Chapter 8
Six months later, on a Thursday, the Velvet Lounge was closed.
Not dark — closed. The bar was lit, the bottles were racked, the chairs were down off the tables, and there was no one in the building except the two of them and a coat-check girl named Sara who had been given the night off with pay and had spent an hour trying to work out why.
Lorenzo walked her through the club with his hand at the small of her back.
He did it slowly. He had learned to do things slowly around her; she had watched him learn it, over months, the way you watch a man teach himself to write with his other hand.
They went down the service corridor.
Khloe stopped at the brass doors, and put her palm flat against them for a moment, the way you touch the wall of a house you grew up in.
“I came through here,” she said.
“You crawled through here.”
“I walked.”
“You fell through here,” Lorenzo said, “and I heard it from the far end of the second floor, and I have never in my life been so certain of anything as I was certain, in that second, that I was going to find out who did it.”
He pushed the doors open.
The private room was the same. Low amber light, the smell of old leather and old money, the great circular table. It had not been changed in six months, and it would not be changed, and everybody who worked in this building knew why and nobody had ever said it out loud.
The Persian rug was exactly where it had been.
Khloe walked out onto it in her bare feet — she had taken her shoes off in the corridor because she’d wanted to, and because she could — and crossed to the middle of it, to the precise spot where she had fallen, and she stood there.
Her collarbone was clear. Her throat was clear. Somewhere in a locked records room in a federal building there was a file with a photograph in it, and she had asked him once, in the dark, whether it still existed, and he had said, without any hesitation at all, yes. I keep it.
She had asked him why.
Because I want to know what happens if I ever forget, he had said.
Khloe stood on the antique Persian rug in the middle of the room where she had bled and fainted and been carried out, and she was standing on her own two feet, in a dress he had not bought her and shoes she had left in the hall, and behind her she heard him cross the room and stop — six inches short, exactly like always, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him.
She did not turn around.
May you like
She reached back, without looking, and found his hand, and laced her fingers through his split-knuckled, ruined, careful fingers, and held on.
Above them, the single pendant light burned steady, and the rug held.
