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)
“What you are,” I say, “is a man who stole a baby to save him.”
His face breaks.
Not the hairline fracture from the office, not the rawness from the confession. Something deeper, something I’ve no name for. This is the man at the bottom of all of it, the one who was five years old in a stone room and ten years old carrying a baby through the dark and fourteen years old alone in a forest, and he’s looking at me like I just said the only thing he’s ever needed to hear and didn’t know it until this moment.
“I pushed you away because I believed it.” His voice is rough. Wrecked. “That I would ruin you. That my name would follow you, that Agnes was just the beginning, that everyone who stands near me eventually gets touched by what I came from. I told myself it was protection. That I was saving you.” A pause. “I wasn’t saving you. I was saving myself from watching it happen.”
“You deserve sunlight, Elsa. I’m not—”
“Stop.”
He stops.
I lift my hand from the armrest. His right hand is resting on his thigh, and it’s clenched—a fist, tight, the knuckles white. I reach across the arm’s length of bench and I lay my hand on top of his fist.
He goes rigid. Every muscle, every line of him, taut and still.
I open his fist. One finger at a time. My thumb on his index finger, pressing gently until it uncurls. Then the next. Then the next. His hand resists, not against me but against itself—against years of holding tight, of gripping, of keeping his fists closed around everything he’s afraid of losing. I carefully open each finger the way you open something that’s been sealed for a long time, with the understanding that what’s inside might be fragile.
His hand lies open on his thigh. Palm up. The lines of it visible, deep, the hand of a man who has done things with these fingers that he’s just told me about, and I don’t flinch, and I don’t pull away.
I draw a circle on his palm.
One circle. My fingertip on his skin, tracing the motion I’ve been drawing on every surface of my life for two years. The circle that started in an alley when I was eighteen and terrified and my hands needed to convince my body I was whole. The circle that stopped when he cut me loose and started again ten minutes ago on a cold bench because my hands remembered who I’m.
I draw it on his palm, and his fingers twitch, and his hand is warm.
“You’re the man who saved me.” My voice is clear. Not loud. Not fierce. Certain, the way Nebraska sky is certain—wide and even and going on forever. “Everything else, we figure out together.”
He closes his hand.
His fingers fold over mine, trapping the circle inside his fist, and my hand is caught in his grip and his knuckles are white again but this time it’s different, this time he’s holding on, and his other hand comes up and covers both of ours, and he’s holding my hand the way you hold something you almost lost and just got back.
He lifts my hand.
Brings it to his mouth. Presses his lips to my knuckles. Eyes closed. Jaw tight. His mouth warm and still against my skin, not a kiss exactly, or not only a kiss—a seal, a vow, a man pressing his mouth to the hand that just drew a circle on his open palm and found him worth holding.
He doesn’t speak.
He has no words left. The man who lectures without notes, who says come here and get out and this is done—that man is sitting on a bench in a garden with his lips against my knuckles and his hands around mine and nothing left to say.
We sit. The garden holds us. The trees are bare above, and somewhere inside them, behind the bark and the dead-looking branches, something green is building toward a surface it hasn’t reached yet.
My hand stays in his. His mouth stays on my knuckles. My circle lives inside his fist, trapped and warm.
And the silence between us isn’t empty. It’s the fullest thing I’ve ever heard.
Chapter 12
HIS APARTMENT ISN’T what I expected.
I don’t know what I expected. Something cold, maybe. Glass and steel and surfaces that wipe clean. The apartment of a man who has spent his life making sure nothing sticks.
But the door opens, and the first thing I notice is the warmth. Not temperature—atmosphere. Dark wood floors, deep colors, walls lined with books in Italian and English and what might be German. A leather chair by the window that has the cracked, softened look of something that has been sat in for years. His coat is draped over the arm of it, which means he was sitting there before I arrived, and the image of him sitting alone in that chair waiting for me makes my chest ache.