“I’m getting better,” I say again, my voice softer this time.
He pulls another white pill from the orange bottle and places it on my tongue. A bottle of spring water washes it down. Then he helps me recline onto the bed. Soon my eyelids feel heavy. He pulls up the blanket to my chin. Then his large palm passes over my forehead, and it is like I’m a bird being put away for the night. Like I have a blanket over my cage, but I’m not going to rail against the bars. It’s cozy here. It’s safe.
Thankfully, the painkillers don’t last forever. The morning after they run out I start the day with a newly cleared head. My back is healed enough to be able to roll over without thinking much about it, and I do it several times in the empty bed.
His side is cold. He’s been gone for a while.
The smallest excitement kindles in my chest. I don’t want him to be gone, but I do want to look around. Ever since we arrived, I’ve been so curious about this place. About him. I thought Zeus and the whorehouse were the same.
Surprise.
Not only are the two things not the same, but this is an inner secret of his, carefully guarded. He’s never mentioned it. No one at the whorehouse ever mentioned it. If the rest of the girls knew, they would all be vying for an invitation. There wasn’t even a whisper of this during the hours we spent getting ready for the evenings.
My heart squeezes at the thought of them. Where are they now? What happened to all of them? My memory of that night is fragmented but I know they weren’t in the ballroom. I hope they weren’t in their rooms when the ceiling came down. I hope none of them were. Not even turncoat Savannah, who is still fairly mysterious, even now.
He’s left me clothes for the morning in a neat stack on a chair by the bed. Soft shorts, underthings, a tank top, and a silk robe. On top of the stack is a note.
He writes notes.
My heart kicks itself into a run.
Brigit—
I have a meeting. Stay on the second floor.
I’m coming back
—Z
I fold up the note and slip it into the pocket of the silk robe the moment it’s on, and then—because I’m only human—I go to snoop in Zeus’s house.
The first thing that’s immediately obvious? It’s not just a second residence. This place is lived-in, which makes no sense to me. He was always working, always in his office, or on the floor, or upstairs.
Or I only thought that he was. I believed the illusion because he wanted me and everyone else to believe it. The real truth is that he’s been here. The three books on the nightstand have dog-eared pages at different points. I bend down to read the titles. The first is a space western I’ve never heard of. The second is a hardcover called The Two-Mile Time Machine, about an ice core from Greenland. A giant, frozen chunk of ice that scientists use to learn more about the distant past.
The third is Anna Karenina by Tolstoy.
Everyone knows the line about happy families, and unhappy families.
I let the books fall back into place and pad out into the living room. I’m coming back. That’s probably the most romantic thing he’s ever said to me. And he put it in writing, too.
I spend the first hour in the kitchen. He keeps enough silver and dishware for a dinner party of six. He drinks pulp-free orange juice. He keeps three boxes of seashell pasta. One shelf in his fridge is entirely taken up with berries in glass containers. Raspberries. Strawberries. Blackberries. No blueberries, though. Odd. In a glass Tupperware by the microwave I find a covered basket of small pastries and steal one. It turns out to be an airy cinnamon roll.
The list of things I can’t imagine him doing is shrinking. In the kitchen, I’m forced to imagine him doing things like drinking pulp-free orange juice and eating cinnamon rolls and leaning against the island and washing his hands in the sink. Every drawer I open lights him from a different angle.
The second hour I spend in his bedroom closet. It’s big enough for him to change in, like his former closet, but this one doesn’t have any paintings. He doesn’t hide them here. They’re out where he can see them. In Zeus’s home he keeps a collection of his usual suits, plus a larger selection of casual clothes.
He owns three pairs of swim trunks.
It’s the swim trunks, more than anything, that makes me fall into another dimension of the swooning, painful crush I already have on him. I’ve imagined him on a beach so many times. A brief scene involving me asking him to go swimming sends heat rushing to my cheeks. Such an ordinary thing.
When I’m finished with the closet I come out to scrutinize the paintings. They all have the same name scrawled in the corner. Erich something.
I spend the third hour looking at his huge collection of books, pulling them out at random. In a few of them I find places he’s underlined.
By the end of the fourth hour, he’s still not home.
I need to stretch my legs.
I walk back and forth across the living room but I want more than that, I want a little lift in my heart rate, so I make sure my robe is secure and stride to the main doors.
No one is on the other side, or on the stairs. The lobby waits in silence while I consider the double doors.
His note didn’t forbid going in here. It only said to stay on the second floor. And my impatience is starting to get the better of me. I need a distraction for the worry that’s lapping at my mind with growing waves.
The doors are unlocked.
One of them swings open with a whisper.
I’m expecting complete darkness inside, and once again, I’m wrong.
Zeus has divided the theater in two. The sunken floor creates another high ceiling, with tall windows. They’re closer to the ground, of course, so the light isn’t as intense as it is upstairs. He’s also taken out all the theater seats, because this is his office.
He has a round meeting table to one side, surrounded with chairs. It’s covered in neat stacks of paper and clear at first glance that he wasn’t lying—people don’t come here. It’s a work table. A wheeled chair sits at an angle to a low-slung desk. I can see his pose from that angle. Feet up on the desk, a book propped in his lap. And the book waits for me in the center of the desk.
If I weren’t paying attention, I might mistake it for one of the whorehouse ledgers. It’s not one of those ledgers. I circle the desk and look down at it. A blue cover. The cover has his neat print on the front—about three months ago.
Goose bumps erupt down the length of my back. This whole place has a very forbidden energy about it.
It’s irresistible.
Zeus has been gone for more than four hours. He’s just as likely to be gone for another four. I step around the chair with extreme caution and open the cover of the book on the desk.
It’s more than a ledger.
It’s more than a notebook.
It’s a journal.
The very first page has a date in the upper-right corner—the same date as the one on the front.
I should not be looking at this.
I can’t help myself.
I pull the robe tighter around me. I’m only going to read one. One page, and then I’ll close this and go back upstairs, like he told me.
I saw her again this morning. Her/you. A figment of my imagination in that dress. M never wants to leave until I take him to the door and these women cannot get through a night without having a crisis. Three-drink minimum from now on. Five, and she’s just around every corner. You have got to get out of my brain, Katie. It’s been too long. And not long enough.