd come catch up," he says. "The way I said I would."
He takes another step.
I press my back against the wall and my crooked finger throbs and the twelve-year-old girl inside me starts to scream.