FIFTY-THREE
When I burst into Raf’s restaurant, the hostess at the front tried to stop me. “Sorry, we’re closed for the evening,” she began, but I ran past her and back into the kitchen, skidding to a stop next to Raf, who was arms-deep in a sink full of soapy dishes. When he saw me, he froze, wary.
“Hi,” I said, then bent over to catch my breath.
“Uh, guys,” he said to the few remaining dishwashers. “You can take off for the night.” Reluctantly, they did, shooting furtive, curious glances at me. (Right. Because I was still wearing a fucking robe, like I’d escaped from a fancy church concert.)
“So . . .” he said, removing his arms from the water and reaching for a dish towel. “What’s up?” Just like the first night I’d found out about the Coven, simply being in his presence made me feel better, safer, hopeful. A cute, dark curl fell across his forehead and I wanted to brush it back. How I hoped he hadn’t changed his mind and thought better of things. If he’d healed his heart and taken up with one of those lithe model-groupies in the weeks since we’d seen each other, I didn’t know what I was going to do.
“I just did something that was probably very stupid,” I said when I was able to speak again. “And there’s a chance I’ll go to prison forever, or that the women of Nevertheless will send a hit man to kill me in the night.”
“Jillian—” he said with concern, dropping the towel and stepping toward me.
“No, it’s okay. I had to do it. It was the right choice. Probably. Yeah, now that I know everyone made it out safely, it was the right choice. But I was thinking about what I’d regret, if they kill me or lock me up forever, and it was only you.”
“Me?” he asked, a glimmer of hope beginning to shine in his eyes, and that glimmer of hope gave me what I needed to keep going.
“It was only that I wanted to tell you that I love you.”
He folded his arms across his chest and raised an eyebrow. “Like as a cousin?”
“Not at all,” I answered, and stepped forward to kiss him.
Our hearts pounded against each other. He wrapped me up in him and kissed me back, and it was exactly where I wanted to be. I never wanted to stop touching him. We’d been children together, and we’d be old together, or at least we’d give it our best shot as life threw its typical curveballs our way. I melted into him as he backed me up against the counter, both of us smiling and gasping and clutching each other like we’d never get enough.
“Hold up,” he said, pulling away for a moment. “Are you not wearing anything under this weird robe?”
“No,” I said, pulling him back in. “No, I am not.”
FIFTY-FOUR
I went to Margot’s aunt’s apartment the morning after spending the night with Raf to find that all my stuff had been boxed up and left outside the door, and that my key no longer worked.
As I stood in the hallway, staring at the meager contents of my life, Miles called me. I’d gotten four missed calls from him over the course of the night. “Beckley, thank God,” he said when I answered, his voice ragged. “I’ve been worrying about you. Where the hell did you go?”
“They found out I was a journalist, right before the fire started,” I said. “I had to get out of there.”
“Oh shit. Are they going to retaliate? Do anything to you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably? But so far, they just locked me out of that apartment and, honestly, that seems fair.” He laughed a little, but it was a worried, halfhearted sound. “I saw Caroline cornering you. What did you say to her?”
“I said we were building inspectors, but obviously that wasn’t true, and then we got out of there too.” He sighed. “Jesus, what a mess. I’m so glad you’re okay, though.”
“Thanks, yeah, you too.”
The line was silent for a moment, both us of taking a breath. “What’s our next move here?” he finally asked.
“Well, the evidence is all gone,” I said. “So I think there is no next move.”
“No,” he said. “Come on. You already wrote the article. There’s got to be some way to make this work. E-mails they sent you, something we can fact-check.”
“I’m sorry. There’s no way to back up the bigger claims in the article without the clubhouse. And like you said when I signed the NDA, it’s just not going to be worth it for some catalog of the insipid girl-power posters they’ve hung up on the walls.”
“Look, you know I didn’t mean . . . There were a bunch of women in robes on the roof—it’s clear that you were right, and something juicier was going on.”
“Mm,” I said.
His voice got softer. “Can I see you? Come over to my place, and I’ll go into work a little late.” I swallowed. The switch from editor to lover jarred me, even though it had been happening all along in subtler ways, hadn’t it? “And if you need to stay with me for a bit—”
“Did you ever think that maybe this article was doomed from the beginning?” I asked.
“What?”
“I was never going to make the best decisions about it because I had such strong feelings for you. You must have known that on some level.”
“I . . . well, no, I trusted you to be professional.”
“And you had feelings for me,
