Page 61 of Lucky Night

She sits up. There was no smoke in the hallway just now. Maybe the stairs have cleared. What’s the harm in checking?

He leans over, resting his elbows on his knees and pinching the bridge of his nose. It just seems incredibly foolish tome.

Then I’llgo.

No chance. I’ll go. He sighs. If you absolutely insist.

Circle the whole floor, to make sure you hit every stairwell.

So that’s a yes, he says. That’s a, yes Nick, I am absolutely insisting yougo.

With a great show of resignation, he rises and finds his shoes.

Take one of the wet towels, she says. Do you want a bottle of water?

I’m not crossing the Serengeti, Jenny. I’ll be right back.

He heads for the door, where he picks up a towel, then turns to give her one last martyred glance.

Well, he says, it’s been real.

Thank you, Nick.

He gives her a little salute. Then he opens the door, and he’s gone.

But he’ll be back. She saw him pick up his keycard. Does he think she won’t let him in? Does he mistrust her that much?

Retrieving his phone from the foyer, where she must have dropped it during the struggle with Edvin, she sits on the end of the bed, unmutes the television and scrolls for updates. The conditions downstairs look more or less unchanged. Juliana, the pretty NY1 reporter, keeps referring to the situation as asignificant blaze,but it’s unclear whether that’s official terminology or infotainment hype. Juliana is currently explaining how smoke filtered to lower floors of the building via electrical conduits, creating initial confusion about where the fire was. Smoke also spread upward when fleeing guests opened stairwell doors.

The two anchors in the studio, whose names are Ron and Cheryl, listen and nod and look concerned.

The fire has made theNew York Timeshome page: FDNY Battling Blaze in Midtown High-Rise.

Firefighters are now going room by room on the affected floor, making sure all flames have been extinguished and beginning smoke mitigation efforts.

Poor Juliana’s nose is red. They’d be freezing too, if they’d left. No, they’d be in another room by now. In another bed. Asleep. Or fucking. Or watching the news, astonished, saying, that’s insane. Can you believeit?

We werejust there.

Shouldn’t Nick be back by now? Chill, it’s been like four minutes. She misses him. Has she ever been alone in a hotel room without him?I get lonely after I come.She understands now. The simple comfort of a body, near at hand.

She hadn’t meant to upset him—she was trying to make him feel better! She’d listened to his explanation for why he’d insisted on a whole night, his heartfelt confession, and she’d felt awful. So she blurted out the one thing she had, her own confession, which she hoped would reassure him, but which, upon reflection, she can see might not be so reassuring. Of course he’d be confounded by what she’d done—what kind of psycho fakes faking an orgasm? Plus her reason, her ridiculous wedding ring misunderstanding…how can she explain that to him without sounding like a complete cuckoo?

She logs into Twitter on his phone. @firechieftim is describing the building’s numerous safety features. It has advanced sensors, high-tech sprinklers and a buildingwide command-and-control system monitored by AI. Okay, but if the building is that spectacular, why was it so hard to find the fire in the first place? Answer me that, @firechieftim, you who seem to know so much.

I laid my heart bare for you.Okay, but…really? He shared a concern about their relationship, not some soul-crushing secret. Is he so fragile that a little vulnerability can knock him sideways—make him feel so bad that he needs to get rid of her, erase this awful stain on his sense of imperviousness? Is he really so defended, so…what? Allergic to consequences. No wonder he didn’t takethe fire seriously at first. How could something like a fire possibly affect him? He’s invincible.

Or so he thought.

And persuaded her to think, too.

She hears two quick beeps, and the door opens. He takes two, three, four steps in, and by the time the door falls closed he’s sitting beside her, taking her hands in his.

I have a proposal, he says. No more lies. We wipe the slate clean, and commit to total honesty from here on out. How does that sound?

Okay, but—

I’m saying this so that you believe what I’m about to tell you, which is that we are better off, significantly better off, staying put. I did a full circuit of the floor. The elevators are still shut down—the freight elevator, too. I checked all three stairwells. Our old favorite, A, is almost black with smoke. Impassable. The other two weren’t as bad, but bad enough.

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