The Last Door

Chapter 4: Always

I made the pasta the way I always had, which was the problem, because my hands moved through every step without me.

I crushed the tomatoes by hand and added a pinch of sugar because my mother had. I stood slightly to one side of myself while I did it, like a stranger watching someone cook. At six-twenty, I set the table for three and then stood holding two chairs because in my first life, I had always sat beside the stove, and that seat put my back to the front door. This time, I dragged my chair against the wall where I could see every exit.

Elise arrived at ten to seven with cold on her coat and a bottle of wine she had chosen for its label. She hugged me from the side while I held the wooden spoon, and she told me she was dying to hear Daniel's news and that I was not allowed to guess. I watched her face for any sign of the girl who had stared at the drawer that afternoon. I found nothing but warmth, which was somehow worse.

Daniel came in at seven. He hung his coat on its hook and paused in the doorway to take in the room, the way he did every evening. "You moved the chairs," he said.

"I wanted a change."

He kissed me, and I leaned into it because Mara would have, and I held his sleeve a second too long. His attention caught, like a man hearing a floorboard creak in a house he knew well, then Elise told us to sit.

We ate by candlelight, the pasta was really good, and I laughed on cue at Elise's story about a customer who tried to return a funeral dress, because I could hear how convincing my laugh sounded. Daniel waited until the second bottle.

"I have some news," he said before setting down his fork.

I knew every word before he said it. He would say that Hale Group was giving him the site lead on a major project, that it was confidential. He would joke about signing a form that kept him from telling his own fiancée. He said all of it in the same rhythm, with the same pause before the word fiancée, and Elise shrieked on cue. I turned my hand over inside his and said that I was proud of him, and the terrible part was that I meant it.

"It means a lot of travel," Daniel added, rubbing his thumb across my knuckles. "But it's the kind of work that keeps you safe, long term."

My fork stopped halfway into my mouth. I searched my memory for that sentence and found only a blank where it should have been. I could not tell whether he had said it before or whether it was the first thing in this world that did not match.

"I'd love to see where you work," I said, to cover my silence. "Could I come to the site on Friday?"

His hand went still on mine. "It's a closed project, Mar. No visitors, not even family."

"Not even for an hour?"

"Not even for an hour." He smiled, and it was tender and immovable at once. "I'm sorry, but it's a client rule."

I lowered my eyes to my plate because if I had looked at his face, I would have asked what he was hiding, and I could not afford to ask yet.

"Is it the one on the ridge?" Elise asked, reaching for the wine. "The one with the door test?"

The table went quiet. Daniel turned his head slowly toward my sister, and I saw something cross his face that I had never seen there, a flash of alarm so quick that I would have missed it had I not spent nine days learning to read faces for danger.

"Where did you hear that?" he asked.

"You said it on the phone last week." Elise laughed lightly and waved her glass. "I was in the hallway. Don't look at me like I was spying. It was only a word."

Elise's cheeks colored, and she busied herself with her napkin. For the first time that evening, she did not look as though she were performing anything at all.

"It was only a word," Daniel repeated, and he picked up his fork again. But he did not look at either of us for the rest of the course, and I noticed that the pause before he spoke again was a little longer than he meant it to be.

After dessert, he carried the plates to the sink without being asked. I walked Elise to the door, where she wrapped her scarf twice around her neck and bounced on her heels the way she had since she was small.

"Thanks for dinner," she said. Her eyes were bright and a little wet, though she was smiling. Then she hesitated, and the porch light made her look younger than twenty-four. "Can I ask you something strange? If the world ever went really wrong, you would come and get me, wouldn't you? You'd never leave me somewhere."

Behind me the water ran in the kitchen, and a radiator knocked twice somewhere in the building. The old Mara would have answered before Elise finished the sentence, and I could feel the word in my mouth, worn smooth by twenty-six years of use.

"Always," I said.

It came out steady and warm, and it sounded entirely true. Elise grinned, hugged me hard, and ran down the stairs with her scarf trailing behind her.

Much later, in the dark, I lay beside Daniel with my eyes half closed and my breathing slow, pretending to sleep. I felt him ease out from under the blanket, and I listened to his bare feet cross the floor to the spare room and the soft scrape of a drawer opening.

Every instinct told me to sit up and ask what he was doing, but a confrontation would show him that I had read those pages, and I would lose my only chance of learning more. So I rolled my head on the pillow until I could see him through the doorway. He stood at the desk in the glow of his phone, lifting the old engineering textbook out of the bottom drawer, and I watched him go perfectly still. I had put the folder back at an angle, a quarter inch off from where it had been. And he stared at it for a long time with his hand resting on the cover.

He did not say my name or look toward the bedroom. He simply lifted the folder out, slid it into his work bag, and zipped the bag closed. Then he set it beside the front door, where he would see it every time he left. Beneath the floor, the slow tick I had heard that morning began again, and this time, I counted forty beats before it stopped.

Lying there in the dark, I understood that the only person who knew where that door stood had just decided to take it with him.