Chapter 9
The house went blue before it went dark.
It wasn't night yet, not really. That thin time after sunset when the sky over the lawn turned the color of cold water and the inside lights hadn't warmed up enough to win. I stood at my bedroom window and watched the parking lot lights come on one by one beyond the hedge line, and my bandage itched under the lace of my nightgown.
They'd locked the window. Not with a key. With a small brass latch screwed high into the frame where I couldn't reach without standing on the chair, and they'd taken the chair. I dragged the side table over instead. My left shoulder pulled when I lifted it and I had to bite down on my lip so I wouldn't make a sound.
Down below, the gravel lot was empty except for two cars near the service entrance and one more pulled far back under the oak, its headlights off. I knew that shape. The sedan from the afternoon. The one he'd been in.
I hadn't planned what to do with the cloth. I'd torn it that morning without thinking — a strip of lace trim from the hem of the nightgown where it was already loose. I'd rolled it in my palm all day until it was damp. Now I pressed my forehead to the cold glass and held it up.
It was stupid. A white scrap against a dark house. But white shows best at dusk.
I waved it once. Slow. Then again.
For a long second nothing happened. The wind moved the oak branches. A sprinkler ticked somewhere out of sight. Then the driver's door of that last car opened.
He got out.
Even from two stories up I would have known him. Brown suede coat, striped shirt underneath. He didn't look up right away. He rubbed his left wrist with his right hand — the same way he had in the car — and then he did look up. He found the window. He found me.
My breath fogged the glass. I lifted the lace again and pressed my hand flat so he could see it.
He started walking.
He didn't cross the lawn. He stayed along the edge where the parking lot met the box hedges that marked the property line, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched like he was just a guy headed to the gate. But he kept his eyes on my window the whole time. Every few steps he lifted his chin, just a little, to let me know he still saw me.
I knocked once on the glass. Soft. He nodded.
Then the hall light behind me clicked on.
I didn't hear footsteps. The marble foyer carried sound weird — everything echoed except when it was carpeted. My bedroom door had been left ajar six inches, the way they'd left it since the afternoon, and the warm hallway light cut a yellow bar across my floor and up the wall. It turned the blue in the window to gray.
I heard his voice before I saw him.
"Step away from the window, please."
My father's voice. Even. Not loud.
I didn't move. My hand was still on the glass, the lace trapped between my palm and the pane. Down below, the young man had stopped at the hedge. He'd seen the light come on behind me. I saw his body tighten.
"Now," my father said.
He was in the doorway. Dark suit, pocket chain catching the light. He wasn't out of breath, he hadn't run. He just stood there with one hand on the doorknob like he owned the air in the room.
"I told you to rest," he said. "You are not supposed to be standing."
I let my forehead stay against the window a second longer. The cold bled into my skin. I could see my own reflection now, overlaid on the dusk — pale face, hair falling forward, bandage thick under the lace at my shoulder — and beyond that, the faint shape of the young man by the hedge, getting smaller as he took a deliberate step back toward his car. He wasn't leaving. He was making himself invisible.
I peeled my hand off the glass. The lace left a damp print.
My father crossed the room in four steps. He didn't grab me. He just reached past me and flipped the latch higher, though it was already locked, and then pulled the sheer curtain across. The heavy drape came next. He drew it with one smooth pull and the blue went away.
"You will not signal," he said, quiet enough that only I could hear it. "You think no one watches the lot. Everyone watches the lot."
He left his hand on the drape a beat too long, knuckles white, and then let go.
The room was suddenly too warm, too yellow. I stared at the curtain. My fingers were still cold from the glass.
That's when it happened.
A pulse. Not loud. Not even bright at first. Just a low heat under the skin of my right wrist, right where his mark had been that night at dusk when our hands had joined. It spread — that familiar branching gold, thin as veins of light — up from my palm toward the bandage, and I gasped before I could stop myself.
Across the curtain, through the fabric, I saw an answering flash. Faint, through the gap where the drape didn't quite meet the window frame. Gold, not yellow. Not the house lights.
He was still there. Beyond the hedge, beyond the glass, beyond my father's hand on my arm. And the light had found its way through anyway.
I curled my fingers to hide it. The glow thinned but didn't go out. It beat once, twice, in time with my heart, and then settled back under my skin like it was waiting.
My father didn't see it. He was looking at the curtain, satisfied the blue was gone.
May you like
"Lie down," he said.
I didn't. Not yet. I kept my wrist tucked against my nightgown, feeling the heat fade slowly, and listened to the dusk hold its breath outside.
