Page 15 of Travis
There was a keypad beside the front door. Same model as the gate. I typed T-R-E-A-S-U-R-E.
The light turned green. The lock released.
For a former CIA operative, Travis’s security sucked. But I didn’t care. I was inside now, and once he got home, he’d have to hear me out.
The house was dark and smelled like nothing. Not cooking, not cleaning product, not the accumulated scent of a person living in a space. I found a light switch. The hallway opened into a living room with furniture that looked staged rather than used. A couch with cushions that held no impressions. Surfaces with nothing on them. No books, no decorations, no evidence that anyone spent time in this room.
The house felt like a shell. The architecture of a life with no life inside it.
I called out his name. My voice sounded too loud in the space. There was no answer. I hadn’t been expecting any.
I sat down on the couch. Checked my phone. No missed calls, no messages.
I tried to picture Travis in this space and couldn’t. Reading a book on this couch or eating dinner at that table. Doing any of the ordinary things that a person did in a house they lived in. None of it fit.
Being here felt weird, probably because it was breaking and entering. I hadn’t broken but I’d definitely entered. I thoughtagain about going back to my car. Sleeping in the backseat, trying again in the morning like a professional. I even stood up, got as far as the hallway, and stopped.
I wouldn’t sleep in my car. If I left, I’d drive to a motel. In the morning when I got back here maybe he still wouldn’t let me in. Maybe I’d call, and he still wouldn’t pick up. I’d leave a message he’d never return, and I’d drive back to Spokane with nothing, and in a week I’d be exactly where I’d been for the past few months: on the outside of a door that wouldn’t open.
I walked back to the couch and sat down.
He was going to have to look at me. That was the minimum. He was going to have to walk into this room and see me sitting here and deal with the fact that I’d come all this way and let myself into his house, and I wasn’t leaving until he heard what I had to say.
He could be angry about it. He could throw me out.
But he couldn’t pretend I didn’t exist, and right now that felt like enough.
So I waited.
The adrenaline I’d been running on started to thin. My body registered every complaint it had been saving up for hours. The tension in my neck from gripping the steering wheel. The ache in my lower back from a car seat that had never been comfortable. The throb behind my eyes from staring at a dark road.
I sat on his untouched couch in his unlived-in living room and felt the exhaustion settle over me like something heavy being draped across my shoulders. Eventually I got up and went looking for the bathroom.
The hallway off the living room had several closed doors. Linen closet. Spare bedroom with a bed that looked military and untouched. Bathroom. I used it, washed my face with cold water, and looked at myself in the mirror.
I looked like a woman who’d made a series of decisions she couldn’t undo.
Back in the hallway, I noticed a couple other doors. One was probably Travis’s bedroom. The other at the far end looked different. Heavier than the others. When I opened it, a set of stairs led down.
Warm air rose from below. Not furnace heat. Something humid, dense, carrying a temperature that didn’t match the rest of the house.
I went down. The stairs turned once and ended in a hallway that was nothing like the house above. Smooth floors. Solid walls, the kind of construction that felt permanent in a way that drywall and studs did not.
I followed the hallway. I reached an open door at the end.
The pool was behind it.
Not a hot tub. An actual pool, long and narrow, set into the floor of a low-ceilinged room. The water was lit from within by something faint and blue, the only light in the space.
I stood in the doorway. The air was warm and heavy and the water was right there, and I’d been running on adrenaline and coffee for hours and every part of me hurt. But my lungs, for the first time all day, stopped complaining. The humid air began doing what my inhaler only half managed, and I could feel my chest opening up with every breath.
Screw it. In for a penny, in for a pound. How much worse could it get?
I pulled off my shoes. My jeans. My sweater. Left them in a pile by the edge and lowered myself into the water.
The heat took me immediately. I let my head fall back against the edge and closed my eyes and my blood pressure lowered to something close to normal for the first time in hours. I pushed off the wall and floated on my back in the center of the pool andfor a few minutes my brain was quiet. Just a body in warm water and the soothing light from under the water.
I stayed in long past the time my fingers went wrinkly. But the quiet helped, and somewhere between floating and thinking, my brain started working again.
