Chapter 6: Bridgeport

I left the penthouse with one bag, and Lydia's bag still sitting beside Dylan's in the hall.

Marco drove me to Bridgeport without asking a single question, and I was grateful.

My grandmother's kitchen had not been cooked in for five years, and Marco was determined to fix that.

He found two cans of beans, a box of pasta and a jar of garlic that was almost certainly older than he was.

"I can work with this," he said, and lit the old gas burner with a match.

I watched the flame come up blue.

I flinched. Then I made myself watch it.

"I'll open a window," Marco said at once.

"Leave it," I said. "It's a stove."

It was the first open flame I had stood near in five years.

I sat at the table my grandmother had eaten at for fifty years and let him fuss.

My lungs were quiet.

That scared me more than the attacks had.

For months I had thought quiet was something I got only on good days.

Here it simply came.

At seven there was a knock at the green door.

Sam Novak stood on the porch in a grey sweatshirt, with a hard case in one hand and a box in the other.

"It's a concentrator," he said. "My cousin's. It's a loan. Where do you want it?"

"Are you allowed to do that?"

"I'm not here as a paramedic." He looked at his boots. "I'm here as a guy with a cousin."

Marco pulled him in by the sleeve and put a bowl in his hands.

We ate in the front room, the three of us, with the concentrator humming against the wall and the radiator knocking.

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