Chapter 12

M ina was very displeased. Her pretty nails clicked as she tapped them against her mug, just as they had when I’d first discussed how Granger and I were going to share Cacau. “I don’t know about this, Addie,” she said doubtfully. “You’re living together?”

“We’re just friends, sharing a house,” I agreed. It was working out very well, actually, and was a wonderful thing for me. I’d arrived there the night when the pipe had burst, and I hadn’t yet left. I didn’t want to, either.

“For how long?”

“We haven’t discussed it. Granger said that I should stay, and he hasn’t mentioned me leaving.” Not one time in the weeks since the second flood.

She frowned even more. “So you plan to be there forever? You’ll live together platonically, as roommates?”

“No!” I burst out, and her eyebrows shot up.

“It’s not platonic?”

“I mean, no, I definitely won’t live with him forever but yes, we are roommates. Only roommates, and it’s so helpful with the cat and with keeping things up.”

“You’re helping him around the house,” she interpreted. “And you’re going to stay there until your apartment is ready?” If anything, the doubt in her voice had only increased—my explanations weren’t satisfactory.

But Mina knew that my apartment building was still not an available option for life forms besides mushrooms, and they had recently frozen in a cold snap. It wouldn’t be available for human habitation anytime soon due to the extensive damage. There were a lot of problems that went beyond water because apparently, structural things also had gone wrong. The landlord had tried to hide the truth, which was there were insurance problems, too. Like, she had somehow let things lapse and in addition, that greedy, selfish woman was scheming all kinds of legal machinations so that she wouldn’t have to let us break our leases or have to return our security deposits. It was working up to be a battle in the courts and it was a lucky thing that Granger had some friends who were attorneys. Oddly, Mr. Campbell had asked me what was happening with my building and when he’d heard about the pending litigation, he’d suggested that I could contact his personal lawyer, too.

“If I’m going to remunerate her so substantially, then at least I can give that woman some actual work,” he’d grumbled, and when I’d probed to figure out exactly what he’d meant—yes, he’d been saying that he would pick up the bill for those legal services. Mina and I had both been shocked, enough that she’d gone in with a thermometer to check him for a fever. He’d been fine temperature-wise, but had gotten very angry about her interference.

I didn’t feel the same way about her interference at the moment because I understood that she was only asking these questions to look out for my best interests. “I thought you didn’t believe in living with someone,” she reminded me. “You were with your former boyfriend for three years and that was never a consideration.”

“I considered it. Briggs didn’t,” I corrected. “When I had the flood in my building for the first time and I couldn’t go back to my studio, he wouldn’t let me stay with him because he said that he didn’t believe in cohabitation. Not even temporarily.”

She frowned. “That was necessity, not cohabitation. But I guess…I guess he was standing by his principles.” She sounded doubtful again, though.

“Maybe, but I actually think that he was worried that having another person in his house would drive up his bills, because that was something he’d complained about a lot when I was there. You know, I’d want to turn on the lights so I could see better in the rooms at night, and he’d say that I was wasting electricity.”

“He sounds a little like Mr. Campbell,” she admitted, and bent to crank up the space heater at our feet. We had specific instructions about the old dials on the walls of this mansion and how far we were allowed to turn them, just as Briggs had rules about the touchscreen thermostats in his house. Now that the season was turning toward winter, Mr. Campbell (due to his lack of body fat) was so bundled up that he looked like a caterpillar in a cocoon.

“There were lots of things like that,” I said. “There were lots of times that he did things that I didn’t agree with or want but I let them go.”

“No one’s perfect,” she reminded me.

“No, we’re not, but I wanted my relationship to be. That was why I made things between us sound better than they were,” I said. “I made it seem like I was totally happy and content, and it was because I really wanted him to be a person that I would love and be with forever. You know, if things had gone a little differently, I probably would have married him even though things weren’t perfect at all. They weren’t even good.”

“You just wanted to have someone?”

“I guess that was part of it,” I admitted. “That’s terrible, though. It wasn’t fair to him, either.”

“I didn’t know you felt that way. Well,” she considered, “sometimes I thought that you had issues.” She started to nod. “Sometimes when you talked about him, you looked kind of determined. My mother used to have a little bulldog, and you reminded me of that.”

“I looked like a dog?” I questioned. That news didn’t make me very happy.

“It was in the way you set your jaw,” she said. “Stubborn, I guess. Maybe you were trying to talk yourself into something.”

