They Wanted Me Gone, So I Became Unforgettable의 모든 챕터: 챕터 91 - 챕터 100

Anastasia’s POV:He called me that same evening.I was in the kitchen when my phone rang and I saw his name and I answered before the second ring because I had been waiting for it since Harlan left and I knew what the call was going to be about before he said a word.He did not say anything immediately.I waited.“Did you read yours?” he said finally.“Yes,” I said.Another pause.“He knew,” Marcus said. “Things about me that I did not know he knew. Things I thought I had hidden.”“What things?” I said.“The temper,” he said. “He wrote about my temper. He said he watched me fight it my whole childhood and he said.” He stopped. “He said he was proud of me for fighting it. Not for winning. Just for fighting.”I held my phone.“He saw it,” Marcus said. “I spent years thinking he did not see it and he saw everything.”“He always did,” I said.“I know that now,” he said. “I’m just.” He stopped again. “I’m angry that he’s not here. I thought I was done being angry about it and then Harlan p

Anastasia’s POV:Isla called me from somewhere loud and said she had painted something and she wanted me to see it before anyone else did and I said when and she said now if you can and I said give me an hour and she gave me forty five minutes because that was Isla.Her studio was in a building on the south end of the city that had been a warehouse and was now divided into spaces for people who made things and needed room to make them and it smelled like paint and turpentine and the particular cold of a large space that was heated insufficiently on purpose because Isla said the cold kept her alert.She met me at the door.She looked the way she always looked, paint on her hands, something in her face that was between restless and satisfied, the expression of someone who had just finished something and had not yet decided how to feel about it being finished.“Come in,” she said.I followed her through the studio which was full of things in various states of being, canvases leaning agai

Anastasia’s POV:Lucas came home from lunch with Gerard and stood in the hallway for a long time before he said anything.Not the way he stood when something was wrong. The way he stood when something was large and he was still inside it and needed a moment before he could hand it to someone else.I waited.He came to the kitchen and sat at the island and I put coffee in front of him and sat across from him and did not say anything.He looked at the coffee.“He told me about Edmund,” he said.“What did he tell you?” I said.“Everything,” he said. “The version I did not have. Not the files or the flash drives or the Meridian Group. The other version. Who he was before any of that.”I held my coffee.“He was funny,” Lucas said.“Yes,” I said. “Harlan said that too.”“Gerard said he used to laugh at his own jokes before he finished telling them,” he said. “He said it was his worst quality and also the thing he missed most.”I thought about that.A man who laughed at his own jokes before

Anastasia’s POV:He did it in her kitchen.Not a restaurant. Not somewhere with a view or a significant location or an occasion that announced itself. He had gone to her apartment for dinner, the one she had near the federal building, and she had cooked and he had helped badly and they had eaten at her small table and afterward she was washing up and he was drying and he asked her.He told me afterward.He said he had planned something different. He had thought about it for weeks and had a version in his head that involved somewhere meaningful, somewhere that said something about what they had been through and where they were now.And then she was standing at her kitchen sink washing a pan and he was standing beside her with a dish towel and he looked at her and the planned version stopped feeling like the right version.So he asked her there.At the sink.With the dish towel in his hand.She turned off the tap and turned around.She looked at him for a long moment with the particular

Anastasia’s POV:I filled the last page of the sketch notebook on a morning when the house was quiet and Lucas was at work and the children were at school and I had not planned for it to happen that day.It just did.I was working on something for a new client, a small house on the west side with a courtyard that needed intention, and I turned to what I thought was a blank page and found the last quarter page left and I drew what I needed to draw and then I put the pencil down and looked at the notebook.Full.Every page.From the first rough floor plan at the back, the one with the kitchen island in the wrong place and the two offices and the east windows that were not yet windows in any real building, to this last drawing of a courtyard that was going to be someone else’s.I picked it up and went through it slowly.From the back.The floor plan of the house on Linden Street in its earliest form. Revised twice on the next pages. The studio in the east corner added on a page that stil