Chapter 157

Sloane

I woke late, with my face stiff and my eyes sore, and lay for a while looking at the window.

The light coming through it was gray and flat. Not dawn. Later than that. I had slept through the hour before light, when he would have been waiting on the porch to take me up the switchbacks to the shelf. I wondered if he had waited. I wondered if he had stood out there in the cold and looked at my door and decided not to knock.

I didn’t want to think about last night. So I lay there and thought about it anyway.

You were mine. I didn’t share.

It was later. Much later.

And my own voice, so small I hardly recognized it. When?

I got up.

***

They were both in the main room.

I knew something was different before I had the door all the way open. The table had been cleared of everything except a lamp, though it was daytime, and a map spread out flat under it, weighted at the corners with a tin cup and th