“I really did like him at the beginning,” I said. “I thought he was attentive when he wanted to share a calendar and look at my location so he could monitor me at all times. I thought he was strong-willed, not obnoxious. I even thought it was sweet that he and his mother texted so much.”

“How much?”

“More than twenty times a day.” She got the same expression as she did when Mr. Campbell’s relatives showed up. “I was impressed by his good habits,” I continued, “like how he was diligent about clearing his driveway after we got snow. He always had a lot of kitchen towels and they were in very good repair. Once or twice, he let me do laundry at his house when the machines in my building were broken, as long as I washed his clothes along with my own.” But it was hard to remember my list of Briggs’ good points. I’d written it on paper instead of my phone, and that was probably now just a sodden wad of wet pulp.

“I did like him a lot,” I concluded, “but it just…died.”

And speaking of—

“Is anyone going to bring me lunch, or are you waiting until I expire and the Rüppell's griffon vultures scavenge my wasted corpse?” Mr. Campbell called from his study. I didn’t think that his voice actually made it past the wings of his armchair, but thanks to the baby monitor, we heard him just fine. I put the last few items onto his tray and went to help him out, thinking about my conversation with Mina as I walked.

Yes, two weeks post-flood and that was the major news: I was still living at Granger’s house. It was making my sisters crazy with questions, it had made Mina upset that I was once again disregarding my own stated desires, and it was driving my mom to do really unusual things. For example, she’d been peeking through the windows (and that, in turn, had made Granger follow through on his plan to buy curtains for the whole house). She had been curious and had also wanted to make sure that I was ok, she’d later explained, since my last boyfriend had been such a…she didn’t say the word, but I knew what she was thinking.

I had discovered what she’d been up to when I’d come into the kitchen early in the morning, pre-coffee, and had discovered them sitting together at the kitchen table he’d bought. Both of them were already sipping from his new mugs. He’d caught her peering in but instead of calling the police, he’d gone out to ask what she thought she was doing and she’d introduced herself.

When I’d stopped in the kitchen doorway and stared at her, my mom had smiled. “Oh, it’s Addie,” she had announced in surprise, like the unexpected person in the situation was me. I’d sat down with them and it had been strange but also pleasant, and then I’d had to leave for work as she and Granger had started to discuss window treatments.

“Worried,” he’d texted me in that terse way he had of messaging, and I understood that he meant that my mother had been concerned about me. As JuJu always reminded us when we got mad, we had to know that Mom loved us. I did know that, but I asked her not to come by again without prior notice and reminded her that unfortunate things could happen to spies. Like arrests.

Mr. Campbell’s lunch tray today was heavy with dishes because Mina had prepared a large assortment of tiny portions in an attempt to get him to consume something. Anything. He was taking in even less and I had a theory that he was losing more of his appetite because he was cold—like he was going into hibernation or something. So when I thought that he wouldn’t notice or check, I had been sneaking around and turning up the heat. It made the conditions in the house slightly more comfortable but so far, it wasn’t working to get him to eat more.

“Here you are,” I told him, and put the tray on the table next to him. Then I tugged the table closer around so that he didn’t have to lean forward much to reach his food. “If I were you, I’d start with the consommé, because it’s delicious and it might turn to ice soon.” This month had been super cold, a fact which hadn’t been good for the work on my apartment building.

“I don’t want any soup. I don’t want any of this,” he said irritably, and pushed the table so that all the dishes rattled and I had to grab the tray to prevent it from falling.

“Is there something else you’d like instead?” I asked him.

“No, because I’m tired. Do not suggest that I nap, because I never nap.” He looked up at me and I nodded sedately, as if I hadn’t caught him sleeping away the afternoon at least a thousand times before. “I’m not tired from a lack of sleep.”

I nodded again. “I can reschedule your doctor’s appointment this afternoon,” I suggested. We were going to see another neurologist, and although he generally liked to visit a plethora of specialists, this was the third brain person in as many weeks. The appointment today could wait.

“You’ve been in my employ for six years,” Mr. Campbell suddenly pointed out. “Nearly seven.”

“I know,” I agreed. “It’s a long time.”

“When I’m gone, you won’t have a job. At least you’re not part of the adulatory crowd waiting for me to die.”

I sat down in the chair he liked me to use, the one that was slightly lower than his wing chair so it seemed like he was taller. “No, I’m not waiting for that, but it has nothing to do with worry about my job. Are you thinking about death today?”

