But he was overreacting, he told himself, letting the fear sink its hooks into him. He slowly opened the door, the foyer pitch-dark.
It smelled different here. He couldn’t explain it to himself, couldn’t say for sure what was different, but it was. Something besides the fresh paint and the apple cider.
He wondered if that meant that someone was inside the house. Or that someone had been in the house since he’d last been here. But it was too early for a showing, right? Or whether he was just picking up on a scent he hadn’t noticed earlier. Because he felt the prickle of fear, of paranoia, and maybe that was distorting his perception.
He stood still a moment and listened, and he heard nothing.
Leaving the lights off, he climbed the staircase. The master bedroom was at the end of the dark hall, after a series of smaller rooms and a bathroom. He knew this from his prior exploration.
As he rounded a turn, he saw light spilling out of the master bedroom, its door open. He approached slowly, quietly, his tread silent on the wall-to-wall carpeting. All he could hear was his heart pounding. He could smell that familiar note more strongly here.
He entered the bedroom.
And at the same moment he remembered what that smell was, he saw a pair of familiar jeans-clad legs and stockinged feet sticking out of the side of an overstuffed chair.
She turned, and now Tanner could see she’d been reading a book — Ragtime, by E. L. Doctorow.
“What happened to your face?” Sarah said.
47
My face?”
Tanner set down his bag and felt the left side of his face, which in fact felt a little warm. His fingers came away sticky. Blood. It must have happened when he crashed the Fiat through the gates of Harvard Stadium, when he was thrown forward.
“Did you get attacked or something?” Sarah said.
He shook his head. “I went back to the office to get some stuff.”
“You risked that?”
“Not a good decision, as it turned out.”
“Why? What happened?”
“Some guys followed me when I was driving. Damage to your car might have resulted.”
“They hit your car?”
“No. I hit a fixed object and got kicked around a very little bit. I’m fine.”
“Do I dare ask about my car?”
“That’s a complicated story. But I think it may be time for a new one.”
“Tanner! You know I don’t have any money.”
“I’ll take care of everything.” Not that he had any money either. But he was going to have to buy her a brand-new Fiat somehow.
She shook her head disapprovingly, but a tiny smile crawled across her face. “That’s so you. You’ll take care of everything.”
“Why are you here? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad to see you, but—”
“One of the brokers had a late showing, and they changed the code on the padlock. So I came here to meet you last night, and it was cold, and I decided to come inside and wait. And then I thought I’d just take a nap, and— Tanner, I need to talk to you.”
“Is it about my face?”
They went down to the kitchen to make coffee. Sarah fired up the Nespresso machine on the kitchen counter.
Tanner grimaced. “Fancy instant coffee.”
“It’s pretty good, actually, Tanner. Give it a chance.”
Tanner agreed to a demitasse of Dharkan — not bad at all — and Sarah had one too, and she said, “Look, I haven’t been sleeping at night. I’m basically scared shitless about what’s happening to you.”
“It’s going to be okay,” Tanner said. “Don’t worry about it.”
Sarah looked at him. Their eyes met. She took a sip of espresso. “I always know when you’re lying to me.”
“It’s nothing to worry about.”
“Except you can’t go home, you can’t go to work, and you were just almost killed.”
“Not even close to being killed. Please stop worrying.”
Sarah took another sip. “Do you remember that time when we were driving in the Adirondacks, going to Uncle Johnny’s cabin, and we got stuck in that blizzard?”
“Sure do.”
“And we were driving that crappy old Jetta, the Rustmobile as you called it, and we got stuck in the snowdrift?”
Tanner chuckled. He remembered a near-death experience and Sarah close to freaking out, and only now could he laugh. They’d been together for a couple of years by then, and he was learning to navigate the complex topography of this beautiful woman’s personality.
“And the tires are spinning in place and we’re getting spattered through the rust holes in the floor, and the car’s not moving, and all of a sudden this huge tractor-trailer in the other lane loses control, it’s jackknifing on the black ice, and it’s coming at us, this eighty-thousand-pound truck?”
He nodded. He remembered wondering if this was their last few seconds on earth. Wondering whether they should scramble out of the car into the snow, whether they had time to do that, deciding to stay put. He remembered her screaming, terrified, and him not wanting her to see he was just as frightened.
“And I’m basically losing it, and you just grab my hands — you’re perfectly calm — and you say, ‘We’re going to be okay, don’t worry about it, we’ll be fine.’”
“Yeah?”
“You must have been just as terrified as I was; we’re just trapped in that tin can and this gigantic truck is about to squish us like bugs. But you stayed calm; you had to stay strong for me. All you cared about was how scared I was.”
“I told you we’d be fine.” He remembered going into that calm place, a peaceful acceptance of the fact that they had no control over what was about to happen to them. And that weird calmness somehow looked like bravery.
“You’re doing it again now. Only this time the tractor-trailer’s not going to miss us.”
“This is not about us. This is just about me. And I’ll be okay.”
“How long do you think you can hide from — from whoever these people are? You, one person, against who knows how many, the whole goddamned government!”
“First of all, the US government doesn’t kill American citizens—”
“Oh, that is so not true. The president has the right to kill Americans on American soil.”
“Honey, this is all going to blow over soon. I’m sure of it.” He put down his espresso cup.
“You know this because you have a plan?”
“Yes. I mean, not yet. But I will.”
“Tanner!” she said. She was crying, tears pooling in her eyes, her face red. “I can’t lose you.”
“Hey,” he said very softly, and he put his arms around her. She drew herself into him. The room was cold, and he could feel the warmth of her body.
“I can’t lose you,” she said again, and she put her mouth on his. He could feel the hot tears on her face.
48
A minute?” Will said.
Senator Susan Robbins was sitting in her office, meeting with their legislative director. Her office door was open, which meant she was doing routine work she didn’t care if everyone knew about.
Today’s suit color was amethyst, which he’d learned was not the same thing as purple. It also meant she was trying to cheer herself up on Dull Committee Work Day. All of her suits were Elie Tahari, or Tahari-style, but this was one of the older ones in the rotation, a few frays here and there.
She looked up from a sheaf of papers she was holding in both hands. Her death stare over her Benjamin Franklin reading glasses. “Urgent?”
He thought: Do you really think I’d interrupt you if it wasn’t something urgent? He nodded. “I’d say, yeah.”