Page 109 of Never Alone
"A new apartment?"
"Yeah."
"What for?"
She hesitated.
"The case is over, Cole. We won. There's no reason—there isn't a reason for us to keep pretending this is anything other than what it was. An arrangement. The arrangement is over.”
I watched her say it. She got the words out evenly. Her hand on the laptop didn't stay flat. Her thumb pressed into the side of the screen, released, and then pressed again. She wasn't looking at me. She was looking at the counter between us.
I had been wrong, two weeks ago, about what was costing her. I had thought it was tired. I had thought it was relief catching up with her. I had not thought it was this.
It was costing her now.
"If you wanted to move out," I said, "you should've told me."
She didn't answer.
"You don't need to move out. I will, if you want me to."
Her face did something then. Small. Not enough that someone who didn't know her face would have caught it. Thecorners of her mouth pulled. Her eyes shut for one count and opened again.
"Do you want me to?"
"Cole."
"Do you?"
"I don't."
It came out broken. The first crack in two weeks of clean.
"Then why are you doing this?"
She put both hands flat on the counter. She was holding the counter the way she'd held the firehouse counter the day she'd first come to ask me. Both hands flat. Holding on.
She looked up.
"I know you blame me for your sister's death."
The room went still.
I'd been a man standing three feet from a counter. I wasn't, anymore, a man standing three feet from a counter.
I closed my eyes for one count. Two.
"Quinn told me about the girl whose boyfriend you reported."
I stopped breathing.
"Quinn told me she was the reason you hesitated saving your sister."
She started crying.
I came around the counter.
She didn't move. She watched me come. I stopped a step away from her, close enough to reach. I didn't touch her yet.