“Today?” he echoed. “When you reach my age, it’s not something that darts into your mind on occasion. Death is waiting impatiently, just like one of those vultures would if it sat outside this window.”

“Let’s not talk about those birds anymore. How about some lunch?”

“I’m tired,” he told me again, and he wasn’t paying any attention to his food. Instead, his brown eyes were directed toward the wall above the fireplace, where a large portrait of his late wife hung. It had been painted in the nineteen-fifties and she wore a strapless gown, a diamond tiara, and a diamond necklace that looked like it weighed as much as she did.

“Celeste was a pretty woman,” he noted, and I agreed, because she really was. “But,” he continued, “I never liked her much.”

Oh. I had been imagining that he would say something about not being afraid of death because he would join his wife, but I should have known. “Yes, now that I think about it, you’ve said a few things to me about how you two didn’t get along,” I said guardedly.

“Our parents desired the match,” he explained. “Mine wanted me to settle down and stop whoring around. I did not. Why should a few words in front of a priest put a halt to a man’s fun?”

I only shrugged, because how was I supposed to respond to that question?

“We had our problems besides my paramours,” he continued. “The topic of having children was another thing that we argued over. I truly despise the grubby little no-nothings.”

“Feeling that way, it’s lucky that you didn’t start a family,” I said.

“It was for me, but as Celeste was dying, she said that she regretted that decision. She regretted not having a baby and she regretting being swayed by my opinion.”

I wondered why she hadn’t just left him, but maybe she’d been pressured by her parents again. And maybe she’d been afraid of going out on her own and making such a change.

“I called her bluff that day. As much as she enjoyed complaining, I knew that she hadn’t wanted to ruin her figure by expanding into a land-bound Balaenoptera musculus . So many women never recover from pregnancy,” he said, and eyed me. “She said that I was a selfish child myself and that I would have been as poor a father as I had been a husband.”

He had argued like with his wife on her deathbed? I argued with him, too. “Pregnancy makes a woman gain weight. That’s normal, not whale-like,” I told him, and he frowned.

“I see that you’re part of the cult. All women seem to want children. It’s an unfortunate genetic mutation,” he said disparagingly.

“No, it’s not a mutation, and not everyone wants them,” I countered. “Some of us do, but some of us are good without. My aunt and uncle are child-free and totally happy.” I thought that their decision had been influenced by watching my nuclear family and thinking that they wanted to avoid my parents’ situation. “Have you been sitting here ruminating over things? Are you sorry that your wife was upset about not having kids and that you said she would have become a whale if she’d gotten pregnant?”

He didn’t answer, but he kept looking at the portrait of Celeste in her diamonds. It was clear he didn’t regret his lack of children, which I’d gathered from his “grubby little no-nothings” and “genetic mutation” remarks, but he did seem a lot more introspective than usual. Maybe, in spite of saying that he’d never liked her, he was sorry that he and his wife hadn’t gotten along.

“Mr. Campbell? Do you want to eat something?” I prompted.

He focused on me. “What are you wearing today?”

We both studied my outfit. “These are my sister’s clothes. Last week I was allowed to go back into my apartment but by that point, a lot of my stuff was in bad shape. I’ve been borrowing from people.” I’d mostly been borrowing from Juliet because although she was taller, she had the largest wardrobe. And her clothes were all new and very nice. Today I wore black pants and a sweater, but somehow they were more stylish and less…ok, I looked less middle-aged than I did in my usual outfits. I had sent a picture to Brenna and even she approved, but added that JuJu always tried too hard and it showed (she was “all about labels”).

“It’s better,” he said grudgingly, although he was generally opposed to pants. “You usually dress like—”

“I know,” I interrupted. “I usually dress like an old lady, but you can put some of the blame for that on me not spending money on clothes. I’ve been saving for a house of my own instead. That’s also why I lived in the cheapest place I could find, but that backfired a lot and now I’m rethinking the decision. My next place will be in a more modern building with strong pipes and functioning elevators.”

“What will you do in the future for employment?” he asked me, and I understood him to mean, “What will you do when this job is gone because I’m no longer around?” I answered tentatively, thinking that he’d start to ridicule me or grow bored, but we actually had a normal—even a pleasant conversation.

“So, what was your answer?” Granger asked me later, when I related the story to him as we sat in his office at Amunì. “What did you tell him about what you wanted to do?”

