"Of course, I also have coffee here just in ca?—"
I vomit directly into my own lap and onto Linda's white sneakers.
The mortification arrives faster than the nausea left. "I am so sorry, I'm so sorry — the smell, I can't—" An officer materializesfrom somewhere and hands me a rag. I press it to my mouth and try to remember how to be a person.
"You're at the Ocean Line Motel downtown," the officer says, calm and practiced. "Do you remember who you were with tonight? Where you'd been?"
I close my eyes and reach for it. "Mel. I was with my friends." The bar. The nineties music. Shots. "Then I was talking to a guy at the bar. And then I think someone carried me here but it's—" I shake my head carefully. "It's all fuzzy."
"You're safe now. Do you want us to take you to the hospital?"
The words hospital bill arrive in my head before I've finished processing the question. "No. I just need to go home."
"Are you sure, sweetie?" Linda asks.
"I need my own bed."
I find my phone in my bag. Seven missed calls and twelve texts from Mel and the girls, the tone escalating from curious to worried to, in Mel's case, the assumption that I was somewhere having the time of my life with a man. I would laugh if my head didn't hurt this much.
It's past five in the morning.
One of the officers gives me a ride. We sit mostly in silence through streets still dark and lightly drizzling, the windshield wipers dragging across the glass every few seconds in a rhythm that makes my head worse. He asks a few questions about the man I was with. I give him what I have, which isn't much. Everything from a certain point onward exists in fragments.
He pulls up to my complex and I climb out of the patrol car with approximately none of my usual coordination. The stairs up to my apartment take more concentration than they should. My feet shuffle. My reactions arrive a half-second behind everything else. I get through the door, get to my bed, and that's the last deliberate thing I do.
Sleep takes me immediately and drops me just as fast.
I wake to the tail end of a dream I can't hold onto, heart going too fast, the sheets twisted around me. Something lingers at the edge of it, not an image exactly but a sensation. A smell. Something warm and grounding that I can't name.
Then a face. Not the man from the bar — that's still blurred, features dissolving every time I reach for them. Someone else. Brown eyes lit through with gold, wide and fixed on mine, carrying something that looked like fear and something that looked like recognition.
I know those eyes. I've seen them before, somewhere I can't place, in a context I can't retrieve. He was near the door when James was pulling me out of the bar. He was looking at me like he knew something was wrong before I did.
I don't know his name. I don't know where I know him from. But I can't shake the image of his face or the particular quality of that stare, the way it felt less like being seen and more like being recognized by someone who had no business knowing me yet.
I drift back under and surface again. Drift and surface. The gray morning light shifts slowly through my curtains and I spend the hours between sleep and waking turning the question over without finding an answer.
Who is he?
CHAPTER 15
DIEGO
I text Linda the second I wake up for my run. 4:45 AM, she's still on shift for another hour.
Any update?
The cops are trying to interview her now but she's not fully responsive. Will keep you updated. You did good.
I stare at that last part longer than I mean to.
Did she at least say her name?
A pause. Then:
I think she said Harvee? It's sweet of you to check on her, son. How's your mom this morning?
Still sleeping. About to head out. Have a good day, Linda.