Chapter 21: Almost

The rain came in sideways off the park, and Julian Cross was standing out in it like he’d paid for it.

Rachel watched him through the terrace doors for a full minute before she went out. Forty-two floors up, the city was a smear of wet gold, cabs crawling down Central Park West, the reservoir a black hole in the middle of everything. In the pocket of her cardigan was a strip of shredded paper gone soft as cloth from being touched. She’d been touching it all day.

R M C O N S U L.

She hadn’t said the letters out loud since dawn. Saying them would make them a thing.

“You’re getting soaked,” she said.

“So are you, now.”

He didn’t turn around. His white shirt was stuck to his shoulders, see-through in patches, and she made herself look at the railing instead. Nice railing.

“Mrs. Ruiz is going to kill you. That shirt’s Italian.”

“Everything in this apartment is Italian except you and me and the toaster.”

That got a laugh out of her, a real one, the ugly kind with a snort at the end. He turned then. Water ran off his jaw into the collar, and he was looking at her the way he’d looked at the tape and the strips all night on his study floor, like she was a problem he actually wanted to solve.

“You didn’t sleep,” he said.

“Neither did you.”

“I’m used to it.”

“Well, I used to sleep under a train, so I think I win.”

It landed on him like a hand. He came closer, close enough to smell rain and the cedar soap from his shower and something underneath that was just him, and she thought, very clearly, okay, here it is, I’m going to let this happen and deal with it in the morning.

His hand came up. His thumb touched the corner of her mouth, where a drop of rain was sitting, and wiped it away. She tipped her face up.

He stepped back.

Not far. One step. But it might as well have been the Hudson.

“Not like this,” he said. His voice was rough. “Not while you’re under my roof because you have nowhere else to go.”

Rachel stood there with her face still tipped up like an idiot.

“Wow,” she said.

“Rachel.”

“No, that’s great. That’s very noble. Somebody get you a plaque.” She could feel the heat climbing her neck, and it wasn’t the good kind anymore. “You think I don’t know where I’m standing? You think I’d kiss you for the rent?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“It’s exactly what you said. You just said it in a nicer suit.”

“I’m not wearing a suit.”

“Don’t,” she said, and it came out wobbly, which made her angrier. “Don’t be funny right now.”

She went inside dripping on his Italian floors. In the guest suite she packed the one bag she had, a canvas duffel Mrs. Ruiz had dug out of a closet. Four minutes. She owned four minutes’ worth of things. Her mother’s quilt. Three blouses from Bergdorf’s she’d fought him over. The green dress she left on the hanger, out of spite.

He was in the hall when she came out. He didn’t block her. That was almost worse.

“It’s raining,” he said.

“I’ve been rained on.”

* * *

She still showed up at eight the next morning. She was mad, not stupid. It was a paycheck, and she’d scrub his grout until it sparkled out of pure pettiness. Julian left for Hudson Yards before she got there, which was cowardly. She’d have done the same. Mrs. Ruiz made a lot of noise with pots and said nothing at all.

That night, her second on Tessa’s lumpy couch, Rachel took the 5 up to Pelham Parkway and walked toward Tessa’s with a bag of oranges from the fruit stand under the El, fifty cents apiece, and halfway down Williamsbridge Road she noticed the car.

Gray sedan. Chrysler, maybe. Same cheap tint as the one in the Scarsdale bank lot. Going eleven miles an hour on a street where people drove like their mothers were in labor.

She sped up. It sped up.

She stopped to look in the window of a botánica, plaster saints, one with a chipped nose, and in the glass she watched the car stop too, half a block back, lights on, engine running.

Her stomach dropped. Fine. She’d been followed before. She was not going to drop her oranges and cry on Williamsbridge Road.

There was a bodega on the corner with a side door onto the cross street. She knew because Tessa bought her lottery tickets there and complained about the cat. Rachel walked in, nodded at the cat, walked straight past the Takis and the Goya cans and out the side, then cut back up the block through the driveway between two houses, where somebody’s pit bull lost its whole mind behind a fence.

When she came out on Williamsbridge again, she was behind the car.

She got the plate under the streetlight before it pulled off. New York, orange and blue, the back half caked in road grime like somebody had splashed it on purpose. K. T. V. And a 9.

That was all. The car turned at the light and was gone.

Rachel wrote KTV9 on the back of her hand in Tessa’s borrowed eyeliner.

Then she turned the corner to the salon and stopped walking.

The front window of Glossy Nail Bar was just gone, glass all over the sidewalk, glittering like somebody had spilled a whole bottle of topcoat, and the neon NAILS sign hanging by one wire, buzzing.

Tessa was standing in the middle of it in her house slippers, holding a brick.

“Don’t touch nothing,” Tessa said. “I already touched it. I’m an idiot. Look.”

The brick was wrapped in a photograph, rubber-banded tight. Rachel knew it before she saw it. Eight by ten, the one from the upstairs hallway at Linden Court, the one her mother had paid for. Rachel in ivory, laughing, Michael’s arm around her waist.

Somebody had taken a key to her face. Just hers.

“I’m calling the cops,” Tessa said. “I’m calling the four-nine, I’m calling the news, I’m calling my cousin Ricky who knows a guy…”

“Call the cops,” Rachel said. She held up her hand. “But I want the rest of that plate.”

* * *

The officers came at ten-forty and left at eleven-fifteen with a report number and a shrug. Tessa duct-taped cardboard over the window, cursing so creatively Rachel wrote two down.

Near midnight, upstairs in Tessa’s apartment, somebody knocked.

Tessa grabbed a curling iron. Rachel grabbed the brick.

She opened the door on the chain.

Julian stood in the hallway, soaked through, no umbrella, no coat, rain running off him onto Tessa’s cousin’s welcome mat. He looked like he’d walked from Central Park West.

“I was wrong,” he said. “Come home.”