Page 85 of The Shape of Night

“One of these days, I’m going to turn you into a fur collar,” I mutter as I haul him into my arms. I haven’t fed him since this morning, but he seems heavier than ever. Wrestling the armload of fur, I turn to the turret staircase and freeze.

Ben stands in the doorway.

The cat slips from my arms and thumps to the floor.

“You didn’t tell me you were leaving,” he says.

“I needed to…” I glance at the cat, who slinks away. “To find Hannibal.”

“But you took your suitcase. You didn’t even leave me a note.”

I retreat a step. “It was getting late. I didn’t want him to be out alone all night. And…”

“And what?”

I sigh. “I’m sorry, Ben. This isn’t going to work out between us.”

“When were you going to tell me?”

“I did try to tell you. There’s so much about my life that’s a disaster right now. I shouldn’t be getting involved with anyone, not until I can straighten myself out. It’s not you, Ben. It’s me.”

His laugh is bitter. “That’s what they always say.” He goes to the window and stands with shoulders slumped, staring out at the fog. He looks so defeated that I almost feel sorry for him. Then I think of the unfinished painting of Brodie’s Watch and the woman’s figure silhouetted in the bedroom window.Mybedroom window. I take a step toward the stairway door, then another. If I’m quiet, I can be down those steps before he realizes it. Before he can stop me.

“I always liked the view from this turret,” he says. “Even when the fog rolls in. Especially when the fog rolls in.”

I take another step, trying desperately not to set off a creak and alert him.

“This house used to be nothing but rotted wood and broken glass. A place just waiting for someone to touch a match to it. It would have gone up in a flash.”

I back away another step.

“And that widow’s walk was ready to collapse. But the railing was sturdier than it looked.”

I am almost at the doorway. I place one foot on the first step and my weight sets off a creak so loud it seems as if the whole house has groaned.

Ben turns from the window and stares at me. In that instant he sees my fear. My desperation to escape. “So you’re leaving me.”

“I need to go home to Boston.”

“You’re all the same, every one of you. You dangle yourselves in front of us. Make us believe. Give us hope.”

“I never meant to.”

“And then you break our hearts. You. Break. Our.Hearts!”

His shout is like a slap across the face and I flinch at the sound. But I do not move, just as he does not move. As we stare at each other, I suddenly register his words.I think of Charlotte Nielson, her decomposing body adrift on the sea. And I think of Jessie Inman, the teenage girl who fell to her death on a Halloween night two decades ago, when Ben would have been a teenager, like Jessie. I glance through the window at the widow’s walk.

That railing was sturdier than it looked.

“You don’t really want to leave me, Ava,” he says quietly.

I swallow. “No. No, Ben, I don’t.”

“But you’re going to anyway. Aren’t you?”

“That’s not true.”

“Was it something I said? Something I did?”