“I said that I’d been thinking about becoming an office manager, or maybe something like Brenna’s job. She works in an art gallery and a lot of the time, she seems to do many of the same things that I do with Mr. Campbell. Kind of babysitting adults,” I explained, “except instead of one elderly guy, she has different artists and buyers who need hand-holding. I want to have a job where I’m around people but nursing is still out, because I realized that I can’t stand to see anyone in pain or suffering. Nicola says that I’m like talc and when I did my clinical rotations, my preceptors kept having to talk to me about my emotional state. I got upset and it showed, which was totally unprofessional.”

“Yeah, hiding your thoughts is not your strength,” he admitted, but it didn’t come out as mean or critical. “You’re looking for a non-emotional job around people. There are plenty of those that would pay more than what you make with that old guy.”

“How do you know what I make?”

“I guessed,” he said, his face impassive, but I looked at him and thought that he might have had more information than just a guess.

“Do you have access to criminal databases of information?” I asked him.

Granger looked at me for a moment and then he started to laugh. He laughed hard enough that he had to go get a napkin from the servers’ station to wipe his eyes. “No,” he finally told me. “No, I don’t, and I’m not a criminal myself. In my old job, I had to deal with collecting information and I never really stopped.”

“And your old job was…”

“It varied,” he told me. “What about planning gardens like you did for me?”

I’d thought about it. “Maybe I could do that in a few years, after I’ve saved more. Maybe.” I had my doubts, though, since I knew nothing about running a business and my training was to be a nurse, after all.

“Does this mean that you’re going to start looking for something else right away?”

“That seems a little—” I hesitated. “I don’t want to say it because I never want to think of those birds again, but it seems vulturine.”

“It seems practical to me,” he countered. “You should always be ready to do something new.”

I shifted, uncomfortable even though he’d recently put a cushion onto the unyielding chair that faced his desk.

“At least you’re thinking about it,” he said, and I really was.

“What about you?” I asked. “Are you always ready to do something new?”

“I have several backup plans in case the restaurant fails,” he answered, and I was horrified. He would leave, for sure, if the business didn’t tie him here.

My feelings must have shown on my face because he added, “It doesn’t seem likely right now, but restaurants are a terrible business. The majority crash and burn and the ones that last are outliers.”

“Then why did you…” I stopped the question before it was completed, because I knew why he’d opened Amunì. Despite what he’d said to me before about marrying too young, he’d loved his wife completely. This place was to honor her and her dreams, which was so romantic. “What would you do if this didn’t work?”

He had so many ideas that he had to keep telling me even after we’d left the restaurant and gone home. It was already late when we arrived and it got a lot later as we sat on the new couch and played with Cacau as he told me even more. He seemed excited about a lot of his ideas, one in particular.

“There’s a guy I’ve met with a few times who runs a successful auto repair shop. I’ve gone in to talk to him about what I was doing to my truck and to shoot the shit about engines,” Granger said. “He’s very, very skilled, as far as I can tell, especially with restoration of classic American models. He was talking to me about wanting to open a second shop just to specialize in that. I was thinking about investing but I could do more. We could be partners and I could take over the business side, which doesn’t seem to be his strong suit. I’d teach him how to run things a little more cleanly, and he’d show me how to fix cars. Seems like an even trade.”

“Wow. Could you afford that? I’m not trying to pry, but could you?”

“I could,” he said. “I’m doing all right.”

“Wow,” I repeated. “Well, that sounds ideal for you! You could get a Thunderbird like you talked about, too.” And I’d heard, time and again, how much he liked cars. He could go on about them as much as I could about my family.

“I could fix one up myself,” he said, nodding. “This guy, Digger, drives a 1955 T-Bird. That’s the first year that they rolled off the line right here in Detroit. He found it in a barn in the northern part of the state—”

“Up north,” I corrected. “If you’re from Michigan, you say ‘up north’ and ‘downstate.’”

“He found it in a barn up north and restored it himself,” he finished. “I could do the same thing.” And he was smiling as he said it, like he was excited by the idea.

“We could clean out the garage and maybe build it bigger to make space for you,” I said, because I was getting excited, too. “There’s definitely room for expansion on your lot and I can park somewhere else for a few months so that the driveway could be a staging area.”

“A few months?” he echoed. He frowned after he said the words.

Oh. I had said the wrong thing, and I realized it immediately. “No, no,” I said quickly, to cover the gaffe. “I won’t be staying with you for months, of course not.”

