Chapter 6: Ten Past Eleven

The gap between the two curtains let the sun through and laid a warm stripe across the foot of the bed.

The clock on the nightstand ticked on. It ticked a long while before the man under the covers moved at all, and then his lashes shifted, and his eyes came open, and for a moment he only looked at the ceiling.

Then he saw the clock.

10:05.

He sat up so fast the blanket slid off the end of the mattress. He was still in the clothes he had fallen asleep in. He stayed where he was with both hands flat on the bed, staring at the numbers.

He did not sleep like this. There was a clock inside him that got him up at the same hour no matter what kind of night it had been, and this morning it had not gone off at all.

And today was the day they were going up to the house.

He was out of bed with his slippers on before the thought finished, then the door, then the stairs, two at a time, one hand on the rail.

The whole first floor was empty.

He came down into the hall and stopped. Living room on his left, curtains open, nobody in it. Dining room on his right, table bare, breakfast cleared away hours ago. Somewhere behind the wall he could smell coffee.

He stood in the middle of the floor and bit the inside of his lip.

“Right,” he said. Out loud, to the dining room. “Of course.”

Adrian had said it to him. That was the part he kept coming back to. Last night, in the hall, with the stairs right there: Grandpa wants me up at the house tomorrow for lunch, and you’re coming with me. Milo had said all right. He had gone up with it and lain awake with it, and somewhere in the night he had let it turn into something that was actually going to happen.

And the whole downstairs was empty. That was the answer, then, and it served him right.

“Mr. Milo.”

He turned around.

A woman from the house staff was standing in the doorway at the back of the hall with her hands folded in front of her.

“You’re up,” she said.

“Were you looking for me?”

“Mr. Walter is out running the morning errands, and he asked me to catch you before you went anywhere. Mr. Adrian had to go into the office. Something came up early. He’ll be back around eleven to drive you up. Mr. Walter says to be ready by then.”

Milo didn’t say anything for a moment.

“He’s coming to get me.” He almost said Adrian, and didn’t. “He hasn’t left for the house yet?”

“Not yet, Mr. Milo. Around eleven, is what I was told.”

She said the last of it in the same even voice she used for everything in this house, and then she looked at him a beat longer than the job needed. She had heard about the other one, and it did not explain why Mr. Adrian would be driving him up to the house for lunch, and she was not going to ask.

“Thank you,” Milo said.

She nodded and went back through the doorway.

He stood there a while longer. He was not going to stand in a dining room and wonder why Adrian Hale would take him up to his grandfather’s house. Or he was, and he was not going to do it where anybody could watch him.

Under all of it there was something he was afraid of, and he could not have said what.

Then he went upstairs.

Downtown, in Adrian’s office, the coffee on the low table had been sitting long enough to go cold.

“So.” Rory Vance watched him across it. “Adrian Hale. There’s a thing you haven’t dealt with, and I’d like to know what you’re going to do about it.”

On the couch, Adrian picked up his cup and drank.

“Nothing. Great.” Rory had known him long enough not to take it personally. “Say something. You keep sitting there like that and somebody’s going to come in and dust you.”

Adrian set the cup down on the table. Then he raised his eyes.

“Say it,” he said. There was a small line between his brows. “Skip the warm-up.”

Rory laughed once. Then he stopped.

“You really don’t know what I’m asking.”

Adrian didn’t answer that.

“Fine.” Rory put his own cup down. “What’s going on with Emmett Rusk?”

Nothing moved on the other man’s face.

“I was outside your door yesterday,” Rory said. “I heard what you told Sean Cole. Go after Emmett Rusk, find out everything there is. Were you ever going to tell me? When did this start, and why?” He waited. “If you still call me a friend.”

Adrian looked at him for a while.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about it.”

“Nothing.”

“Not long ago I found out that he and I aren’t what we were. That’s all.”

“What does that mean?” Rory leaned forward. “Are you saying he did something—“

“Rory.” Adrian checked his watch and stood up. “I have somewhere to be. That’s all for now. The rest another time.”

Rory sat with that. He had known the man a long time, and Adrian Hale did not explain himself. That had been an explanation.

“All right,” he said.

He let him get as far as the door.

“What’s the somewhere?”

“Lunch. I told Grandpa I’d be at the house.”

“Then I’ll come.” Rory stood up too, cheerful again. “It’s been months since I’ve seen your grandfather. Your father either.”

“Not today.” Adrian picked his phone up off the table. “I’m bringing someone.”

“Someone.”

“Milo Ellery.”

For a second Rory didn’t say anything at all.

“Your—“ He stopped himself. “You don’t even like him. Why would you take him up there? Did something happen between you two? You’re actually—“

Adrian was already through the door.

“—and what about Julian—“

The door closed on the rest of it.

Rory stayed where he was until the sound of him was gone. He wasn’t smiling now. He looked at the closed door and said it to nobody at all.

“Adrian. What happened to you?”

Upstairs, Milo got dressed: shirt, dress pants, his hair flattened down with water, and then there was nothing left to do.

He sat on the edge of the bed with his hands on his knees and watched the clock move toward eleven. Somewhere in the last half hour the nerves had gone out of him and left something steady behind, which he had not expected of himself. He watched the minute turn over anyway.

At ten past eleven there was a knock.

He got up and answered it. The same woman from that morning.

“He’s outside, Mr. Milo. He’d like you to come down.”

“I’ll be right down,” he said.

He took the stairs one at a time. At the bottom he opened the front door and went out into the light, and the car was waiting at the end of the driveway, silver-gray, with the engine off.

Adrian was beside it, one hand in his pocket, watching the door. He looked up when Milo came out, and the angle tipped his chin up, and the light came across his face and down the side of his throat. Out here his face was harder than it was indoors, clean and cold at the edges.

Milo stopped on the last step.

None of it looked real: the car, the light, the man standing there at eleven in the morning, waiting on him.

There was a question behind his teeth. It had too many words in it and nowhere to end, so he kept it where it was.

When he didn’t move off the step, Adrian came up from the car.

“What is it?”

The voice was flat, the way it always was, and under the flat, faint, there was warmth.

Milo opened his mouth and had nothing.