Chapter 5

Chloe's POV

"You've been drinking," I said. "You should go home."

I had put both hands against his chest. He was warm through the wrinkled shirt, unsteady in a way I had never seen. For an instant, I wanted to mistake that unsteadiness for needing me.

Then I heard the wrong name again.

His hand closed around my wrist. I stopped speaking, not because he had answered me, but because I was suddenly afraid of what he would do if I insisted.

I had imagined loving this man for so long that fear felt like a betrayal of the girl I had been. The girl remembered a compliment at a dinner, a door held open, a kind word offered without thought. The woman standing in Serena's apartment could feel his fingers tightening.

They were not the same experience. Remembering one did not change the other.

"Please go home," I said again.

He called me Serena again.

I said no. I said my name. Neither brought him back to himself in time.

Later, when the room was quiet, I lay awake with my eyes on the pale strip of light beneath the curtains. I could not arrange the night into something tender simply because I had once wanted him to love me. Wanting him in another life did not make this one my choice.

When he fell asleep, I got up, dressed, and went into the bathroom. I shut the door and sat on the floor until my shaking eased enough to hold my phone.

I tried to type a message, but I could not decide whom to send it to. At last, I opened an empty note and wrote two sentences: I told him my name. I asked him to leave.

I read them and put the phone down. I wasn't sure what writing them could change. For now, I wanted to keep them somewhere outside the argument in my own head.

I found a blanket in the cupboard and took it to the sofa. The bedroom was at the other end of the apartment. I stayed where I could see the front door and left the hallway light on.

At dawn, I opened the curtains. Delivery vans turned into the street below. Someone across the courtyard watered a row of plants.

I made toast because I knew how to do it without thinking, and because my hands needed something to do. I put water on the table. Then I looked at my phone again.

There was no new message on the screen. I opened the one from my mother and read the word rest until it stopped looking familiar.

I could have called her. I knew every pause she would make before she asked what I had done to upset him. Even knowing that, I wanted to hear her voice.

Instead, I opened the draft to Maxine.

Minnie.

This time I added: I don't know what to do.

I did not send it. I put the phone beside the toast, faceup, as though the answer might arrive by itself.

Julian emerged while the toast was still warm.

He paused when he saw the blanket on the sofa. His gaze moved to me, then to the phone in my hand.

"About last night," he said.

I waited.

He began buttoning his cuffs. "I will take responsibility."

The phrase sounded prepared, something he had chosen before coming into the room. There was no question attached to it.

"What do you mean?"

"Once Serena's one-year mourning period is over, I will marry you."

For a few seconds, all I could hear was the kettle cooling on the counter.

As a child, I had imagined him saying those words and had been ashamed of how much I wanted them. I had never imagined standing in a borrowed kitchen, wrapped in a cardigan because I could not get warm, wishing he would ask whether I was hurt.

"Marriage isn't an answer to what happened," I said.

He looked at me properly then.

"Chloe—"

"You didn't ask me. Last night, or now."

His hand stopped at the final button. Something crossed his face, quickly hidden.

"You need rest. We can discuss this later."

"I need you to knock before you come in."

He looked toward the bedroom, as though the apartment might supply a different interpretation of the night.

"This is Serena's property."

"I'm the person living here."

The silence between us lengthened. I did not become brave inside it. My pulse hammered, and I was already calculating whether he would take the phone, whether the door would open, whether I had made things worse.

But I did not take back the sentence.

At last, he picked up his coat.

"Eat something," he said.

He left without touching the toast.

I waited for the lift, then for the car below. Only when it had disappeared did I let myself sit.

His promise of marriage had solved something in his mind. It had solved nothing in mine. It did not return my name, tell me who had started the studio fire, or explain why my parents had watched a coffin lowered beneath my photograph without asking a single question.

I opened the note again and added his words from this morning. Then I put it away.

The cold toast lay on its plate. I took one bite and could not finish it.

On the sofa, the blanket still held the shape of the place where I had sat all night. I folded it twice, unfolded it, and folded it again. I wanted some ordinary action to tell my hands that the morning had started.

When I finally sat down, I thought about the tea he had claimed to spill at that dinner years ago.

For so long, that memory had made him someone I trusted. I had returned to it whenever he overlooked me, placing the cup between us in my imagination and insisting that I knew another side of him.

I did not know what to do with it now.

The memory had happened. So had last night. I could not erase either, and one did not change the other.

I opened the note I had made in the bathroom. At the bottom, I wrote that he had offered marriage and that I had asked him to knock.

The second thing looked so small on the screen. A door, a few seconds of warning. I had imagined a future with him once; this morning, I was trying to ask for those few seconds.

Later, a cleaner came. I moved the note out of sight and watched her strip the bed. She asked whether I wanted the blue cover or the white one.

"Whichever is clean," I said.

"Both are."

I looked at the folded cloths in her hands. She waited without seeming impatient.

"Blue."

She nodded and went back into the bedroom.

It was the first question anyone had asked me that morning without already having decided the answer. I cried after she left, then washed my face before she returned for the bucket.

That evening, I put the blue cover on the bed myself. I did not sleep in it yet.

I took the blanket back to the sofa, left a light on, and kept the phone where I could reach it.