“We never really talked about how long you’d stay,” he answered, and I felt like I could see ideas floating above his head in white bubbles, like they did in old cartoons. “Run while you can!” one said, and another proclaimed, “Danger! Danger!” in big, block letters, with “Marriage ahead!” and a flashing arrow.

I had to fix this. “I didn’t tell you my other news, besides the career talk I had with Mr. Campbell,” I said, talking even faster. “I’m going to stay with my sister for a while, until I rent a place of my own. She said I could.” I knew that none of them would say no, except maybe Brenna, which made my lie kind of true.

“Which sister?”

“Nicola. No, Sophie,” I corrected.

“I thought her house was too dirty to live in.”

“That was so rude of me to say. I actually think it would do her a lot of good to have a roommate.”

“What about Cacau? We share her,” he reminded me. “Would you leave her?”

I looked down at the cat in my lap, the little brown bundle with marshmallow paws. “Maybe she could come with me, since I have more time to take care of her.”

Granger stood up. “Maybe that would be best,” he said. “Since I’m never around.”

“What about your idea?” I asked him. “What about opening a new garage with that excavator guy?”

“No, I don’t have time,” he said. “I have the restaurant.”

“You…well, that’s too bad.” But was the adult decision, after all. Of course he needed to work on this giant project he’d started, the restaurant that was the dream he’d shared with his wife—actually, it had seemed like her dream, but he was making real and successful.

“It’s late,” he mentioned, and I nodded.

“Do you mind me staying here for one more night?” I asked.

He was already walking toward his bedroom and he paused, but he didn’t turn around when he spoke to me. “No. Hell no, I don’t mind. Ok? I don’t mind.”

“Oh. Ok, then. But I’ll be out by the weekend.” I’d said those words to his back but now he was moving very fast, and he didn’t pause again or bother to answer. The next thing I heard was his door slam behind him.

“Ok,” I said again, this time to myself. It was very late and I was also very bad at understanding how men operated. I’d demonstrated that when I’d gotten involved with someone for three years and thought that he was a good person, because I’d been able to make a list of various not-so-bad qualities rather than paying attention to the really bad ones that he also displayed. I didn’t understand why Granger would have gotten angry just now, but it appeared that he had. Most people didn’t frown like that when they were feeling content and lighthearted.

I didn’t get it at all. He was right that it was late, but I texted Juliet anyway and described the interaction. JuJu, being smart, ambitious, athletic, and beautiful, was obviously a magnet for men and I’d figured that she would have an explanation for his behavior.

“Why is he mad?” I concluded after typing out a summary and some direct quotes. I sent the message and waited see if she was still awake to answer.

She was. “Addie duh,” she wrote back, which totally didn’t help.

I confessed my lack of understanding: “??”

“He doesn’t want you to go. Stayandhell,” she wrote, and broke off after the last word.

I read that a few times. “??” I asked again.

“Dogo.”

Something about a dog? “Talk to you tomorrow,” I wrote. “I guess I should go to bed.”

This time she called me to respond. She was obviously inside a club or a bar, because the music thumped through the phone and I heard people in the background talking and screaming.

JuJu screamed, too, probably so that she could hear herself—but in the silence of Granger’s house, I heard her perfectly well and had to hold the phone away from my head to protect my ear. “Stay!” she hollered. “Don’t go!”

“He wants me to,” I said.

“Huh?”

“He wants me to go!” I said louder. “We just had a conversation about me leaving, and he wants me to go!”

“No, he doesn’t! Addie, if you want to get together with him, you have to stay there and make it happen. You’re in exactly the right position! Oh, sugar. Someone just spilled another drink on my shoes—hey! Get off me. Stop it!”

“Juliet, are you ok?”

“Yes, it’s just crowded here,” she answered. “Ow! Let me go!”

“Juliet! What’s the matter? Who’s grabbing you?”

“Just some idiot who thinks I’m going home with him. It’s ok, I pushed him and he fell. Someone else stepped on his hand and broke his phone and he’s fighting with them.”

“Where are you? If people are fighting, you should leave!”

“Don’t be Nicola!” she shouted back. “I think he likes you.”

“The guy whose phone got stepped on?”

“Addie! I think Granger likes you.”

“Yes, we’re friends. Juliet! What’s happening?” Because now, I’d heard a man’s voice telling her that they were leaving together. “Is that the same guy? Get away from him!”

