After that soft week of confession and salt and the way the house had settled back into its rules, everything felt both safer and more dangerous—safer because we had stitched promises into paper and skin, more dangerous because the tenderness had given me a new kind of vulnerability. I wanted to tell him everything now: the small fissures that opened in my chest when a message flashed on my phone, the way old photographs could still press cold into my palms. He wanted to know those things, and wanting to be known is the most intimate, terrifying request there is.
The morning after our music-and-confessions night, the mansion moved through ordinary rituals: coffee, schedules, a slow parade of people who made the foundation run. Angel left early for a meeting with a donor in the borough; Co
