He broke away from her gaze and stared down the sidewalk for a few seconds. His chapped lips were parted slightly as he gathered his thoughts. The sky today was a pale blue. The sun gave no warmth but glistened on windows and lampposts in sparks of pure white. A couple of blocks away, a trolley rolled along the track, its bell clanging as it passed through the intersection.
“Come out with me today,” Charlie said. He grabbed her hand with a suddenness that startled her.
“Today?” she echoed. “Where?”
“We’ll figure it out,” he said. “Don’t you want to get away from this—just for a while?”
Ada hesitated.
“We don’t have to talk about anything important,” Charlie said, rubbing his thumb across her palm. “I just want to be with you, Ada.”
She wanted to be with him too. She wanted everything to be easy again, like it was before the asylum, before the Bengali banker. Maybe it could be, just for tonight.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Corinne ended up spending most of the morning on the phone with her mother, trying to convince her that this unnamed friend Mrs. Wells had never heard of was in dire need of Corinne’s tender ministrations and could not be abandoned for another day at least. In retrospect it was the “tender ministrations” that made the story difficult to believe. Constance Wells knew her daughter too well for that.
With her mother finally appeased enough to not come after her, Corinne spent the rest of the day ranging around the basement of the Cast Iron, picking up books that she could barely concentrate on and pretending to straighten up the common room, though she really just shifted the mess and rearranged the piles. All this occurred under Gabriel’s vaguely amused watch from his seat on the couch. She noticed that he hadn’t moved much since making his way there from the closet with the cot, though he swore that his wound didn’t hurt that badly.
Corinne wanted to go out and do something, but there was nowhere to go. She also felt strangely guilty at the thought of abandoning Gabriel, even though she was under no obligation to tend to him, and he probably wouldn’t have let her if she’d tried.
She had told him about her plan to go to the theater tonight with Ada, mostly because she figured that being able to disapprove of something would aid his convalescing. Gabriel disapproved, but he didn’t bother trying to dissuade her. And when he calmly insisted that he was coming along, she put up only a token amount of resistance. “You probably won’t be able to walk that far anyway. And I hate taxis.”
In reply, Gabriel struggled to his feet. Corinne forced herself not to jump out of her chair to help him. She concentrated on glaring at him in a way that might convey how stupid she thought he was.
“I’m fine,” he told her, for the eighth time that day. “I need to go check on my mother.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“No.”
His voice was even, but the word had a finality to it that gave Corinne pause. She remembered how carefully Ada guarded her mother’s home. Gabriel walked to the stairs with only the slightest hitch in his gait, and Corinne decided he was probably okay to hobble home on his own. The wound on his side didn’t have that many stitches, after all.
“We leave at six,” she called after him. “Wear a suit.”
He lifted a hand in acknowledgment and disappeared, slowly, up the stairs.
“And try not to look armed,” Corinne shouted as an afterthought.
Gabriel responded by slamming the panel shut. Corinne picked up the book she’d been trying to read, but even in solitude she couldn’t focus on the words. When Saint crept out of his room, she was glad for the distraction. He kept to himself these days, which made him easy to forget about. Saint didn’t say anything to her, just slipped past her chair to the coffee table and snatched up an egg that she didn’t remember seeing during her attempt at tidying.
“Where did that come from?” she asked.
He looked at her like a preying wolf had just spoken to him, and he cupped the egg protectively.
“It’s for a painting,” he said, not really answering her question. “The—the composition is wrong.”
Corinne wanted to say more, like how odd it was that eggs seemed to be turning up all over the Cast Iron, as if there were a stealthy chicken on the loose. But she remembered she was supposed to hate him and looked back at her book. Saint scurried away. Once he was gone, Corinne twisted in her chair and leaned over the back as far as she could. She could just barely see past the doorframe into Saint’s room. He was pulling a painting from the easel and replacing it with a blank canvas. Stretching over the chair back a couple more inches, Corinne saw that the finished painting was of the common room, rendered in perfect detail, down to the rips in the couches and the clutter on the coffee table.
Saint shut the door—possibly he had noticed her not-so-subtle spying. Corinne dropped back down in her chair and made herself dutifully turn the pages of her book until half past five, when the phone in Johnny’s office began to ring. She sprang free from the chair and ran to grab it. Maybe Johnny was calling with news.
It was Ada.
“Hey, Cor. Don’t be mad.”
“Something wrong?”
“No, nothing.”