And that the two things were connected in a way I needed to understand before he used it.
Chapter 16: The Morning After
I woke with the particular clarity of someone who had not actually slept.
It was not insomnia -- I had closed my eyes, lost consciousness for hours, and surfaced again. The problem was what had happened in between: nothing. No dreams. No processing. Just a flat, airless pause, and then morning, and then the full weight of the previous evening arriving all at once like a bill I had been waiting for.
I lay still for a few minutes, taking stock.
The facts were manageable if I treated them correctly. I was good at facts. I had spent my entire adult life learning to prefer them to the other kind of information -- the kind that arrived through the body, bypassed the rational mind entirely, and made itself at home in places I had not authorized.
The fact: Dominic Moreau had kissed her in the garden at the Moreau family ball.
The fact: I had kissed him back.
The fact: neither of them had spoken on the drive home.
I could work with facts. Facts were categorical and contained. Facts did not require me to account for the way my pulse had behaved when he had reached across the car to unlock my door and his hand had grazed my wrist -- accidental, almost certainly accidental, but my body had registered it anyway withthe efficiency of something that had been waiting for exactly that kind of information.
I got up. I made the bed. I went to the kitchen.
* * *
He was already there.
This was not unusual -- Dominic kept hours that preceded hers by a margin I had stopped trying to understand. What was unusual was the coffee.
It was on the counter before I reached the machine. Black, the temperature that indicated it had been made approximately four minutes ago, set at exactly the place I always stood when I was waiting for my own cup to finish brewing.
I stopped.
Looked at the coffee. Looked at him -- still at his own counter, phone face-down, back half-turned to me.
I was very careful not to look at this too hard.
The problem with careful was that it required knowing what you were being careful about.
"Thank you," I said, because not saying anything would have been its own kind of statement.
He made a sound that was not quite an acknowledgment and not quite a dismissal. His phone buzzed once. He answered a message without looking up.
I took my coffee to the window.
* * *
I spent the morning trying to work.
The Moreau Holdings acquisition report was half-finished -- I had identified three layers of shell companies, which had been straightforward, but the fourth layer was not resolving cleanly. There was a gap in the ownership chain that might have beenadministrative sloppiness or might have been something else, and I could not determine which without more access than I currently had.
I was supposed to find this intellectually engaging. I generally did find this kind of structural puzzle engaging. I was a person who liked patterns, gaps, the specific satisfaction of making a picture cohere.
This morning, I could not stop noticing the quality of the light in the apartment.
I had been here long enough to know its rhythms -- the way the morning came in from the corridor window first, then the kitchen, then the main room, moving east to west in a way I had learned to read like a clock. I knew which angles cast shadows and which opened into something brighter. I knew all of this.
What I had not allowed myself to notice, until apparently this morning and with very poor timing, was that the apartment looked different when he was in it. Not better -- that would have been a conclusion I was not prepared to reach. Different. More precise somehow. As if the space had been imprecise before and had only now resolved.
I closed that line of thought with the firmness of someone shutting a window before weather arrived.