CALLIOPE
The feeling had followed me for three days, a prickling at the back of my neck whenever I crossed a parking garage or stood too long at a crosswalk, and by the time I let myself into my building that night I had stopped pretending it was nerves.
Nobody was looking for me. I had reminded myself of that so many times it had begun to sound like a prayer, because the police had no reason to look at a disgraced surgeon when Nathaniel Brooks had confessed to every lie on camera and the hospital was issuing careful statements about unauthorized disclosures and the public had decided, with the fickle speed of strangers, that Dashiell Harper-Astor was the wounded party in all of it. The sympathy had poured in so quickly it made my teeth ache. Colleagues I had known for a decade were posting about his brilliance, and a children's charity had named him in a tribute, and somewhere in the middle of that noise there was a man I had loved for years who had never once looked at me the way he looked at that awkward, glasses-wearing boy.
But the police were not the problem, and I knew it.
I locked the door behind me and left the lights off, because the lamps would show through the blinds and I no longer wanted to be a lit window anyone could see into. I had spent the evening on the other side of the city withdrawing cash from three different machines, never more than the limit, my hair tucked under a hat I would have mocked on anyone else, and the envelope in my bag was thick enough to carry me through the first few weeks wherever I landed.
My laptop sat on the desk by the window where I had left it. I opened it and the screen washed my hands blue, and I pulled up the confirmation I had stared at a dozen times already: one seat, one way, Lisbon, departing at 6:40 the next morning, booked under the name of a cousin who had died when I was twenty. It was not clever, but it was not meant to be clever. It only had to get me past a gate before anybody thought to ask why I was running.
I read the departure time again and let myself breathe, and in the quiet I heard a click behind me.
Light spilled across the room, warm and golden from the lamp in the corner, and a voice I would have known in my sleep said, "It's a lovely country. I'll give you that."
My heart dropped straight through the floor.
I turned so fast the chair spun beneath me, and there he was in the armchair I had bought because it reminded me of the one in his office, one long leg crossed over the other with his hands resting on the arms as if he had been sitting there for hours, perfectly relaxed, perfectly at home. His jacket was folded over the back of the chair and his shirt was crisp and white and buttoned at the cuffs, and he was smiling, a slow, gentle, devastatingly handsome smile that I had once dreamed of seeing aimed at me and that now made every hair on my body stand on end.
"Alexander."
I was on my feet without remembering rising, backing away until the desk bit into my spine, and my voice came out thin and ridiculous. "H-how did you get in here?"
"Your building's security hasn't improved since you stopped being able to afford better." He tilted his head, studying me with an interest that felt like being pinned to a board. "Though I'll admit I expected to wait longer. You were cautious with the cash. That was almost intelligent."
The cold in my stomach spread into my arms. "Whatever you think I did..."
"I know what you did."
He rose from the chair, unhurried, and everything in the room seemed to shrink around his height. He was not angry. That was the horror of it. I had seen Alexander furious in operating rooms, clipped and icy with a resident who had failed, and this was nothing like that; there was no heat in him at all, only a terrible, patient calm, like a surgeon standing over an open chest who had already decided where the first cut would go.
"You wanted me," he said.
"Alexander, please..."
"So let me give you what you wanted."
He began unbuttoning his cuffs, one and then the other, slowly enough that I felt every second, and he rolled each sleeve up over his forearms in neat, precise folds until the strong lines of muscle and the pale ridges of veins lay bare beneath the lamplight. They were the hands I had watched stitch a human heart back together, and I had never imagined being afraid of them.
"No." My head shook on its own. "No, no, please, I'll go, I'll leave, you'll never see me again..."
"You can have me, Calliope."
He crossed the space between us in three steps and I had nowhere left to go. His hand rose and the backs of his fingers traced the line of my cheek, so gently that a sob caught in my throat, and his thumb dragged slowly across my lower lip.
"I missed you, baby," he murmured. "Didn't you miss me?"
His mouth came down over mine. It was a soft kiss, slow and almost tender, and it was the worst thing that had ever happened to me, because I had wanted it so bad and now I could feel nothing behind it at all, no hunger or warmth or even contempt, only the cold confirmation that I was an object he was handling. I stood rigid and trembling against the desk, my fingers clawing at the edge of it, and when he drew back by an inch his eyes were completely, horribly empty.
"Kiss me back, baby."
I shook my head, but his hand slid into my hair and wrenched it backward so hard my scalp screamed and tears sprang into my eyes. He lowered his face until his breath brushed my mouth, his voice still soft and kind, a smile still curving his lips.
"Be a good girl."
Behind him, on the screen of my laptop, the little blue confirmation glowed in the dark, one seat to Lisbon, departing at 6:40, and I understood with perfect clarity that I would never see that flight.