“You okay?” Carl added. “Boy, you sure look like you could use some sleep.”
Gabe snorted. “Hey. This isn’t the most flattering lighting.”
Carl grinned and moseyed off, whistling what sounded like, for Christ’s sake, “Lily Anne” by Blue Room. The universe was a bastard, sometimes.
Gabe blew out a long breath. He reached for his baseball. Hefted it once, twice.
He realized what he was doing and swore and put it back again immediately.
Goddammit.
Just because she was right aboutthatdidn’t mean she was right about everything.
He sighed, surrendered, picked up the ball and tossed it thoughtfully.
He realized what he’d been trying to do here in the semidark of his office: listen. Because the sort of odd ringing, wired numbness that usually followed a disaster—an earthquake, an explosion, a crash, a shattering breakup, for instance—was ebbing from his body. He still felt like shit, but various realizations were beginning to sift down like ash.
And he knew from experience the quality of the silence that followed a disaster was a hint as to what, if anything, remained.
He knew exactly what it felt like to lose someone or something. In his experience, when a person was gone, boy, they surefeltgone. Greta at the New Age Store downtown might beg to differ, but even though all of the things one said in the wake of a loss—that someone will live on in your heart and memories, and so forth—were technically true, the absence was still resounding. Gone wasgone. As though a lovely song that had been playing all your life had been... slapped off.
The way Eden had slapped that Jasper Townes’s song off the radio.
So he listened.
She was here. Eden was. In that chair across from him, where she’d toppled into his arms for the first time. In the way his skin hummed when he so much as brushed up against the memory of how it felt to touch her; his fingers curled hard when he recalled her fingers clinging to his shoulders as he plunged into her when they made love on that sofa.
And she was in the doorway, too, her pale face as they shredded each other’s hearts, each of them wielding pride as a battering ram.
Ironic to discover that deep down inside there was a little bit left of that cocky fucker who thought he had control over anything. He was darkly amused by this. He’d had a damned plan, for God’s sake! What could possibly go wrong? Literally the last thing he’d ever imagined, that’s what had gone wrong. Jasper Townes waltzing into town to claim paternity was, in its way, pretty damn funny.Surrealfunny, like those dreams you had after eating Pasquale’s pizza too late at night.
Joke was on him, though.
Townes would be meeting Annelise tonight. The restless, territorial, subterranean misery of knowing another man—a man like Jasper Townes—was in Eden’s apartment right now was part of the reason Gabe was sitting in the dark.
But he knew instinctively that wasn’t the only reason he was still sitting here.
And that’s when he admitted to himself that he was sort of keeping vigil. The same way you would if you were waiting for a loved one to get home on a stormy night or out of surgery. Maybe not as dire. As if you were waiting to hear an award announced. As if somehow his vigilance could keep Eden and Annelise safe, make that meeting go well, make it everything Annelise hoped it would be, help Eden feel peaceful about it.
What had Eden said about Gabe waiting outside the burning building? That they’d be fine if he was the one waiting out there. That’s what she thought. He believed it himself.
Ah, but she “couldn’t deal with him right now.”
She had pushed him away, hard.
He gave a short laugh. Then sighed.
Fuck it.
He signed the invoice and turned off his desk lamp.
Carl was right: he needed to sleep.
But that was the other reason he was hanging out here.
He wasn’t looking forward to his empty house. And somehow his big yellow house felt even emptier than before.
Chapter 18