Page 113 of Fate, Interrupted

Three hundred miles. The first three months are the hardest.

I can work with three months.

Chapter thirty-one

Silas

The day after is not peaceful exactly, only absent of drama, angst, and familial disapproval.

I finish my sandwich and go down to the warehouse.

Not because there is anything there that requires my attention, but because the warehouse is where I go when I don’t know where else to go—a habit I’ve had my entire life and am only now recognizing as a pattern rather than a preference. The warehouse is known to me. The smell of it, the sound of it, the light through the tall windows in the afternoon, all of it known, and dare I say it—safe.

I walk the floor for a while.

It’s my day off, so I’m not supervising. Not working. Just moving through the rows of pressing machines and the suspended rails and the sorting tables, watching the staff get ready for the afternoon trucks to deliver the bins of cleaned linens they picked up yesterday. Hotels, conference centers, and restaurant contracts; these are most of the work that comes through the main warehouse.

Efficient. Continuous. Relationships. What my father built this business on.

The floor staff nod and go back to their work.

This is one of the things I’ve always appreciated about the warehouse—nobody here requires anything of me I’m not prepared to give. They need to do their work. I need to be somewhere where my feet know the layout. We’ve always had an understanding.

I stay until the afternoon crew leaves and then I go upstairs.

The enormous family apartment above the warehouse is more like the dining room, with everything in its correct place. My father believes the arrangement of a space reflects the arrangement of a mind. He has become more entrenched in that belief every year. I don’t mention it to Logan, but I know Henry notices. Henry notices almost everything.

I sit at the kitchen table with a glass of water and think.

Or I try to think.

What I end up doing is thinking about Norah’s rowhouse. The warmth of her kitchen. I think about her Aunt Claire on the sidewalk. About what happened afterward.

It’s about her, but it’s also about who I become when I’m with her, stripped of the roles I’ve spent years playing in this family: the playboy, the middle son, the loose cannon who keeps everything carefully filed under ‘controlled.’

I lay in her bed and listened to her talk about breaking into a dean’s office at seventeen, and the tightness in my chest eased. I think about that for the rest of the afternoon until I hear Henry on the stairs.

He comes in without announcement, without ceremony, with his easy energy and unconcern for anything that affects the peace. He goes to the refrigerator, opens it, stands in front of it for a moment with the focused consideration of a man conducting a serious assessment.

“You eat today?” he asks, without turning around.

“Yeah. I had a sandwich.”

He glances back at me. He doesn’t believe me, but decides not to pursue it. He takes out a bottle of apple juice, leans against the counter, and studies me cautiously.

“Greer said you didn’t go out last night,” he says.

“No, I stayed in.”

Henry nods, the nod of someone gathering information without making anything of it. He takes a drink and looks out the window at the back lot where a truck is being loaded for the evening run.

“How’s the bookshop girl?” he says.

The phrasing arrives before I’ve prepared for it.

It isn’t hostile or pointed, but rather the affectionate casualness of a younger brother who has never once meant anything malicious in his life and has no idea of the repercussions of using a label instead of a name.

The bookshop girl. At least he didn’t say that human chick.