Neither of us slept.
I know, because I didn't, and because at half past four I gave up and went looking for my husband to make him tell me the truth, and I found him already awake, already dressed, sitting at the black piano with his hands flat on the closed lid like a man keeping something shut.
He didn't play. He just sat there in the grey light with the sea going on and on behind the glass, and when I came down the gallery in bare feet he said, without turning, "You should be asleep."
"So should you. You don't, though. Do you."
That got him to look at me.
I'd spent three years reading bodies for a living, and his was easy once you stopped being distracted by the rest of him. The skin under his eyes had the bruised, papery look of a man who hadn't had real sleep in weeks. The stillness I'd taken for control was the stillness of someone running on the far side of exhaustion, holding himself level by will alone. And his hands — his hands, when he lifted them off the piano, had the faintest tremor in them, the kind I'd seen in old surgeons and young widowers, the body's small mutiny against a mind that won't let it rest.
"You patched a man up on my fish table at three in the morning," I said. "I've earned a few answers. Start with an easy one. Who was he."
For a long moment I thought he wouldn't. Then he stood, and crossed to the window, and gave me his back, which I was learning was the closest he came to trusting anyone — turning around so they couldn't see his face do the thing it did.
"My father built something," he said. "A long time ago. On this coast, on that water. Most of it is legitimate now. I've spent ten years making it legitimate, line by line, and it has cost more than you'd believe and killed people I couldn't save. But it didn't start clean, and the parts that aren't clean don't like being cleaned. They fight back. Sometimes the fight comes to my door bleeding." He paused. "That's who he was. One of mine. A man I was trying to get out before the getting out got him killed. You kept him alive. I haven't thanked you for that."
"I don't want thanks. I want to know what I married."
"No," he said quietly. "You don't. You want to be the kind of person who faces things. It's not the same as wanting the thing."
"Don't tell me what I want."
He turned around then.
And whatever was in his face stopped the next clever thing in my throat, because it wasn't frost, and it wasn't the careful blankness of the photographs. It was naked. A man looking at me like I was a fire he'd been standing too close to for years and had finally decided to let burn him.
"Eve." My name in his mouth. He'd almost never used it. "Every question you ask is a door, and behind every door is a room, and some of those rooms have people in them who will hurt you the instant they know you've looked inside. I'm not keeping you out to be cruel. I'm keeping you out because I have spent a great deal of my life learning exactly how much it costs to know things, and I would rather pay it myself than watch you pay it. Do you understand?"
"No," I said. "Because you keep telling me what it costs and never what it is. That's not protection. That's just a nicer cage."
Something snapped in the air between us. I felt it go.
He crossed the room. Not fast. That was the thing that undid me — he came toward me slowly, giving me every step to stop him, and I didn't stop him, and when he stopped he was close enough that I could feel the exhaustion coming off him like heat off a wall at the end of a long day.
"Then stop asking me to be kind," he said, low. "And ask me for the thing you actually came down here for."
I should tell you I slapped him. I should tell you I turned on my heel and went back to my beautiful empty wing and kept my dignity and the moral high ground.
Instead I fisted my hand in the front of his shirt, and I pulled, and he came.
The kiss was not tender and it was not an accident. It was a negotiation conducted in the only language neither of us could lie in.
His mouth was hot and certain and the frost went out of him everywhere I touched, that furnace I'd felt under his hand at the gala now under my hands entirely, and I made a sound against his lips that I'd have been embarrassed by if I'd had any capacity left for it. He walked me back into the edge of the piano, both hands framing my face like I was something he'd been forbidden and had stopped caring about the rules. I got my hands under his shirt and found the truth of him written on his skin — a hard body, a soldier's economy to it, and a scar low on his ribs, ridged and ugly, the kind a knife leaves when someone means it. I pressed my palm flat over it and felt him go still, that same half-second stutter he did over the watch, the body remembering something the mouth would never say.
"Who did this," I breathed.
"Not now." His voice wrecked, his forehead dropping to mine. "Eve—"
And then, when I arched up into him, when it would have taken nothing at all to let the whole careful architecture of the marriage come down right there on the cold lid of the piano —
he stopped.
He set me back from him. Both hands on my shoulders, gentle and absolute, holding me at the length of his own arms while we stood there breathing like we'd run somewhere.
"No," he said.
"No?" I could have hit him. The wanting had teeth; I felt stripped by it. "You've had your hand on the small of my back in front of half the coast for weeks. Don't tell me no."
"Not like this." His chest was heaving; the refusal was costing him something I could see cross his face. "Not while you're still deciding whether I'm a monster. If I take you tonight, you'll wake up tomorrow certain I bought this too — one more thing I paid for, one more room you didn't choose to walk into. And you'd be right to think it."
He let go of me one finger at a time, like it hurt.
"I told you I didn't buy you. I meant it. So — no. Not until it isn't a transaction. Not until you come to me knowing exactly what I am and you want me anyway." A breath, unsteady. "God help us both when you do."
I have been left in a great many rooms in my life. That was the first time a man ever left me wanting by refusing to take, and it undid me more thoroughly than any yes could have.
He didn't leave, though. That was the strange mercy of it. He lowered himself onto the piano bench, spent, and after a moment I sat down beside him — not touching, a careful hand's width of cold air between us — and we stared at the black window and the blacker sea.
"You don't sleep," I said finally. "How long."
A pause. "Years."
"Why."
"Because when I close my eyes," he said, "I see the things I've buried. And they don't stay buried. They never once have."
I waited for more. It didn't come. He'd given me the truest sentence he had and folded the rest back up, and I sat there a hand's width from my husband in the dark and thought: whatever he's carrying, it's heavy enough to have stopped him sleeping for years, and he carried it alone, and he'd rather I never touched it. And still he stopped. He wanted me and he stopped, to keep me from being one more thing he'd bought. No one had ever refused me for my own sake before. It frightened me more than the wanting had.
I should have let it lie.
But I have never been good at letting things lie, and in the morning, at the long table, Emil poured me coffee and smiled his warm easy smile and said, "You look rested, Eve. Marriage suits you," and then, lightly, buttering toast, not looking up: "That old watch of yours. Family piece, isn't it? Your father's?"
I hadn't told him it was my father's.
I never had.
The coffee went to ash in my mouth, and I smiled back, and I said, "Something like that," and I thought, with the small cold precision that has kept me alive on a hundred night shifts: He knows. The warm one knows. And he wants me to know he knows.
Something was very wrong in this house, and it wasn't only behind the north doors.
