Chapter Twelve

Adam's POV

He quit on a Tuesday.

It was a deliberate choice, the way most of his worst decisions were — not impulsive, not emotional, just a logical conclusion he'd arrived at after a period of very controlled, very quiet internal devastation. He sat at his desk at the museum for the last time on a Tuesday morning in October, looked at the Byzantine manuscript he'd been cataloging for three weeks, and understood with sudden and complete clarity that he did not care about it at all.

He had never not cared about it before. That was the thing.

For twelve years, the work had been the point. The museum, the archiving, the particular pleasure of handling something centuries old and knowing its story — it had been the only inheritance he'd wanted from his mother, who had curated the medieval collection here for twenty years before she died. He'd taken the job six months after her funeral and he'd never once regretted it. It was the thing that made him feel like a person rather than a corporate function, the one part of his life that Elena and the board and the business press had no claim to.

And now he looked at the manuscript and felt nothing.

He wrote the resignation letter in eleven minutes. He left it on the director's desk and took the stairs instead of the elevator and walked out of the Whitmore Museum into the gray city morning without looking back.

He told himself it was time. He told himself the museum work was a kind of hiding and he was done hiding. He told himself a lot of things on the walk back to the car.

He did not tell himself the truth, which was that he had quit because everything in that building reminded him of something, and the something was the night in the loft above the barn when a girl in a worn flannel shirt had picked up his copy of the Divine Comedy and said good book with all the confidence in the world, and he had felt, for the first time in years, like he was in a place that was real.

Elena was at his apartment. She was often at his apartment now. She moved through the space with a proprietary ease he hadn't invited and didn't know how to revoke — she was never anything but pleasant, never demanding, never wrong, and her wrongness was somehow worse because of it.

"You're home early," she said, looking up from her laptop.

"I resigned."

A beat. "From the museum?"

"Yes."

She blinked once. The calculation behind it was invisible to most people — not to Adam, not entirely, not after fourteen months — but she recovered smoothly, and her expression settled into concern so quickly it was almost seamless. "Adam. Are you sure?"

"Already done."

She closed her laptop. "Okay." She stood, came toward him, touched his arm. "Okay. Let me make coffee."

He let her. He stood in his own kitchen and watched her move around it and thought about how little he actually knew about her. He'd built a file on everyone he did business with — it was habit, precaution — but he had never built one on Elena. He had assumed he was safe in her because she was familiar. Because she was there.

Cooper appeared in the doorway. He had a key — Adam had given it to him years ago for emergencies — and his expression now was the expression he wore when something was wrong and he had decided to say it carefully.

"The arson investigation," Cooper said. "The witness who filed the corroborating statement —"

"I told you," Adam said. "I don't want to hear about it."

"Adam —"

"She made her choices, Cooper. I made mine." He said it with the kind of finality that was meant to end things. "File the divorce and move on. I don't want to hear her name."

Cooper looked at him for a long moment. Elena, in the kitchen, had gone very still.

"Alright," Cooper said. Not convinced. Not finished. Just alright, for now.

He left.

Adam drank the coffee Elena handed him. It was good coffee. Everything about Elena was correct and competent and present.

He wondered, for the first time in weeks, what Julia Rose Arthur was doing.

He didn't let himself wonder for long.