Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Three steps from the stairwell, I see her.
Agnes Cuthbert is standing at the end of the corridor.
She’s perfectly still. Her coat is buttoned, her bag over one shoulder, her posture carrying the same rigid composure she brings to faculty meetings and scholarship reviews and every other moment where she holds someone’s future in her manicured hands. She’s standing outside the door to the department offices, which are ten feet from his office, and she’s looking at me.
Then at his closed door.
Back to me.
Something moves across her face. Not surprise. Agnes Cuthbert doesn’t do surprise. This is recognition, confirmation, the final piece of a puzzle she’s been assembling since she sent me that email about external distractions and warm regards.
She smiles.
It’s the coldest thing I’ve ever seen on a human face, colder than the wind off the river, colder than three weeks of silence, colder than an empty back seat where Luciano wasn’t.
“Working late, Miss Lively?”
Four words. Perfectly pleasant. Perfectly poisonous. Her voice carries the same silk-wrapped blade as her emails, and she lets the question hang in the corridor between us, lets it fill the greenish light, lets me understand exactly what she’s seen and exactly what she intends to do with it.
“Goodnight, Professor Cuthbert,” I say, and my voice doesn’t shake, and my back is straight, and I’m my father’s daughter.
I walk past her. Down the stairs. Out into the cold.
My hands don’t start shaking until I reach the sidewalk.
Chapter 8
THE TEXT ARRIVES AT 11:47 PM on a Thursday, and it’s a photograph.
No caption. No words. Just an image of a sky going copper and violet above a skyline I don’t recognize, shot from somewhere high, and the composition is careless in a way that tells me he took it quickly, instinctively, the way you reach for something before the impulse fades. The clouds are stacked low on the horizon and the buildings beneath them are silhouettes and the whole thing looks like the sky is on fire from the inside out.
I’m sitting on my bed in my pajamas with my laptop open to the security integration section of my thesis, which I’ve been staring at without seeing for forty minutes, and my phone buzzes against the mattress and I pick it up, and there it is. A sunset. From Luciano. At 11:47 PM on a Thursday.
I look at it for a long time.
Then I type: Where is that?
Three dots. A pause. His reply:
My apartment.
My apartment. Not his office, not the campus, not any of the contained, institutional spaces where I’ve known him. His apartment. Where he lives. Where he sleeps. Where he stood at a window and watched a sunset and thought of me.
A circle on the edge of my phone case. I type: It looks like Nebraska.
The three dots again. Longer this time. Then:
It looks like Florence.
I press my phone against my chest and stare at the ceiling. Iowa stares back. The water stain hasn’t changed, hasn’t moved, and he just told me his sunset looks like home, and his home isn’t New York, and mine isn’t either, and we’re two people looking at the same sky from different windows and seeing the places we came from.
Sleep takes me with the phone on my pillow. The sunset is still on the screen.
HE TEXTS LIKE HE TALKS. Few words. Every one chosen with a care that makes me read each message three times, looking for the thing underneath the thing.
Friday, 2:15 PM, between classes: How is the security section?
I write back: Still terrible. I’m considering letting my father’s spreadsheet handle it.
A pause. Then: Your father’s spreadsheet has more structural integrity than most enterprise systems I’ve audited.
I laugh out loud in the middle of the quad. A girl walking past gives me a look. I don’t care.
Saturday, 10:30 PM: Are you sleeping?
I’m not sleeping. I’m lying in the dark thinking about his hand on my thigh and the sound he made against my collarbone and the way he said tomorrow and then kept his promise, and now it’s Saturday and he’s texting me at 10:30 and I should be sleeping and I’m not.
Not anymore.
His reply takes four seconds.
Good.
One word. I read it eleven times. Good. Good that I’m awake. Good that he can reach me. Good that at 10:30 on a Saturday night, there’s a line between his phone and mine, and we’re both holding it.
Sunday, 1:45 PM, after the call with Martha: Your mother. Is she well?
My throat tightens. He knows about the Sunday calls. He knows because his men have been watching me for months, because somewhere in the careful machinery of his surveillance, someone reported that Elsa Lively calls her mother every Sunday at 1:15 and that the calls leave her quiet.
She’s good. She asked if I’m eating enough.
Are you?
I look at the sandwich David brought me yesterday, half-eaten on my desk. I look at my dress, still loose at the waist, though less so than last week. I look at my face in the bathroom mirror, still sharper than it was a month ago but with color returning, warmth that wasn’t there during the avoidance, and I know exactly what put it back.