Chapter 15: Three in the Morning

I didn't sleep.

At two I made coffee I didn't drink, and at half past two I sat at the kitchen counter with the lights off.

Her empty room was ten feet down the hall, and I had stopped looking at its door.

I thought about the three words she had thrown at me on the dock.

A weapon with a pulse.

I had stopped arguing with it around midnight.

I rinsed the full cup and set it upside down on the rack, and the small clink was the loudest thing in the condo.

The cut on my palm had stopped hurting around midnight, and I missed it, because it gave me something to hold.

At three a key turned in the front lock.

I had given Erin no key.

Maggie had.

She had pressed one into Erin's hand on Wednesday and said, "Lose it and I'll find you."

The door opened, and the hallway light fell across the floor.

Erin stood there in her gray coat with her bag over one shoulder and her hair half out of its knot.

Her eyes were red, and her lips were chapped.

She looked like a woman who had been outside in the wind for a long time.

I stood up so fast the stool scraped.

"I was at the airport," she said.

My stomach dropped.

"I bought a ticket for the six a.m. to Chicago. I sat at the gate for four hours with my bag between my feet."

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