Chapter 10: No

Ansel's POV

The phone rang at ten past two, and I knew before I looked that it was the tiger.

Leona was asleep beside me with one arm flung over my pillow.

It was the first night she had slept without a single thought, as far as I could tell.

The room was so quiet that I could hear the refrigerator.

I lay there with the phone buzzing against my hip and listened to it.

Eleven years of that sound.

I got up before the twelfth.

I took the old bag from the closet, not the Milan one, and I put on yesterday's shirt in the dark.

I did not wake her.

I had a plan, which was unusual.

I did not want her thinking about it, because anything she thought loudly in the dark would reach me all night.

I had also never told her the whole truth.

I had told her one lie, on a hotel terrace with a parking structure behind it, and the longer I carried it the heavier it got.

I stood a second in the doorway, looking at her.

She frowned in her sleep and turned over.

I thought: I'll tell her this week.

Then I drove to the Collier house with every window down.

The lights were on again, all of them.

Barrett did not meet me on the lawn.

The front door was open, and there was no flashlight, and nobody was shouting about the roof.

I found him in the kitchen.

He was sitting at the island in a silk robe, eating cereal out of the box.

The tablet leaned against the fruit bowl with the screen lit.

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