Chapter 3: I Would Never Have Said Yes

I Would Never Have Said Yes

He woke with a sound still half in his mouth and lay in the dark with it.

Not a word. It had been something, and now it was a shape in his throat, and it wasn’t coming back. What was already there — before the room, before the hour, before the cold where the sheet had come off his arm — was the body: pull in, let out, pull in, all of it happening on its own, with nobody having asked.

He had been somewhere. It didn’t come back as pictures. It came back as weight: something flat and heavy, low on his ribs, pressing, and a floor tipping up out of the dark to meet him.

Then the ceiling. Then the window. Then the moon, laid across the foot of the bed in one long white panel, and past the glass a city with its lights on and the lake sitting black in the middle of all of it.

He shut his eyes. He opened them again. He smiled at the ceiling and made no sound at all.

He sat up. The sheet came off him and the air went over his skin, and he stood, and his legs carried him where he sent them. The whole time he was waiting for something to stop working.

Nothing stopped working.

He crossed the room and opened the window and stood there barefoot, letting the cold come in on him until he was sure what hour it was.

Then he said it out loud, quietly, to a room with nobody in it.

“I’m back.”

A car went past on the street below and kept going. Nothing upstairs had anything to say to him.

“Let’s find out which of you can afford what you owe me.”

He was smiling when he said that part.

On the desk by the window, a photograph in a white frame lay face down on the wood. He went over and stood above it. He didn’t hurry. He turned it up and set it on its stand, and stepped back, and looked at it.

Two men, standing close, in front of a bank of white flowers. Him on the left, in black, a head taller than the man beside him, wearing the face of somebody who had been told to look pleased and hadn’t bothered. Beside him a man in white — shorter, unremarkable, a face a room takes a second look at and then forgets. Except for the eyes. The camera had caught them dead-on, and they were round and calm and clear, not the kind of eyes a man usually got.

Two men who had no business standing that close together, in a photograph that had somehow come out right.

Adrian leaned over the desk and put two fingers on the face in it, the way you touch a thing to find out whether it’s real.

The cold he had been wearing since he opened his eyes came off him. What was underneath it was a smile he had no idea he was making.

Then something moved under that. The smile went. His brows came down, and he stood there frowning at the picture like a man who had walked into a room and forgotten what he came in for.

“Milo,” he said. There was almost no voice on it. “Why. What was it that — what reason did you ever have to—“

Two knuckles hit the door. Two more.

“Come in.”

The door opened. Walter stood in it in his shirtsleeves with the hall light behind him, and didn’t reach for the switch.

“Mr. Adrian. You’re up.” He took in the open window, the cold coming off it, the man standing in it barefoot, and said nothing about any of that. “You came in from the office and slept an hour. You haven’t eaten. I’ll put something in front of you. Please come down and eat it.”

“Thank you, Walter.”

“Your father called while you were sleeping. Your grandfather wants you out at the house tomorrow. Lunch.”

“Tell them I’ll be there.”

“Of course.” He pulled the door to behind him.

Adrian stayed where he was until the latch had gone quiet, and then he went back to the desk and squared the frame on its stand and left his hand flat on top of it.

He didn’t know what the man had done it for. He had asked, at the end, and gotten two words out of him and then nothing.

Fine. He would find out, or he wouldn’t. The bullet had not been meant for Milo Ellery, and Milo Ellery had taken it anyway, and that was a debt with Adrian’s name on it. For as long as Milo Ellery was married to a Hale, nothing in this family was going to touch him.

He went into the bathroom and shut the door. A minute later the water was running.

On the other side of the same city, at the same hour, a man in a light gray coat was standing at the curb outside arrivals with a suitcase by his feet and a phone against his ear.

He looked tired the way people look tired at the end of a flight. He was smiling anyway, and it was the smile doing the work and not the face — a woman going past him toward the taxi line glanced at him twice and could not have told you why. He wasn’t much to look at.

“—Yes. Yes, I’m here.” He listened. “I’m standing outside right now. It’s fine. I’m not a child.”

The voice on the other end had no trouble being heard.

“That is not the point. The point is you could have stayed one more day. I had it planned. Everything.”

“I know.”

“Everything,” she said again.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Just — be careful, going back by yourself. That’s all I’m saying.”

“I will.”

“You come out here to help me and you’re on a plane before I can even feed you properly. I was going to take you around. I had the whole week laid out.”

“Next time.”

She didn’t answer that. Then: “Hang on. Hold on. This isn’t because of him, is it.”

“Cass—“

“It is. I can hear it. It is.” A breath. “Because I’ve met him, Milo. I’ve met the glacier. He’s a piece of work, and you—“

“Okay. Okay — Cass, listen.” He switched the phone to his other ear and stepped back from the curb; a car went by close enough that he felt it in the coat. “Next time. I mean it. Next time you come out here I’ll take the whole week. Wherever you want. There’s a car. I have to go. Good night.”

“Wait, I’m not—“

He hung up.

In New York, Cassidy Voss took the phone off her ear and looked at it. Call ended. She hadn’t gotten one straight answer out of him the whole call.

She put the phone in her pocket and turned back to what was on her desk. There was still the rest of it to close out here. She would close it out, and then she was going to Chicago.

A taxi pulled over and Milo got in with the suitcase across his knees. He gave the driver the address and thanked him, and put the phone away without looking at it.

He took it out again after the city went by and the lights got thin and they came up onto the expressway. He didn’t do anything with it. He just scrolled.

The number he wanted was at the top of the recent calls. It was a week old, and it was there because he had made it. Nothing above it. Nothing under it. Seven days, and nothing had come the other way.

He looked at that for a while.

If he had been able to leave the man, he would never have said yes. He had said yes — out loud, in front of witnesses, in a room full of white flowers, with his own mouth and nobody holding his arm — and he had not been confused about it at the time.

He opened the message box and typed something.

He read it back, held the backspace down, and took it apart until the box was empty again. He put the phone face down on his knee and kept his hand over it.

The driver came off the expressway and into the neighborhoods, and the houses got bigger and farther apart, and Milo reached down and had the suitcase handle in his hand before the car had stopped.