Chapter 17: Not a Refuge

The taxi was parked where we had left it, at the bottom of the drive, with its engine running.

The driver with the grey ponytail looked at the three of us coming down the gravel, and he lowered his window.

"Twelve minutes, I said," he told me. "I didn't say I'd leave."

"Take us home," Florian said.

"The long way?"

"The long way."

He grinned, and pulled out onto the Elbchaussee, and the pavilion lights fell away behind the trees.

I sat in the middle again with my wrist in my lap.

Nobody spoke for a whole bend in the road.

"He grabbed you," Nils said, finally. His voice was tight. "I should have broken his hand."

"Florian took care of it."

"Florian was too polite."

"Florian wanted to," Florian said.

The streetlights went over us, one after another.

I looked at Florian's profile and at Nils's jaw, and I understood that they were still waiting.

Something had been holding them back all week, even in my bed, even with my mouth open under theirs.

"Say it," I said.

"Say what?"

"Whatever you've both been keeping behind your teeth since Tuesday."

They glanced at each other over my head.

"It was a good speech," Nils said carefully.

"It was an excellent speech."

"You were incredible." He rubbed his face. "But he's the fiancé you spent three years with, and you just stood in front of everybody and..."

"And?"

"It might have been for show," Florian said quietly. "For tonight. For the pavilion.

"Tomorrow the shock wears off. He rings. He cries. He says he's sorry."

"And you think I'll go back."

"We think you could," Nils said. "And we think we'd let you. We've been telling ourselves we were only a refuge. A place to land."

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