RUIN ME GENTLY

Chapter 12: Three Short, One Long

The ladder was slick with rust and condensation, and I climbed it badly. Halfway up, my hands gave out. I hung there, forehead against cold iron, and Julian's good hand came up under my heel and held me, the way you hold a child on a swing.

"I can't do this and think at the same time," I said.

"Then don't think."

"Julian."

"I know." He was quiet for a moment. Water dripped somewhere below us, slow and regular as a clock. "Ask me, then. Here. Before we go up, because I don't know what's up there."

I turned around on the rungs so my back was to the dark and looked down at him. He was gray in the face and swaying a little. His shirt was black with blood from collar to belt. It was a ridiculous time for a conversation. It was also the only time we were ever going to have it.

"Why did you come back at six?"

He didn't flinch. I think he'd been waiting for it so long that it was almost a relief to hear it said.

"Adrian called me at five," he said. "From the room. I was sitting in a car park, two floors down, with a bruise coming up on my jaw where one of her men had put me against a wall. He said, She's asleep. She's fine. Come and take over."

"Take over."

"Mother's plan was never for him to be there one night." He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "She wanted to see if you'd notice. If you could be handed a different brother and never know. Because if you could, then eventually she wouldn't need me at all.

He was gentler, Elena. You'd have liked him more. You'd have signed whatever he put in front of you with a smile, and she'd have had her pliant husband and her shares and I'd have been in a grave beside the lake that was supposed to have taken him."

I held on to the rung.

"He didn't want it," Julian said. "That's the part I've never been able to hate him for. He called me at five because he couldn't do it. He'd spent a night with his arm around a woman he'd been told to fool, and she'd hummed a lullaby in her sleep and held on to his shirt, and he wanted out."

"And you went up."

"I went up. I stood in the doorway and you were asleep on his chest and he looked at me over your hair." His voice dropped. "I'd been afraid of two things for twenty-five years. That my brother was dead, and that someone would come along and be better than me. Standing there, I found out which one was worse."

I said nothing.

"So I went to the window," he said. "And I stood with my back to you. And I thought, if she wakes up and sees us both, she'll look at him. Anyone would. And I did not want to be there when she did."

"You were afraid I'd choose him."

"I was sure you would." His laugh broke in the middle. "That's why I was cold. You think it was only the bargain. It wasn't. For six years I looked at you and thought, she's grateful to the wrong man, and the day she finds out, she's going to be so relieved."

I could hear my own breath, uneven in the tunnel. I could have said a hundred things. I thought, You stupid, stupid man, and I didn't know if I meant him or myself.

Here is what I hadn't told anyone, not him, not my mother, not the mirror.

I woke up before six that morning.

Not fully. It was that gray strip between sleeping and waking when the body knows things the mind hasn't signed off on yet. I was warm. There was an arm around me. I remember thinking, in the thick, sideways way you think in fevers, this is nice, this is very nice, and then, a half-second later, with no particular alarm, this isn't him.

I didn't know how I knew. The soap, maybe. The way he breathed. Julian breathed like someone listening for footsteps, even asleep, and this man breathed like a man who had never once had to.

I lay there and thought: I could open my eyes.

I thought: I could ask.

And I thought, with a clarity that scared me, I don't want to know.

Because for the first time in months, someone was being kind to me without it costing something. I'd felt the coldness coming even then. I'd seen how Julian looked at me across a room when he thought I wasn't watching: like a man at the edge of a very high place. I was tired. I wanted, just for one hour, to be held by someone who wasn't about to let go.

So I closed my eyes again. I let myself be fooled.

I had been carrying that for six years, folded very small, in a place I never looked. I'd told myself it was the fever. I told myself the kindness was Julian's and the doubt was mine, and that if I could only get back to the man who'd held my hair, I'd be fine.

I'd been so busy mourning a man who didn't exist that I never noticed who had been standing at the window.

"I woke up," I said. "Before you came in."