I hadn’t been paying attention to my own surroundings, but now when I looked up, I saw Granger standing next to his couch. “What’s going on?” he asked me.

“Juliet’s in a club and some guy is bothering her,” I said, just as my sister told me that she was fine and was going home. “Stay right there!” I ordered her. “I’m coming to get you. Where is this place?”

“No, Addie, I’m fine,” she yelled again, but she did give me the name of the bar, one I didn’t recognize. When I had that, I went to the door, picked up my keys, opened all the locks, and started to walk out to my car. I was standing in the driveway when she spoke again in a much more normal volume. “I’m outside but I’m with my friends. Ok? We’re leaving, so don’t tell on me to Nic or anything. I’m totally fine.”

I stopped with my hand on my car’s door handle. “You scared me, Juliet!” I told her. “What’s going on?”

“Sorry,” she said, and she did sound apologetic. But then she continued, “You were the one who called me.”

“No, I texted to ask you a question about Granger and you called me back and let me listen in on a near-kidnapping!”

“It wasn’t anything big and I’m fine now anyway.” I heard voices and a car starting. “We’re driving toward the tunnel.”

The only drivable tunnel went under the Detroit River and led to Windsor, Ontario—it was an international border crossing. “Wait, are you in Canada?” I asked. It wasn’t so extremely unusual for her to drive there to go out for the night or to head to one of the beaches on Lake Erie in the summer. Except now it was November and late on a Tuesday, so she had work in only a few hours. “Are you going there or coming back?” I demanded. “What happening with you, JuJu?”

“I think he likes you. I have to go,” she said, and hung up.

I stood there staring down at my screen and then almost fell over in shock when someone touched my shoulder.

“Relax, it’s me again,” Granger said. Telling someone to “relax” never really worked, but being in his big presence did make me start to breathe. “What’s wrong with your sister?”

“She says that it’s nothing, and I did hear her roommate Leni in the background so it sounds like she’s ok. I don’t know why she’d be out partying now!” I realized that my voice had sounded very, very loud in the quiet of the very early morning. I lowered it when I spoke again. “I’m sorry that I woke you up.”

He shook his head. “I brought your purse, but did you know that you’re barefoot? It’s cold,” he noted, and I nodded and hopped back to the house, where I’d also left the door wide open.

“I just got worried, so I ran out,” I explained. “I wasn’t totally thinking.”

“That’s easy to do when it’s someone you love,” he answered, and carefully relocked everything. “You don’t need to go get her?”

“No, but I’m going to tell her to text me when she gets home. I probably won’t sleep until I know that she’s ok, and it’s weird. Juliet is not the sister I usually worry about. If anyone was going to wander off into another country late at night, it would be Grace. JuJu always has it together.” I stopped. “Sorry. You had already gone to bed, and now it’s even later.”

“You’re the one who has to get up early.”

But he did, too, because he had very busy days. We’d been going on runs together and then he worked out like a maniac, lifting weights and doing one million sit-ups. He worked on restaurant and maybe his property stuff for hours and hours, even on weekends, before he went to Amunì and worked there, too.

“I wasn’t sleeping,” he told me. “I was thinking about you leaving.”

“I’m not going to Canada,” I assured him.

“No, I meant leaving this house to go live with Sophie or Brenna or whoever. You shouldn’t do that. You should stay here.”

“But…” I tried to think. “I know that we didn’t set a date for me to go and it sounded like you were ready for that to happen immediately.”

“It came out wrong, then. I don’t want you to,” he answered. “You should stay for as long as you need, at the minimum until you find a new place and get your security deposit back.”

“That could be months.”

“I don’t care,” Granger told me. He turned again and walked toward his room, and when he got there, he spoke in his quiet way but I heard him perfectly. “I don’t want you to go.”

“Ok,” I answered, as warm, gooey happiness battled with worry about my sister in my mind. “I’ll stay.” He nodded back to me and shut his door behind himself. I sat there for a while, not even considering sleep, but considering him, Juliet, and what she had said to me.

It was a lot to think about and it was confusing—except that one thing I was sure was that I didn’t want to go anywhere. And the reason why didn’t have anything to do with our friendship, or with taking care of the cat, or with any of the other explanations I’d given to Mina about why I was staying in his house.

I knew why I wanted to stay, and it had everything to do with the man who was probably still not sleeping. I wouldn’t be, either.