Page 97 of Rhodes

But normal was Tallulah sleeping down the hall while I didn't know what her mouth tasted like, and passing her in the kitchen without remembering the sounds she makes when I touch her. Normal was being able to look at her and see Coop's little sister before I saw anything else.

I can't get back there. Maybe she can. That thought sits worse than the guilt. I stare at the ceiling and listen to her breathe.

One more was a lie. I knew it before I said it.

TWENTY-FOUR

Tilly

The Estimate: A contractor's number is good for thirty days. After that the same work on the same house costs something different, because the house has gone on without you in the meantime.

My eyes open like someone flipped a switch to pitch-black darkness. Rhodes breathes heavily beside me.

I'm suddenly wide awake. There's no slow climb out of sleep. My body has decided it is midmorning in Italy, and there is a boat somewhere I am late for. Then the streetlight comes through the shutters in thin bands across a floor that isn't mine, with his clothes and mine tangled up on it where we dropped them.

He's on his stomach beside me, one arm thrown across my ribs, his face turned toward me on the pillow.

In every version of Rhodes I know, he is doing something. Talking, moving, opening the fridge, tinkering with an engine, changing the subject when I get too close to a real answer. He fills whatever room he's in.

He isn't doing anything now. His mouth has gone soft. I've never noticed how thick and long his eyelashes are until I see them against his cheek. He looks younger, somehow, like how I remember him when we were playing flashlight tag at Oak Moss when we were younger, when things were less complicated.

My chest does this stupid little squeeze, so I lie there and let it.

His arm is dead weight across me. I slide out from under it an inch at a time, lifting his wrist with two fingers and setting it down on the warm spot I'm leaving behind. He doesn't stir. I move to the edge of the mattress, then off it, catching the frame so it doesn't creak.

My feet find the floor, gathering my clothes as I go, leaving behind the shirt that I took from him in Italy. I open his door without a sound and pull it shut behind me. I'm halfway across the dark hall before I have time to reconsider.

I'm sneaking, and I stop dead in the middle of the hall when it lands on me, because there is nobody in this house to sneak past. Libba is not asleep below me in the villa. Dad and Grandbank aren't across the terrace. Coop is in Spain, living his best life.

It's just me, standing in the hallway holding my leggings like a thief, running a play I ran every morning for a week because it became the only way to move.

I go into my room. The bed is cold and unmade, the sheets exactly how I left them a week ago. It feels unused, like a room in someone else's house. I climb in and pull the blanket up.

I lie there and stare at a ceiling I can barely make out in the gray, ambient light. When I turn to one side, hoping to find sleep, it never comes. So I turn to the other. On approximately the seventh turn, I give up.

Fine, if my body thinks it's morning, it can help me save Oak Moss.

By the time Rhodes finally starts making noise down the hallway, I've unpacked both of my suitcases, run a load of laundry that's already thumping in the dryer, made a full pot of coffee and finished most of it, and sorted the week of mail into a bill pile, a junk pile, and one envelope from Tulane I know is about a lab fee. That doesn’t include the five rereads I’ve done on my notes for Oak Moss.

The kitchen smells like coffee and the lemon spray I used on the counters at seven. It reminds me of Italy.

He comes down the hall shirtless, creased down one cheek from the pillow, dragging a hand over his face. He stops in the doorway and squints at the daylight coming through the window, then he squints at me, and at the folded mail piled high on the corner of the island.

"What time is it?"

"Almost eleven."

"You've been up how long?"

"Since three." I fold a dish towel I had already folded. My eyes go down before I can stop them, focusing on the flat of his stomach to where his waistband sits. I get a full flash of what that stomach felt like under my hands in Italy before I make myself come back to the mail.

"Couldn't fall back asleep. I left so I wouldn't wake you flopping around."

He crosses to the fridge, pulls out eggs, sets a pan on the burner without asking whether I've eaten, and takes down the bread and two plates.

"You wouldn't have bothered me," he says. "Should've woken me up."

"It was three in the morning."