I’ve escaped her darkness into the life I’ve built in the light. It’s a little lonely, sure. But at least I can help people, have friends, an adopted family thanks to Jax, a home. Dear Birdie would say: You can choose and create the life you want. You are the author of your reality.
That reality was enough for me before you. Before you awakened a hunger to be known.
Inside my bag, my phone is vibrating. I ignore it, but no sooner than it stops, it starts again. Glancing around for Bailey Kirk, I don’t see him, but hear footsteps, the sound of cabinets opening and closing in a room behind a closed door—probably a break room.
The phone keeps vibrating, and I reach in to dig it out as I keep walking, coming to a stop by a desk in the only office with a door, its back wall a floor-to-ceiling window. The number is unknown, but I answer anyway.
“Hello?”
There is only silence on the line. Then the sound of someone breathing. I clench the receiver, pull it closer. “Who’s there?”
I look through the glass to the office building across the street.
There, in the window, is a large dark form. I know the shape of your shoulders, the way you carry yourself—tall and a little stiff, your movements slow and careful like you’re afraid to cause yourself pain.
Is it you?
“Is it you?” I say out loud, moving closer to the window. But the dark form there moves away. I put my hand on the cool glass.
I hear something. The rumble of a voice in static. But I can’t make out the words.
“Adam.”
The light goes out across the street. The line goes dead. My breath leaves me.
“Hey?” Bailey’s voice startles me, making me jump and spin to face him.
“Woah,” he says, lifting a hand. “Sorry. Find anything?”
I shake my head, all my words jammed up in my throat.
“Who was that?” he asks.
“It was him. I saw him,” I say. “There. I think.”
He frowns at me, looks out the window as if to see what I was staring at. But there’s just a busy office like this one might have been. People going about their business, their lives, a whole other universe. The window where he stood is dark. There was someone there. Wasn’t there? But it doesn’t make sense. How? Why?
“You saw him? In the office across the street?” he asks.
“He’s—gone.” There’s a note of despair in my voice that shames me. I see a flash of empathy—pity?—move across his face.
We look at each other for a moment and then both bolt for the street, not bothering with the elevator, jogging down eleven flights of stairs, our footfalls echoing loudly off concrete walls. We burst through the metal door that leads outside.
Bailey runs into traffic, holding out his hand, drivers stopping short, leaning on their horns in protest. I follow. On the opposite sidewalk, I scan the street, up and down, looking for you. You’re taller than most people. If you’re here, you’ll be easy to pick out of the crowd. I want to see you so badly, run after you and grab your hand, ask you what the hell is going on? But I don’t see you. Just a street full of strangers. Other strangers.
It’s not hard for Kirk to gain access to the eleventh floor—with his ID and the swagger he has about him. He seems to have a way of getting people to do what he wants, including me.
A burly, middle-aged security guard escorts us up in the elevator to a posh advertising agency—all gray and white, with large screens showing slick ads for beauty and clothing, models preening, glossed lips, shiny cascades of hair, flowing fabrics. There’s an ambient soundtrack playing that reminds me of a South Beach hotel, low, soothing electronic beats.
Everyone seems impossibly young and well-coiffed.
I twist at my hair, glance down at my distressed jeans and leather jacket, my cross-body bag. My urban warrior look. Jax calls it my bike messenger look, which sounds somewhat less cool though probably closer to the truth. But I haven’t mastered fashion the way she has. I can’t rock a muumuu on a nearly six-foot-tall frame or slip my elegantly thin form into a long black shift that clings to my perfection.
Bailey shows your picture around, but no one recognizes you, glancing up from their screens disinterested, heads shaking. I walk into the space and venture to the place where I think I saw you. People sit at silver laptops, talk into head pieces; there’s a hum of voices, ringing phones. Some stare as I walk by, a raggedy stranger in their well-heeled midst.
I find my way to an empty office. From the window, I can see the place where I just stood across the street.