Page 49 of Fate, Interrupted

Because you matter to me.

I think: four words on a loading dock. I said them, and I meant them, and now they exist in a way they didn’t an hour ago. There is no version of putting them back.

I don’t want to put them back.

He reads my face. The guardedness goes out of him. Then he lets me go, steps back, and looks toward the building with the look of someone who has just remembered where he has to be.

“I have to go up,” he says.

“I know,” I say.

He holds my gaze for one more beat, then turns and walks back inside. The door closes. The dock is mine.

I stand there for a moment in the quiet of it, alone now, and I let the full weight of the last fifteen minutes move through me.

I get in my car and sit for a moment. Then I start the engine. When I take the turn out of the lot, I glance up at the building without meaning to.

In the far window, on the second floor is a figure. A man, standing still, looking down at my car. Not Greer. Not Silas. Older. He doesn’t move when I look up.

I face forward and drive. I’m three blocks away before it occurs to me that my hands are trembling.

I pull over, not because I need to—the light is green and the road is clear—but because I am not entirely sure I should be operating a vehicle right now. I put the hazards on and sit in the amber blink of them, looking at nothing and concentrating on my breathing.

Then I call Jewell.

It rings four times, which with Jewell means she’s deciding. On the fifth she picks up.

“You’re calling me,” she says. “With your actual voice.”

“I know. I’m sorry. It breaks our rule of texting only.”

“Are you dying?”

“No.”

“Then this is a significant imposition, and I want you to know I’m logging it.” A pause. “What happened?”

I look out the windshield at the street. It’s a perfectly ordinary afternoon that feels monumental in my head right now.

“And?”

“I did something,” I say.

“Define something.”

“I said what I needed to say, and now I’m pulled over on the side of the road because my hands are shaking.”

Silence. When Jewell goes silent, it means she’s processing information that doesn’t have sufficient context.

“Where did you go?” she says.

“Coulter Cleaners. The dry-cleaning operation. Their big warehouse. Silas and his family have apartments on the top floor.”

Another silence, longer.

“Norah,” she says. “You went to his house?”

“Technically, it’s not a house. It’s a warehouse with apartments upstairs, so…”