The first morning was the hardest.
I woke up in his building with the city in his windows and the cedar in his walls and my coffee maker on his counter and the ghost of two palms on opposite sides of a door I'd locked with the only key. The bed was obscenely comfortable. I hated it. Hated that my body had slept better in one night at forty-two stories than it had in months at Baker, as if the building itself had been engineered for rest the way everything Cole built was engineered for something.
I unlocked the deadbolt. Listened. Nothing. The apartment was quiet — the deep, insulated quiet of a space designed to keep the world out.
