— MIA —
Damien told me over breakfast that Danny would be coming to the house.
He said it the way he said most things — flatly, without preamble, as though he had already considered every possible response I might have and had decided to skip past all of them directly to the information.
Danny Reyes. Coming here. Today.
He had useful information about Marco Carver's movements and it made more sense to have the conversation in a secure location than in the coffee shop Danny had been using as a base.
"Okay," I said.
Damien looked at me for a moment like he had been prepared for something more complicated.
I drank my coffee.
The truth was that I had been thinking about Danny since the day in that room — the worn envelope, the way he had said Ryan talked about you all the time, the expression on his face when I had taken the letter he had been carrying that for a year. The same year I had been carrying everything else. We had been on opposite sides of the same weight without knowing it, and there was something about that I did not have a word for yet but that sat in my chest like something unfinished.
He arrived at eleven.
Viktor let him in and I heard them in the hallway — Viktor's low even voice, Danny's slightly more uncertain one, the particular quality of a person who was not entirely sure they were supposed to be somewhere but had decided to be there anyway. I recognized that quality. I had been practicing it myself for weeks.
Damien met them in the hall and took Danny through to his office and the door closed and I went back to the library and my book and told myself I was not listening for footsteps.
I was absolutely listening for footsteps.
An hour later there was a knock on the library door.
It was Danny.
He stood in the doorway with his hands in his jacket pockets and an expression that was trying to be casual and not quite getting there. He was around Ryan's age, I kept noticing that — the same approximate era, the same kind of face that had grown up alongside my brother's without my ever knowing it existed.
"Damien said I could come find you," he said. "If that is okay."
"It is okay."
He came in. Looked at the shelves the way everyone looked at the shelves the first time, that involuntary moment of taking stock. Looked at the worn chair by the window that had clearly been sat in ten thousand times. Looked at the Dostoevsky on the small table beside it with the ribbon bookmark.
"He really does read these."
"All of them, apparently."
Danny made a sound that was almost a laugh. He sat down on the small settee across from my chair and leaned his elbows on his knees and looked at me the way he had in that room — directly, without performing anything.
"How are you doing?" he asked. "Actually."
I thought about it.
"I am doing actually," I said. "Which is more than I was a month ago."
He nodded like that made sense to him.
We talked for a while about logistics — what he had told Damien, what Damien had told him, where the investigation stood. It was useful and grounding and neither of us was really thinking about it, which we both knew. There was something else underneath the logistics that we were circling toward and eventually Danny got there first, the way Ryan had always gotten places first when he decided he was going.
"Can I tell you something about him?" Danny said. "Something stupid. Something that has nothing to do with any of this."
I set my book down.
"Please."
Danny told me about the time Ryan had tried to learn to cook.
Not because he had any interest in cooking, but because there had been a girl in his building who had mentioned once that she found it attractive when someone could make pasta from scratch and Ryan had decided that this was a project he would complete within the week. He had called Danny every single day for five days with increasingly desperate updates. Day one: The dough is wrong but I think I can fix it. Day two: I can't fix it. Day three: I have started over using a different recipe I found and the girl asked me what that smell was when she passed me in the hallway. Day four: I think I have it. Day five, at two in the morning: Danny I need you to come over and help me throw this away before it hardens completely.
Danny demonstrated the phone call voice — Ryan's particular way of delivering disaster updates with the tone of someone reporting mildly interesting news — and I felt it hit me somewhere specific, that voice, because I knew it exactly, had grown up with it, had received my own version of those calls for years without knowing they were precious.
I laughed.
It came out of nowhere. I had not planned it and I had not felt it coming and it was real in the way that only unplanned things are real — a laugh that started in my chest and took over before I could do anything about it, and I heard it in the room and it was strange to hear, strange and good and terrible all at once.
Danny laughed too.
We sat in the library and laughed about Ryan's pasta disaster and for a moment he was completely alive in the room with us, standing in his kitchen at two in the morning with hardened dough on the counter, calling Danny with the tone of someone reporting mildly interesting news.
When the laughing settled Danny looked at the window for a moment.
"He made everything funnier than it was," Danny said. "Not in a fake way. In a way where you would be in the middle of something terrible and he would find the one angle of it that was actually ridiculous and suddenly the terrible thing was still terrible but also a little bit funny and that made it survivable."
"He did that," I said. "He always did that."
"I miss it."
"Me too."
We were quiet for a moment. The library held it the way it held everything — without comment, without hurry.
"He talked about you a lot," Danny said. Not for the first time, but differently this time — not as comfort, as fact. "Not in a worried way, mostly. In a proud way. He would say: My sister figured out something today and then tell me whatever it was you had done, some problem you had solved or something you had written or a argument you had won against someone who deserved it, and he would tell it like he was reporting a sporting victory he had personally arranged."
I pressed my lips together.
"He never told me that."
"He told everyone else," Danny said. "That was Ryan. Everything he felt about the people he loved went sideways — out to everyone around them instead of directly at them. I think he thought you already knew."
I had known.
I had known and I had not known and now I knew in a way that was permanent and I could not do anything with it except carry it, which I was getting better at.
* * *
We were still in the library when Damien found us three hours later.
He appeared in the doorway and looked at the scene — Danny on the settee, me in the chair, two cups of tea that Elena had brought at some point, a small pile of Ryan stories between us that neither of us had written down but that both of us would carry — and his expression did something subtle that I was not sure I was supposed to catch.
He looked at me.
Something in his face shifted when he registered that I had been crying — not in a bad way, in the specific way of someone who has been laughing and talking about someone they loved for three hours and has leaked a little at the edges without noticing. My face probably showed it. I was not particularly careful about my face in moments like this.
He looked away quickly. Back to Danny.
"I need you for another hour," he said to Danny. "When you are ready."
"Sure." Danny stood, looked at me. "Tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow," I said.
He nodded and followed Damien out.
I stayed in the library.
I picked up the Dostoevsky and held it without opening it and looked out the window at the garden going gray in the late afternoon light and thought about Ryan telling Danny about me like he was reporting a sporting victory he had personally arranged.
I thought about Damien's face in the doorway.
The way he had looked at me and then looked away.
The thing that had moved through his expression in the half second before he controlled it.
I did not know what to call it yet.
I filed it next to the other things I did not know what to call yet.
The folder was getting full.
Ryan would have had something to say about that.
Something sideways and accurate that would have made me laugh and known at the same time.
I was going to miss him forever.