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Her thumb moves once over the side of my face.

“I would like to go back to your house.”

Every useful part of my brain leaves. One comes back.

“Because you want to?”

She looks at me.

“Colt.”

My name. Not Riley. Not anything else. It lands somewhere under my collarbone and I keep my mouth shut.

“Yes,” she says. “Because I want to.”

I take her hand. “Then let’s go.”

She turns with me toward the way we came.

I don’t ask what happens when we get there.

My phone stays face down in my pocket.

Chapter twenty-two

Astrid

The lamp in Colt’s front room is already on when he opens the door. He steps aside and I go in first.

The house is quieter than the restaurant, the piano bar, the place on Broadway, the river. No plates, no horns, no voices, no water moving underneath us. Only my heels on the floor. I take them off beside the table and put my bag down with them.

Colt closes the door, turns the lock, and stays where he is with his keys in one hand. For a man who has spent three months filling every silence available to him, he has become very good at waiting.

I take off my coat. He takes it when I hold it out and hangs it beside his.

“You can speak.”

“I’m weighing the risks.”

“Of what?”

“Of saying the thing I’m thinking and finding out it was the wrong one.”

“Which thing.”

He looks at me for a second, and then he stops weighing it.

“That I’ve wanted you in this house since about the second week of November. That I’ve been extremely careful about it for eleven weeks. And that I’d like to stop being careful somewhere around now.”

The honesty is worse than the waiting was.

“I have spent eleven weeks telling you where to put your hands,” I say. “How long to hold it. When to stop. In a room with a chart and a clock and a door I could open.” I straighten my coat sleeve on the hook, because my hands would like something to do. “I am very good at it.”

“I noticed.”

“I do not want to be good at it here.”

“So tell me what to do instead.”