Julian's face changed, just slightly.

"I knew it wasn't you. Not clearly. But I knew. And I let it go on anyway." I swallowed. "I think I've been furious with you for six years because I couldn't be furious with myself."

"Elena—"

"Let me finish.

Please." My voice was steadier now, strange and thin. "When I opened my eyes at six, you were at the window. With your back to me. You didn't turn around. You didn't say anything. You were looking at the street and you'd put one hand on the glass."

He was staring at me.

"You tapped it," I said. "Three short. One long. On the pane, very quietly, like you thought no one could hear."

I watched it hit him.

"I said thank you for staying," I whispered, "and you thought I was talking to him. I wasn't. I was looking at you."

The tunnel was completely silent. Even the water had stopped.

"I knew which of you was at the window," I said. "I knew the second you did that. And I think part of me has known ever since, and I couldn't make it make sense, because why would the man who loved me that much be so cruel?" I made a sound that was almost a laugh. "I didn't love the man who held my hair, Julian. I loved the one who stood at the window and wouldn't turn around.

I just never understood that was you."

He said nothing. He was crying, silently and without moving, the way I imagine you do when you've been holding it back for a very long time and have forgotten that the body knows how.

I came back down two rungs, took his face in both hands, and kissed him.

It wasn't like the kisses in books. It was clumsy and salt-wet, and he'd bled on my chin, and neither of us was breathing properly. But his hand found the back of my head and held it the way you'd hold something you'd been told you were never going to be allowed to keep, and I felt every one of the six years in it. And then it was over, and we stood there with our foreheads together, shaking.

"I'm still very angry with you," I told him.

"Good."

"I'm going to be angry for a long time."

"I'll wait," said Julian. "I've had practice."

We came up through a maintenance hatch into a back alley that smelled of wet cardboard. It was nearly four in the morning and the sky had that bruised, enormous look it gets before the first light. Somewhere very far away, a church bell was striking the hour.

I had two hours. That was all. Two hours to find my mother, and a signature I'd have to give to a woman who had poisoned me.

"Where are we?" I asked.

Julian looked around, and a strange expression crossed his face.

"Delancey," he said. "The back of it. This is where the loading dock used to be."

I looked at him. "The laundromat?"

"It's under us. The tunnels run beneath the whole block." He pointed to a rusted steel door in the brick, half buried in ivy. "That door's been bricked up since the demolition. That's the one thing she never found, because I made sure of it. It leads to the office from the other side."

"Does it lead to my mother?"

"No." His hand closed around mine. "But it leads to the only thing I have left that she can't take."

He pulled aside the ivy. Beneath it, where the door met its frame, someone had scratched a line of numbers into the steel with the point of a key. I knew them. It was a date. The day I said yes.

I put out my hand to touch it.

And from the dark at the end of the alley, quiet, cheerful, a little out of breath, somebody began to applaud.

He came out of the shadows with his hands in the pockets of a plain gray coat, unarmed, bareheaded in the rain. He had Julian's walk when Julian was tired. He had the face I'd worn myself out hating and loving in the same breath for eleven years, and for the first time I understood that it was not a face I'd ever really seen.

I had only ever seen half of it at a time.

"I'm sorry," said Adrian. "I know that was private. I'd have waited, but we're running out of night."

Julian stepped in front of me. I let him.

"She doesn't know I'm here," Adrian said, gently, as if it were nothing. "I'd like to keep it that way. I came to offer you something, and I only have until the sun comes up."

He took one hand out of his pocket.

It wasn't holding a weapon. It was resting, loosely, against the brick wall of the alley, and as I watched, his fingers began to move against the stone. Very softly. Without any hurry at all.

Three short.

I felt Julian stop breathing.

One long.

"Oh, you didn't think you were the only one in that back office, did you?" said Adrian, smiling, with Julian's eyes. "There was always a third chair, Jules. It's just that nobody ever told you who was sitting in it."