Page 57 of Blind Spot
I didn’t have an answer.
He nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”
“It’s not okay.”
“No. It’s not.” He took his glass to the sink, rinsed it, and set it in the rack. “I’m going to bed,” he said.
“I should have told you—“
“In the guest room.” He said it evenly. The argument was over. He stopped in the doorway, not turning around. “I’d have carried it with you if you’d ever asked me. That’s the whole thing. You never shared enough for me to offer.”
I heard him climb the stairs and then close a door we never closed.
I locked up the house alone, turning off the lights over the sink and the stove. Upstairs, the guest room door was closed, but there was light under it.
I stood in the hallway for a moment and then went into our bedroom because I didn’t know what else to do. Varga’s nightstand still held the usual chaos—chargers and the book he wasn’t reading, but the carved bird was gone. The little wooden bird that he’d slept beside every night of his life in three countries crossed the hall with him to the guest room.
I went back to his door and raised my hand to knock.
I heard him in there. He wasn’t crying. He was moving around, making a strange bed acceptable. Finally, I pulled my hand down. I thought we should both sleep. It would look better in the morning.
But I didn’t go to bed. I went downstairs to the office because the office was where I went when I needed to handle something, and my body still believed there was something to handle.
I unlocked the filing cabinet and opened the bottom drawer. It held the folder of paperwork, the lawn service agreement, and the cleaner’s NDA. At the back, behind all of it, was the small velvet box.
I touched the lid, but I didn’t take it out. It had been in the drawer for four months, waiting for the right moment.
The NDA came out instead. I’d had it drawn up because a cleaner in Dallas sold a story about a player once. I sat at the desk, holding it with both hands. The urge to tear it in half rose into my arms.
I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t the cleaner, or the lawyer who’d want a phone call, or any practical thing. My hands couldn’t do it. I put the page back in the folder, and the folder back in the drawer, locking everything away as always.
The living room was dark except for the clock on the cable box. I sat down on my side of the couch and turned the TV on without thinking. It opened where it always opened—Varga’s Netflix profile. A show was paused on the fourth episode. It happened the night before the road trip. He had his head in my lap, sayingdon’t let me fall asleep.He fell asleep, and I let it play for five minutes more.
My throat constricted.
I turned the TV off and sat for a while, and then I went upstairs.
Sleep didn’t come. I lay flat on my back on my side of the bed. The light under Varga’s door went off at 1:30. It came on again twenty minutes later.
Somewhere around three, I tried to imagine what asking would have looked like, how it would have turned out if I had asked any question.Do you want the apartment? Do you want the curfew? Do you want this?
I couldn’t think of any other possible answers than the “yes” he gave by default.
Something was over. I didn’t yet know what came next. I had no plan, and the absence of a plan was entirely new.
Chapter fifteen
Varga
Ireached for Rook before I was awake and hit the drywall.
The guest room. Right.
I lay there with my hand flat against the wall and ran through it again—the fight and the door I’d closed behind me. It was the first night in the house I’d slept without him, and it was my choice.
The carved bird sat on the nightstand where I’d set it last night. I grabbed it off my side of the bed the way you grab your wallet in a fire. I looked at it sitting there in the wrong room and couldn’t decide which of us should feel worse.
Downstairs, the dishwasher door opened. A cabinet closed. It was the one to the left of the sink, with a hinge that needed oil. I knew every sound the house made.
