Page 56 of Exiled

Eleven

Ihave almost managed to forget about you.

Almost.

We have moved, Logan and I. He sold his row house, and we spent a month hunting for something that suited us. We looked at other row houses, other brownstones. We looked at condos, ground-floor apartments, penthouses. I expected us to choose something like Logan had, something quiet and private with a backyard. Instead, however, we chose the penthouse of a condo building in the heart of Greenwich Village. The entire upper floor, with a private rooftop terrace. It is nothing like the echoing monstrosity of your home, a fact that I love, smaller and cozier than that, yet larger than Logan’s previous place. A beautiful kitchen flowing into an informal dining area, a breakfast nook tucked into a corner. The living room is sunken a few steps down from the kitchen and bedrooms, which strikes me as odd, but I find I like it, for reasons I can’t quite enumerate. There are four bedrooms; one for Logan and me, one as his home office, one to be a nursery—that still makes my hands shake and my stomach flip, because it isn’t real yet, and is still terrifying—and one for Cocoa. The master bedroom has an en suite bathroom, and there is one more shared between the otherthree bedrooms. The master bedroom is isolated, set above the rest of the unit so it overlooks the rooftop terrace. The front of the room is a wall of movable, adjustable-tint glass, which leads to a balcony that in turn descends via twin curving staircases to the terrace.

Cocoa loves the terrace almost as much as I do. As soon as we let her out, she runs laps around the perimeter for a few minutes, barking like a fiend, and then puts her front paws up on the ledge of the waist-high wall and stares down at the street, tongue lolling, eyes excitedly scanning the sidewalk below, tail swinging a mile a minute, and that’s where she’ll stay, just like that, until you make her come in.

Logan sells his old place with all the furniture included, both to fetch a higher price and because he wants us to choose everything for our new home together, from silverware to bedsheets. The only things we bring with us are our clothes and the contents of his office; everything else stays. And we spend days, weeks even, picking out curtains and couches, silverware and wineglasses, bedsheets and cooking utensils and everything in between.

I never realized how muchstuffit took to make a house a home.

And I savor every moment of it, every decision, down to the smallest, most arbitrary thing. It is normalcy, and it is glorious.

I have decided to put on hold the preparations for Comportment. Even if I do not feel it yet—aside from the change in the foods I like to eat, and the morning sickness—I am pregnant. I have seen a doctor, with Logan, and verified the clinic’s verdict. Took measurements and did an ultrasound, a blood test, all sorts of medical procedures to ensure that I am healthy, and the baby is growing as it should be. It is early yet, but the doctor said all is progressing as it should be. I am taking prenatal vitamins, continuing to exercise and eat healthy.

All this means that trying to get my own business off the ground is not feasible, as yet. Perhaps it never will be. Or perhaps, when I am ready to reexamine the notion of going into business for myself, I will have new ideas, a different business plan. For now, I am content to be Logan’s girlfriend, to live in our own home that we chose for ourselves. To run, and watch movies with Logan, and make love with him in every room, on every surface both vertical and horizontal.

Thus, learning to live life as a normal woman, I manage to nearly forget about you.

To forget the questions.

The doubts.

The inconsistencies.

Everything.

It all gets shuffled to the back of my mind, set aside. Not important, now that I am discovering the sweetness of normality.

But, in that inexorable, mysterious way you possess, you appear when least expected, and do something absolutely unpredictable.

Yet, really, when it happens, I am not surprised at all.

It is you, after all:

You kidnap me.

Chapter

Twelve

It is rather unnecessarily dramatic, the way you snatch me.

Right off the rooftop terrace, in broad daylight. Just past ten in the morning, in fact.

I am reclined on a lounge chair, my feet up, sunglasses on, clad in a robe and a bikini so revealing I’d never wear it out, only here, at home, for Logan, or alone on the roof. I am reading, sipping herbal tea, enjoying the sunlight of what promises to be one of the last warm days we will have for some time. Cocoa is beside my chair, her chin on my thigh, snoring.

I hear a helicopter, and think nothing of it. This is New York, there are helicopters going overhead all the time. But when the volume of its whumping rotors grows, I become curious. Sit up, look around. Cocoa’s ears prick and twitch, and she too seems disconcerted. Growls deep in her chest. I watch as the hackles on the back of her shoulders lift.

Something is amiss.

I wrap my thin robe around myself and cinch it closed, tie the belt. Set aside my mug. Clutch my cell phone, ready to call Logan if needed.

The rotors are close now, but the aircraft itself is still somewhere out of sight. Cocoa spots it first, and barks at it. Butnot the bark she has for another dog, or strangers, or squirrels, or birds. This is her fierce, defensive bark, frightening and feral. The helicopter is swooping low over the rooftops, moving fast. Too fast. News and medical helicopters, even the few police ones I’ve seen, none of them have flown thus, barely clearing rooftops, scudding with precise and unerring speed toward this rooftop.

And I know.