Chapter 96: Ryan After
Ryan walked for forty minutes before he noticed he had no particular destination.
This was new. For the past year — since the Apex call, since the Fitch signature, since every subsequent event in the sequence that had taken everything he had built and returned it to the people it had actually been taken from — he had always been walking toward something. A bus. An attorney’s office. His parents’ kitchen. His new job. Even the auction had been a destination, chosen deliberately because he had decided that witnessing things you had caused was part of the work.
Today he walked because walking was what his body did after the door had closed.
He had not planned anything beyond the coffee shop. He had arrived, said what he came to say, received what he received, and left. The leaving had not produced an agenda. He was thirty-eight years old with a logistics coordinator job and a credit file in correction and a five-to-seven-year horizon and forty minutes of walking without a destination.
He thought about the two sentences.
He thought about what they meant — not for her, he had understood clearly that they meant nothing about her, or rather that they had already meant something for her years ago and that meaning was complete and filed and not available for his use. He thought about what they meant for him.
What they meant was that the thing he had been carrying — the specific weight of the mall, the look on her face when she raised her head, the two seconds before she walked away — was not going to be resolved by her. It had not been hers to resolve. It was his, and it would remain his, and the most he could say was that he had spoken it out loud in front of her and she had acknowledged it and that was the maximum available transfer.
He thought about whether that was enough.
He was not certain. He suspected that certainty about this particular question was not a state he was going to reach quickly, and that reaching for it quickly would be the same as every other thing he had reached for quickly in his adult life — the appearance of completeness organized around an unfilled center.
The morning light was the low winter angle that made everything in the street look simultaneously exposed and quiet.
A woman ahead of him was carrying a large paper bag from a bakery that smelled, even at this distance, of something just made.
A child on a bicycle wobbled on the pavement and corrected without falling, which seemed like a reasonable metaphor for something.
Ryan stopped at a bus stop. He looked at the route map. He located where he was and where the bus went.
He got on it.
He was going to be early for his shift.