Page 26 of The Glass Empire
Just for a second. Just a brush of her fingers against my knuckles. But I feel it everywhere—in my chest, in my throat, in the places where I've been holding myself together for so long I forgot I was holding.
"Trying is enough," she says. "Trying is everything."
She pulls her hand back and picks up the coffee pot, and the moment is over. But I can still feel the ghost of her fingers on my skin. I can still feel the warmth.
I stay until two. She tells me about her mother's fever, about the winter that took half a dozen souls from the valley, about the way her father never remarried because he couldn't imagine loving anyone else.
I tell her about my mother. About her death, about the silence that followed, about the way my father became a stranger overnight. I don't tell her that my mother was murdered. I don't tell her that my father ordered the killing in return. I don't tell her any of the things that would make her look at me the way everyone else looks at me—with fear, with pity, with the cold calculation of someone trying to decide whether I'm worth the risk.
But I tell her enough. More than I've told anyone.
When I leave, she says: "Same time tomorrow?"
"Same time tomorrow."
She smiles. That small, tired smile that I've started to think of as mine. "Good. Save me a piece of apple pie."
"For you?"
"For Gabe," she says. "My favorite customer."
I walk out into the cold. The door chimes behind me, and I stand on the sidewalk for a long moment, breathing in the smell of exhaust and rain and something else. Something that feels like possibility.
I don't tell her I'm Aleksander's son.
I don't tell her that the man in the suit is my father.
I don't tell her that I've been watching her for a week, that I followed him here, that I sat in my car in the cold and studied her through the window like a specimen under a microscope.
I don't tell her any of that.
But I will.
Someday.
When I'm ready for her to know.
That night, I lie in my bed in the mansion and stare at the ceiling. The room is too big, too quiet, too full of the ghosts of everyone who came before me. I can hear the house settling around me—the creak of old wood, the whisper of the heating system, the distant sound of my father's footsteps in the hallway.
He came home at three. I heard his car in the driveway, heard his key in the lock, heard the soft pad of his footsteps as he passed my door. He didn't knock. He never knocks.
But he paused outside my room. Just for a moment. Just long enough for me to hold my breath.
Then he moved on, and I was alone again.
I think about Monika. About her hands. About the way she saidtrying is everythinglike she believed it. About the way she looked at me—not with fear, not with hunger, not with any of the things I've come to expect from people who know my name.
She doesn't know my name. She knows Gabe. She knows a boy who wants to be a doctor, who stays up too late drinking coffee, who sits in a diner and talks about his mother like she's still alive.
She doesn't know Gabriel Mire.
I want to tell her. I want to show her. I want to see if she still looks at me the same way when she knows what I come from.
But I'm afraid of the answer.
I'm more afraid than I've been in years.
Because if she looks at me differently—if she looks at me the way everyone else looks at me—I'll lose something I didn't know I had.
