Vicious Grace

had an alcohol problem. The promising young researcher stopped his fieldwork in Panama a few months early, edging her out for a position in England.

And so, Kim came to live in Chicago and work at Grace.

The record ended, I assumed, when the hidden rooms were sealed. There might have been more. There could have been moments through the years when Kim had thought of leaving Chicago and Grace. If there were, Eric hadn’t listed them here. I took all of the pages, squaring the edges neatly on the coffee table just to give my hands something to do.

My head felt like someone had blown a wind through it, my thoughts scattered and powerless as sparrows in a storm. And underneath the confusion and emptiness, a raw, red anger started to grow. None of it—none of it— had anything to do with me. I’d been trying to read all the way through The Grapes of Wrath for my high school English class when all that had been going on, and how dare Kim and Aubrey leave me feeling like I was supposed to apologize for something?

I was drowning, grasping at anything that floated through my head. I was totally out of line, and what was worse I knew it. I just couldn’t stop.

Aubrey was sitting on the bed, his hands laced on one knee.

“So,” he said. “Just one question.”

I stood in the doorway, arms crossed.

“You knew,” he said. “About Kim and Eric. You knew, right?”

“She told me,” I said.

“You didn’t tell me,” he said.

“I asked if you’d want to know whether she’d been sleeping with someone, and you said it didn’t matter now. That you didn’t want to know. That’s what you said.”

I was whining. I was starting to cry. I felt the crushing weight of having done something unforgivable and also the monstrous injustice of not even knowing exactly what it was.

“I came to help you do Eric’s work,” Aubrey said. His voice was calm and soft and implacable as the sea. “Kim aside, Eric’s betrayal would have been germane.”

“You wouldn’t have come?” I said. It came out as a challenge. Tell me that you wouldn’t have stayed with me.

“If you’d given me all the information and let me make my choice,” he said softly, “probably I would have joined up. But I can’t know now, can I? You told me as much as you saw fit, and I did what you wanted. Worked out fine.”

His gentleness was a mask. It was a fake. I could feel the pain coming off him like heat from a fire. I could feel his need to hurt something. Someone. Me.

“You’re like him,” he said, looking at his hands. “You’re a lot like Eric.”

I coughed out a breath, something between a laugh and a gut-punch gasp. He had picked his words well. They stung.

“Yesterday that would have been a compliment,” I said.

“It isn’t yesterday,” he said. And then, a long moment later, “I can’t do this.”

“Can’t do what?”

“I should leave now.”

“What can’t you do? Where are you going?” I said as he walked past me. “Aubrey, where are you going? Aubrey!”

He didn’t look back at me. The front door closed behind him.

FIFTEEN

When I woke up on Sunday morning, it took a few glorious, floating seconds to remember why Aubrey wasn’t in the bed beside me. Then, like someone pressing a hand on my sternum, it all came back. I rolled over, pressing the pillows over my head. I didn’t want to get up. I didn’t want to go out. I wanted to sleep my way backward in time to when the worst thing I had to face was a rider buried alive under its own prison. It seemed vaguely monstrous that my wounds from David’s house hadn’t healed yet. It was only two days ago. It was forever.

Eventually my bladder forced me out of bed, and by the time I was done in the bathroom I was too awake to even pretend sleep. Instead, I sat in bed and checked my e-mail. Curtis, my younger brother, reported that my older brother, Jay, had indeed gotten his girlfriend pregnant and had set the wedding date for before she started showing. Our mother was “hip deep in wedding magazines.” My lawyer had sent a financial report with a note that I shouldn’t panic, the downturn was temporary and my holdings safely diversified. I checked my former friends’ blogs. I cruised a few of the paranormal sites; I Googled haugsvarmr and leyiathan and got all the same links I’d found before; I wasted time. It would have felt like goofing off except for the dread that seemed to hang in the air like dust motes. Aubrey’s bags were still in the room. I tried to take comfort in that.

When I couldn’t put it off any longer, I closed the laptop, steeled myself, and went out to the living room. A scrim of thin clouds stretched to the horizon, turning the blue to white. The green-gray lake stuttered and trembled, tiny whitecaps stippling it. Chogyi Jake sat at the table.

“Hey,” I said.

He turned to me, smiling the same as always. It was just my imagination that put the weariness around his eyes and the gray cast to his skin. I pulled myself up to sit on the countertop.

“Bad night,” I said.

“Difficult,” he agreed.

“You read the thing?”

“Ex and I both. It wasn’t pleasant.”

“Yeah, no,” I said. “Ex around?”

“Out at the store. We’re low on toothpaste and toilet paper.”

“And Aubrey . . . ?”

“Came in just before dawn and slept in the new bedroom for a little while,” Chogyi Jake said. “He went out an hour ago.”

I nodded, caught between relief that he’d come back at all and a twisting rage that he’d left again without at least the courtesy of speaking to me. Of course if I hadn’t been sulking in my room, he would have had to. The thought didn’t make me feel any better.

“Did he say where he was going?”

“No, but he didn’t take the car keys.”

“Okay,” I said. That meant he was nearby. Or using taxis and public transport. Or Kim was driving. I hated how much I didn’t like that last option. “All right.”

“He’s hurting,” Chogyi Jake said. “The information in that file is causing him a lot of pain.”

“That’s deeply stupid,” I said, knowing as I said it that I was out of line. I couldn’t help it.

“You’re hurting too. We all are.”

“Then we’re all stupid,” I said. “We don’t have any idea what the context of that file was. Okay, it looks lousy, but we don’t know what would have happened if Eric had done something else, right? I mean, maybe he knew that Kim would get killed if she stayed in Denver. Or with Aubrey. Magic does that sometimes, right? Tells you what’s going to happen.”

“It can,” Chogyi Jake said.

“So how is Aubrey so sure that wasn’t how it started? How do we even know for sure that it’s not a fake that someone snuck in here to mess with our heads? I’m just amazed, you know? We find one thing that looks weird, and he just loses faith in Eric. He’s just . . . folding.”

Chogyi Jake looked at me in silence for what seemed like an hour and probably took fewer than ten seconds. He lifted his eyebrows and looked down at the floor. Back me up on this, I thought. I already knew that he wouldn’t.

“I hear what you’re saying,” Chogyi Jake said, picking his way through the syllables like they might explode.