The List (28 page)

Solstice, a year earlier

5:04 a.m.

D
aniel had no memory of walking home from Louise’s party, but here he was, at the front door of his apartment in Brooklyn. For hours he’d meandered through Manhattan’s silent, half-lit streets, trying to process what just happened to him. He had a vague memory of pausing in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, watching the East River flow nearly three hundred feet beneath him. At that moment he’d felt like he could fly, electricity tingling on all his nerves, lighting up the synapses in his brain. It was an odd, unfamiliar sensation for a man whose specialty was the application of feet to pavement, wearing down the soles of running shoes as he churned through mile after mile. Even now, as he unlocked the door and climbed the stairs to his apartment, he felt like he’d been flung into the air.

By Tilda Davies. One conversation, lasting less than ten minutes, half of which he didn’t understand. He had no idea what she was talking about on the ledge, the
process
, sending a
letter
, but he couldn’t give less of a damn. Normally, not understanding something was like an itch he couldn’t scratch, but whatever this was with not–Lady Matilda spurred a sense of deep knowing, beyond instinct, into a primal recognition unlike anything he’d felt before. His heart kept skittering and leaping in his chest, probably in response to the adrenaline his brain dumped into his nervous system every time he thought about sitting down on that ledge next to her, and watching the wind tousle her hair around her face.

And there went his heart again. He had to see her again. Had to. For the first time in his life, he was absolutely, utterly certain. No puzzle, no mystery, no questions asked, no doubt.

He stood in his darkened living room, looking around at his possessions as if they belonged to another man. Before he could stop himself he ripped open the packaging of the box of notecards he’d found on a dusty shelf at the back of an all-night bodega on his way home. Using the pen on top of his bureau he followed the protocol his mother drilled into him: salutation, body of note, signature. It took less than five seconds. With eyes blurry from lack of sleep, he looked at what he’d written.

No. It was a command, not a request; either way, he asked for too much, too risky, too crazy, even for a woman he met sitting on a ledge.

He hesitated, tapping his pen against the bureau. The longest day of the year was always followed by the longest night, the earth spinning in the black void, humans pinned to the surface by powerful forces, flung into the air by others, chasing the sun to hold the darkness at bay. She liked risk, but the line between crazy and sure was very thin. In this first draft he sounded crazy.

The sky outside his window lightened from midnight to dark gray. Dawn was coming, and with daylight, sanity returned. Reluctantly, he set his first attempt aside and started over, with something more reasonable, one hundred percent more likely to succeed at getting him a second conversation with not–Lady Matilda.

But the first card lay at his elbow, taunting him. He picked it up and nearly tore it in two before throwing it in the recycling bin. Instead, he slid it into an envelope, and then into the box on his dresser that held his cuff links, watch, American flag pin, other various NYPD and FBI pins.

Someday, he’d show her how certain he’d been.

Dear Tilda,

Marry me.

Daniel

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