Chapter 9: Troy at the Door
Troy found the rental on the fourth day. He knocked like a person who believed doors were a formality.
I kept the chain on. Through the gap he looked smaller than the man who had typed Uber while I stood beside a grave in another time zone.
“You need to take those messages down,” he said. “Mom’s receiving calls. Dad’s firm is asking questions. This is out of proportion.”
“I didn’t put them on television.”
“You made them available.”
“I made them available to the people who found me on the floor so they would stop dialing relatives who had already declined to come. What happened after that is not something I control.”
His jaw worked. “You could issue a statement. Say it was a misunderstanding. Say you’re fine.”
“I’m not fine. I’m functional. There’s a difference. And I’m not rewriting the chat so you can be comfortable at work.”
He stared at me for a long moment, searching for the sister who smoothed things over. She had been buried, in a sense, beside James—or maybe earlier, in all the small refusals that had taught me to write No problem when the problem was the point.
“You’re making this permanent,” he said.
May you like
“You did that when you chose a meeting over an airport,” I answered, and closed the door.
He knocked again. I did not answer. After a while the hallway went quiet. I sat on the bed and shook until the shaking finished, then drank water the way the discharge paper instructed. Permanence, I was learning, was not a threat. It was a boundary that finally had a lock.
