Chapter 12: The Log

"From your car," I said.

"I was parked on the next block, with the engine off."

"You were in a car outside a gala."

"I couldn't be in the building. I couldn't leave either."

He said it quietly, without excuses.

"You'd gone in alone, and I had your pulse on my phone."

"At 9:44 it went to one hundred and fifty."

"So you opened it."

"It opened itself. Then I kept it open."

I set the laptop on the bench, because my hands were shaking too hard to hold it.

"What else did you hear?"

"Everything you heard."

"I mean after."

He looked at me.

"I heard you in the car with him. I heard you at breakfast."

"I heard the glass shatter, and the safe, and the dinner."

He took a breath.

"I heard you in the shower the night of the foundation breakfast," he said.

"I closed it after four seconds. I swear to you, Nina, four seconds."

My face burned.

It was a different kind of burn than the one I knew from fury.

It was the heat of being seen in a room I had believed was locked.

"Four seconds," I said.

"I shut it off as soon as I knew what it was."

"And last night? When I was in your bed?"

"I was asleep. It opened because your pulse was high." He swallowed. "That was not me."

I looked at his hands.

They were big, ink-stained, careful hands that had held my face and my hair.

They hung at his sides now, open and empty.

"I trusted you with every bad thing in me," I said.

"And you were listening in my ears the whole time."

"I know."

"Don't say you know. Don't say you're sorry. Don't say a word."

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