Chapter 22: The Empty Residence

I read both messages twice.

Simon read them upside down over my shoulder, which he was apparently allowed to do now.

"You don't have to go," he said.

"I know."

"Do you want to?"

I thought about it with the terrible coffee going cold in my hands.

"Yes," I said. "Once."

He drove me across the city himself, in an old green Volvo he kept in the garage downstairs and had never mentioned.

"You have a Volvo."

"I have a Volvo."

"You've been driving me around in a black car with a driver for a month."

"That's the company's car," he said. "This one's mine."

The heater worked on every setting. I didn't tell Gage.

At the Talcott Harbor Hotel, a moving truck was parked across the loading dock where I'd climbed into the dumpster.

Simon stopped in the lobby.

"Twenty minutes," he said.

"Thirty."

"I'll get a coffee that isn't mine."

The residence doors were propped open with a rolled-up rug.

Inside, the penthouse was half gone.

The white sofa had been wrapped in plastic. Boxes stood in rows along the windows, labeled in thick black marker. Shoes. Shoes. Winter. Shoes.

Two movers were wrapping a mirror in a blanket.

Quentin stood by the kitchen island in a sweater, holding a cup of coffee he wasn't drinking.

He looked like he hadn't slept.

"She's in her room," he said. "She asked for you, and then she stopped talking."

Tinsley's room was at the end of the hall.

I'd never been inside it. In three years, she'd never once asked me in.

It was bigger than Mama's whole house.

The closet doors stood open on empty rods.

Tinsley sat on the bare mattress in a gray sweatshirt with her hair in a knot, no makeup, a cardboard box at her feet.

Her eyes were dry.

She looked at me in the doorway and didn't arrange her face.

"You came," she said.

"You asked."

"I didn't think you would."

I stayed in the doorway.

"What do you want, Tinsley?"

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