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.
He'd left a note on the kitchen island. Cream stock. The same paper from the Treeline window, the same paper from the key card envelope. His handwriting was precise and slanted and completely wrong for a man who ran a criminal enterprise — it looked like a poet's handwriting, the kind you'd find on a love letter from a century that still used fountain pens.
Coffee is yours. Building security knows your name. Parking level two, spot 14. I'll be at the office until late. Use anything you need.
Below that, in smaller letters: The machine is still terrible. I tried your grind this morning. It helped.
He'd used my grinder. My beans. My pour-over. A man who'd been drinking grocery-store regret for years had woken up in the same apartment as a woman who'd taught him the pour at three in the morning, and the first thing he'd done was try to make it himself.
I stood in his kitchen holding the note and the morning light was coming through three walls of glass and the city was below me and I was not going to cry over a man's handwriting on cream stock at seven in the morning in a building I hadn't chosen to live in.
I made coffee. My ritual. My beans. Except the kitchen wasn't mine and the cups in the cabinet weren't mine and the view from the window was the kind of view that reminded you every second that the man who owned it could see everything you could see and more. I found a mug that wasn't the potter's mark cup — a plain white ceramic, heavy, the kind of mug a man buys when he doesn't think about mugs because nobody in his life has ever cared what his mugs looked like.
I was going to fix that. The thought arrived before I could stop it and I filed it in the same drawer where I'd filed the word falling and the word jealousy and the sound he'd made when I'd kissed him in the dark.
I showered. His bathroom — the guest bathroom, technically, but his water pressure and his tiles and his towels that were thicker than any towel I'd ever owned. The mirror was lit the way expensive mirrors are lit, the kind of lighting that makes you look exactly as you are instead of flattering you, and I stood in front of it in a towel and looked at myself and saw the woman who'd crossed a coffee shop in the dark four nights ago and kissed a man and then spent three days trying to unkiss him and then stood on the other side of a door with her palm on the wood.
The hallway between my suite and the main living space was where the building showed its bones. His bookshelf lined one wall — not decorative, not staged. Read. Spines cracked. A whole section on water law. Another on Colorado history. A worn copy of a John McPhee book about geology that had been read so many times the cover was soft. The man who ran a criminal organization read geology for pleasure. I pulled the McPhee off the shelf. Inside the front cover, in the same poet's handwriting: Cole Ashford, Limon, CO. Age sixteen.
He'd had this book since he was a boy. Before the ranch was taken. Before the architecture. Before the forty-two stories and the nesting dolls and the engagement clause. A sixteen-year-old in Limon had read about the geology of the American West and had written his name inside the cover the way boys do when they own so few things that the ones they have need to be claimed.
I put the book back. My hands were shaking and I didn't examine why.
Treeline was the same and different. The same counter, the same machine, the same Wen arriving with her bag and her read-the-room face. Different because I'd driven from Seventeenth Street instead of Baker, and the drive was shorter, and the parking was better, and the building I'd left had security and an elevator that required a key card and a man's cream stock notes on the kitchen island.
"How's the penthouse?" Wen said. No preamble. She'd been waiting.
"It's not a penthouse. It's a guest suite."
"In a penthouse."
"In an apartment. On the forty-second floor. With a deadbolt I have the only key to."
"And cedar walls and a view of the entire city and probably a bathtub you could swim in."
"The bathtub is regular-sized."
"Liar."
I smiled. The smile was involuntary and warm and I let it happen because Wen was the one person I didn't have to perform for.
"He left a note," I said.
Wen's eyes widened. "On what paper."
"Cream stock."
"The same cream stock as the window note?"
"The same."
"What did it say?"
"That the coffee is mine and his machine is still terrible."
Wen closed her eyes. Put her hand on her chest. "I need a moment."
"It's a note about coffee."
"It's a note about coffee on cream stock from a man who punched someone for touching you and carried you through a nightclub and then wrote you a note about coffee in handwriting that I already know is devastating because the man is devastating and nothing about him is accidental."
She wasn't wrong. Nothing about Cole Ashford was accidental. The cream stock wasn't accidental. The handwriting wasn't accidental. The note that said the machine is still terrible was not accidental — it was a man telling a woman that he'd tried to make her coffee and failed and the failure was an invitation for her to come back to his kitchen.
The morning rush absorbed us. I pulled shots and counted the drawer and the ritual steadied me the way it always did. Coffee doesn't lie. The portafilter doesn't care about your living situation.
Mid-afternoon. My phone buzzed.
Cole: Palisade Foundation gala. End of the week. I'd like you there.
I stared at the screen. A gala. A public event. The first time Denver would see us together in a room that wasn't a nightclub with a fist and a carry. The first time I'd stand next to Cole Ashford in front of people who knew his name and his power and would look at me and draw conclusions I hadn't authorized.
I typed: Is this an invitation or an engineering?
Three dots.
Cole: An invitation. You can say no.
I looked at the counter. The wood I'd sanded. The shop I'd built. The woman behind it who'd kissed a man in the dark and was living in his building and had found his sixteen-year-old handwriting inside a geology book and was now being invited to stand beside him in public.
I typed: I'll need a dress.
Cole: I know a place.
I typed: I'll find my own dress.
Three dots. Longer this time.
Cole: I'd expect nothing less.
Wen was reading over my shoulder. I could feel her vibrating.
"If you say one word—"
"I wasn't going to say a word. I was going to say twelve words. You're going to a gala with the Mountain King and you need a dress."
"I said I'd find my own."
"You own exactly zero dresses, Lark. You wore my dress to Elevation. You own jeans and flannels and one black top that you've been rotating since college."
"I'll figure it out."
"Let me help."
"The last time you helped with clothes I ended up in a nightclub being carried up a staircase."
"And it was the best night of your life and you kissed him a week later because of it so you're welcome."
I looked at her. The twenty-three-year-old who'd counted my corner table looks and smelled cedar on my flannel and photographed Jensen on Platform Three and decoded every denial I'd constructed since Vail. The woman who'd said jealousy is the alarm system and meant it.
"Fine," I said. "Help me find a dress."
Wen's grin could have powered Treeline for a week.
I drove back to Seventeenth Street after closing. The elevator. The key card. The forty-second floor. The doors opened and the apartment was dark except for the kitchen — the stove light, the same warm glow from the night before. On the island, a fresh note on cream stock.
Tried the pour-over again. Better. Not yours, but better. There's food in the fridge. The deadbolt key is still the only one.
Below that: Thank you for saying yes to the gala.
I put the note next to the first one. Two notes. Two mornings. A man communicating through cream stock because he understood that the woman in his guest suite needed the distance of paper — needed to read his words instead of hearing his voice, needed to hold the note instead of holding his hand, needed the architecture of ink on paper because the architecture of his body in the same room was still more than her nervous system could process before the gala and whatever came after it.
I turned on the kitchen light.
Stood at the window. Forty-two stories. The city below.
No Audi at the curb tonight. He was upstairs. In the same building. On the other side of a wall and a hallway and a deadbolt with one key.
I pressed my palm against the window the way I'd pressed it against the door.
Somewhere in the apartment, I heard footsteps stop. And start again. And stop.
He was on the other side of the wall. Doing the same thing.