Total pages in book: 134
Estimated words: 124479 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 622(@200wpm)___ 498(@250wpm)___ 415(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 124479 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 622(@200wpm)___ 498(@250wpm)___ 415(@300wpm)
The trumpet found its opening phrase—a melody Bastien recognized from a recording Maman kept in her shop, Tremé tradition, older than the player probably knew. The notes drifted through the canopy and entered the apartment and settled among the documents on the table.
“You’re right,” he said.
Delphine’s arms loosened. The concession arrived without the architecture she had expected to dismantle, and its absence left her standing without an opponent.
“I held the dissonance because naming it meant questioning your work,” he said. “And your work has been the investigation’s foundation. Pulling a thread in the foundation while the structure above it still bore weight felt more dangerous than holding the question until I could identify the fracture point.”
“That’s a tactical justification.”
“It’s also the truth.”
“It’s also the pattern Maman warned you about.” She stepped away from the window. The trumpet played behind her, and filtered light followed her across the floor. “You protect by withholding. You’ve said this yourself before. You’ve told me about Delia. That you were close to her, that there were things you never found the right time to say. And now you’re doing the same thing to me.”
Delia. Her name landed in his chest. He had shared some of his stories with Delphine in fragments and silences, and she had assembled those pieces into an understanding more complete than anything he had offered voluntarily.
“Delia didn’t know what I was,” he said. The words came stripped of their usual guard. “I controlled the information she received because the full truth would have endangered her in ways I could not predict or prevent.”
“And me?”
“You already know more than either of them did.”
“And yet you still hold back.”
The space between the window and the table had shortened. Delphine stood at the table’s edge, close enough that the trumpet’s melody competed with the sound of her breathing and lost. Her arms had uncrossed. Her hands gripped the table’s edge behind her—the same bracing posture she had adopted in his kitchen the night everything between them shifted past the point of retrieval.
He remembered that night in its exact coordinates: the distance measured in feet that collapsed through the argument’s final stage, the scent of shea butter cutting through the kitchen’s warmth, the moment when friction converted to a current that ran between them and did not stop.
“I hold back because the alternative terrifies me,” he said. “Not the vulnerability. What follows it. Every person I’ve allowed past the perimeter I maintain around what I am has paid for that access. And you—”
He stopped. His hands pressed flat against the table, fingers spread, the wood grain biting into his palms.
“The fear I carry operates on its own timeline, and it does not update based on new evidence. Maybe just time. I don’t know.”
Delphine’s fingers released the table’s edge and settled on the surface, close enough to his that the gap between their hands held the heat of contact without the fact of it.
“The fear is data,” she said. Her voice had dropped the argument’s edge and arrived at a register she reserved for moments when care lived in the same space as analysis. “I’m not asking you to ignore it. I’m asking you to stop using it as a reason to make decisions about my life without consulting me.”
The trumpet outside found a resting phrase and held it. The sustained note opened a space in the apartment the argument had not allowed.
His hand moved. His fingers closed the gap and settled over hers. Her knuckles fit beneath his palm, and the contact sent a current through his arm that reached his chest and displaced the curse’s frequency for one full breath.
Delphine studied the point of contact.
Then she turned her hand beneath his. Palm to palm. Her fingers threaded between his and held.
“I’m not asking you to be fearless,” she said. “I’m asking you to be afraid with me in the room instead of afraid on my behalf from a distance I didn’t agree to.”
His chest expanded. The breath he drew carried turpentine and old ink and the coffee cooling on the table. Beneath all of it, he found her skin—shea butter and black tea.
He squeezed her hand. Her fingers tightened in response.
They did not return to the evidence.
The documents stayed on the table. Delphine closed her notebook and capped her pen and placed both at the table’s edge, clearing the surface between them of everything that belonged to the investigation.
The trumpet on Esplanade had gone quiet. Evening entered through the canopy in increments of deepening gold. Through the kitchen window, the branches threw their shadows long across the floor, reaching toward the hallway.
Bastien stood. Delphine looked up at him from her chair.
He extended his hand.
Her palm pressed against his.
He led her through the hallway. The bedroom held its permanent amber color as streetlight filtered through branches, curtains that had not opened since Baptiste last used the space, the bed they had shared once before when urgency and discovery and the shock of shadow-wings had split the dark.