Her apartment felt like someone else's.
McGee stood in the doorway for a moment with her bag over her shoulder, taking it in — the couch, the lamp, the wine glasses in the cabinet, all of it exactly where she'd left it and all of it faintly unreal, like a set she'd once lived on. Anderson had cut them loose at seven with orders to sleep, or at least to stop. The city was still smoking downtown. She'd driven home through streets that looked like hers and didn't.
She showered until the water ran cold. Bare feet on the tile. Her hair wet down her back. She was pouring the wine when the knock came.
Thomas stood in the hallway with his coat over his arm, and the sight of him did something to her chest — loosened something that had been tight for days. Lamplight instead of fluorescents. Him instead of the board.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi." She stepped back to let him in, and then he was inside — setting his coat on the chair like he'd done it a hundred times.
They ended up on the couch with the wine, her feet tucked under her, his arm along the back of the cushions behind her. He asked about her day and she told him the version with the edges sanded off — long, strange, over — and he didn't press. That was the thing about him. He never pressed.
"Tell me something good," she said. "Anything. The last week has been all bad things."
He thought about it, swirling his glass. "When I was nineteen I worked a summer job painting houses. White. Every house white. By August I was dreaming in white." He smiled. "Last week I drove past a yellow house and I nearly pulled over just to look at it."
She laughed — really laughed, the kind that started in her stomach. "That's your good thing? A yellow house?"
"It was a very good yellow."
"Tell me another."
"My neighbor growing up had a dog named Dog. Just — Dog. Enormous mutt, sweet as pie. The neighbor insisted it was short for something, but it wasn't. It was just Dog." He shook his head. "I think about Dog more than I think about most people."
She told him about Rosa's — the coffee shop, the way Rosa remembered everyone's order and half their life stories. About Hannah's tax attorney with the spreadsheet. Small things. Human things. It felt like surfacing, like coming up from deep water into air.
At some point the wine was gone and the lamp was the only light, and they weren't talking anymore. His hand came up to her jaw — the way it had at her door that night, thumb along her cheek — and she leaned into it, and the rest happened gently, the way the whole evening had been heading: unhurried, tender, the case and the crater and the boy on the board a million miles away. There was nothing performative in it. Just the two of them, and the quiet, and the feeling of being chosen, of choosing back.
After, she lay with her head on his chest, his arm around her, her breathing slowing into his. Safe. That was the word. She felt safe for the first time in days, and she held onto it the way you held onto a dream you didn't want to end.
She fell asleep like that.
---
He didn't.
Thomas lay in the dark with her cuddled up against him, her breath warm and even on his skin, and stared at the ceiling. The streetlight through the blinds drew lines across it. Somewhere downtown, the crater was still smoking. Somewhere in a lab, a fingerprint was becoming a name.
Above him, the ceiling. Beside him, her breathing, deep and untroubled.
His hand rose, adjusted the knot — and found nothing there.
Chapter 32