Chapter 21: Say It Out Loud

By Tuesday I had been back in Seattle for eight days, and my phone had not made a sound.

I checked it anyway.

Her name sat in my contacts, unblocked, with nothing under it.

She had said she would not follow, and she was keeping to it exactly.

I had never been so annoyed by someone behaving exactly as I'd asked.

"You're doing it again," Cal said.

We were at the gym, on the mat under the orange wall, with our shoes half laced.

"Doing what?"

"Looking at the front desk." He tied his shoe with a vicious yank.

"A twenty-year-old with a nose ring works it now. She has no interest in your problems."

"I'm not looking at the desk."

"You've been looking at the desk since you walked in. It's a bad desk, Wyatt. It's veneer."

I stood up and went to the wall.

The old woman with chalk to the elbows was already there, as she was every Tuesday.

Her arms were folded and her eyes were on the route.

"You've lost something," she said.

"Nothing."

"Then why are you looking at the floor every third move?"

I put my hand on the first hold, the yellow one.

"Go on," she said. "Up."

I went up.

It was the five-ten overhang, the one Brody had fallen off in front of the whole floor.

I took it slowly, because that was how I climbed.

Reach, check, breathe, weight over the foot, reach.

At the roof my left leg shook, and I did not hurry it.

I thought of a girl on a ladder with the water at her ribs.

I thought of how she had not asked me to say anything.

I clipped the last bolt and hung there in the harness, thirty feet up.

My whole chest was working, and no one's fingers were on my wrist.

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