Page 69 of Levi

His is at the house. Mine is in my pocket, going with me. Which means if whatever happened in the middle of the night comes back again — he can’t call me. He’d be exactly where he was last night except this time there’s no one down the hall to come with ice.

I stand at the door and run through the options.

Can’t take him with me. Can’t leave him my phone. Can’t bring his phone back here.

The only thing left to do is nothing. I take one last look at him sleeping, and I pull the door to behind me quietly.

When I arrive at the house, the first thing I do is take his phone out of the sectional. It’s down in the same cushion, cracked corner up, the cheapest object in the house. A buyer is going to sit on this sectional in two hours, and a phone going off under them ends the showing in the time it takes to say “what’s that buzzing?” It comes with me, into my pocket, next to my own.

I do the last walk-through.

The house is perfection. I stand under the supply vent, the one that blew out the smell of weed for a week, and I breathe in. Nothing. Eucalyptus and cold clean air, and under it nothing at all.

The remediation took. So did the open door. Levi fought me for that terrace door every day he was in this house. Shoved it wide and dared me to close it. I priced it as damage from the start. Turns out a week of moving air does what a sealed room never could.

I note it and keep moving. Jonathan’s car is at the gate. They walk in at nine-fifty.

The broker, Jonathan Mitchell first, same resoled loafers, same loose old watch. Behind him the client, the divorce settlement behind her, a woman who’s simplified her life down to what she wants to wake up looking at. Linen, real pearls. She’s here to decide.

She wants to walk into a room where nothing has ever gone wrong. And she wants to believe she found it herself.

I step back and let the house sell itself without my help.

“Jonathan.” I shake his hand, then hers, brief and cool. “The light’s better than the photos. It usually isn’t.”

She’s already past us both, drawn across the room toward the glass, which is what the glass is for.

Jonathan hangs back half a step. He lifts his chin, the same place he found the weed a week ago, and I watch him hunt for it and not find it. His face lets it go. “You got your air sorted,” he says, only for me.

“Documented. It’s in the packet.”

“I believe you.” He drifts after her, hands behind his back, giving the client the room.

She stands there, looking at the Gulf, and says nothing. That’s what I want. The talkers talk themselves out of houses. The quiet ones are pricing the rest of their life against the view.

I let her have it.

It’s working. This is the job I was built for, and this morning I need it.

It’s ten. Levi’s been alone over four hours. I’m smiling at a woman on the edge of the biggest purchase of her life while part of me is standing in an apartment, counting someone else’s breaths.

The buzz comes off my hip and for a split-second I don’t know whose phone it is. Mine and his sit in the same pocket and they buzz the same.

It’s his.

Freddie: Status

The phone opens on the thread, and the first thing it gives me is what Levi never did. A name.

Freddie.

Ten o’clock, to the minute. I knew it was coming and it still comes at a bad time. There’s no good moment when you’re two people at once.

“I’ll give you a chance to explore,” I murmur to Jonathan before stepping out onto the terrace.

A good agent gives buyers the space to fall in love without breathing on them. It’s also the cleanest cover there is.

I type in Levi’s passcode and open the text thread. There’s every message Freddie’s ever sent him, stacked up the screen. The answer to the only question I’ve carried since the night he told me somebody thinks he owns him. Right here. One scroll and I’d know everything.