and fencing foils were stacked on the wall, and heavy machines loomed against the windows like bulky insects.
She followed the stairs to the top floor and wound her way down the hall. The door to Darlington’s room was open.
He’s here. Again, the certainty came at her, but worse this time. He’d left the light on for her. He wanted her to find him. He would be sitting in his bed, long legs crossed, bent over a book, dark hair falling over his forehead. He would look up, cross his arms. It’s about time.
She wanted to run toward that square of light, but she forced herself to take measured steps, a bride approaching an altar, her certainty draining away, the refrain of He’s here shifting from one step to the next until she realized she was praying: Be here, be here, be here.
The room was empty. It was small compared to the lodgings at Il Bastone, a strange round room that had clearly never been meant to be a bedroom and somehow reminded her of a monk’s chamber. It looked exactly as she had last seen it: the desk pushed against one curved wall, a yellowing newspaper clipping of an old roller coaster taped above it, as if it had been forgotten there; a mini-fridge—because of course Darlington wouldn’t want to stop reading or working to go downstairs for sustenance; a high-backed chair placed by the window for reading. There were no bookshelves, only stacks and stacks of books piled at varying heights, as if he had been in the process of walling himself in with colored bricks. The desk lamp cast a circle of light over an open book: Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism.
Dawes. Dawes had come to see to the house, to sort the mail, to take the car out. Dawes had come to this room to study. To be closer to him. Maybe to wait for him. She’d been called away suddenly, left the lights on, assumed she’d be back that evening to take care of it. But Alex had been the one to return the car. It was that simple.
Darlington was not in Spain. He was not home. He was never coming home. And it was all Alex’s fault.
A white shape cut through the dark from the corner of her vision. She leapt backward, knocking over a pile of books, and swore. But it was just Cosmo, Darlington’s cat.
He prowled the edge of the desk, nudging up against the warmth of the desk lamp. Alex always thought of him as Bowie Cat because of his marked-up eye and streaky white fur that looked like one of the wigs Bowie had worn in Labyrinth. He was stupid affectionate—all you had to do was hold your hand out and he would nuzzle your knuckles.
Alex sat down on the edge of Darlington’s narrow bed. It was neatly made, probably by Dawes. Had she sat here too? Slept here?
Alex remembered Darlington’s delicate feet, his scream as he’d vanished. She held her hand down, beckoning to the cat. “Hey, Cosmo.”
He stared at her with his mismatched eyes, the pupil of the left like an inkblot.
“Come on, Cosmo. I didn’t mean for it to happen. Not really.”
Cosmo padded across the room. As soon as his small sleek head touched Alex’s fingers, she began to cry.
Alex slept in Darlington’s bed and dreamed that he was curled behind her on the narrow mattress.
He pulled her close, his fingers digging into her abdomen, and she could feel claws at their tips. He whispered in her ear, “I will serve you ’til the end of days.”
“And love me,” she said with a laugh, bold in the dream, unafraid.
But all he said was, “It is not the same.”
Alex woke with a start, flopped over, gazed at the sharp pitch of the roof, the trees beyond the window striping the ceiling in shadow and hard winter sun. She’d been scared to try fiddling with the thermostat, so she’d bundled herself in three of Darlington’s sweaters and an ugly brown hat she’d found on top of his dresser but that she’d never seen him wear. She remade the bed, then headed downstairs to fill Cosmo’s water dish and eat some fancy nuts-and-twigs dry cereal from a box in the pantry.
Alex took her laptop from her bag and went to the dusty sunroom that ran the length of the first floor. She gazed out at the backyard. The slope of the hill led to a hedge maze