Page 116 of The Quiet Tenant

I’m not the one he wants. Not the one he’s after.

But I’ve bought her some time. Whoever she is, I’ve bought her a few feet between him and her.

He turns his back to me and starts running again.

CHAPTER 80

The woman, running

After everything, it comes down to two bodies.

Yours and his.

You run.

This isn’t about running fast. This is beyond fast.

You run like you ran back in your former life, when you yearned to feel your legs dissolve underneath you. When you craved the pounding in your rib cage, the blaze of your lungs searching for air.

You run to it. A small, stand-alone building. So plebeian under the starlit sky. Right here, maybe one hundred meters away.

You can run one hundred meters. You have prepared for this. Felt the muscles in your legs, the strain in your thighs, the toughness of your calves.

You do it and you do not look back and he is right behind you and you can hear him and you can feel him, feel him in your bones and in your brain and underneath your skin and behind your eyes and in every corner of you, every crevice of the world.

And so you run.

The ultimate rule of staying alive: You run, because it is how you have always saved yourself.

CHAPTER 81

The woman at the police station

It’s the end of the world. A chaos so big you can’t expect the planets to ever align again.

What you know: You are still breathing. You are a body, two arms and two legs, a head and a torso.

What you left outside: cold, ice, and snow. The gun, tossed at the last second. The Stars and Stripes flapping meekly in the December wind. A building made of brick and glass. You are inside now, at the heart of it. A lab rat under fluorescent lights. Too much noise, too many voices.

Your head is full. All you can hear is your heart pounding in your chest, the pulse of blood in your ears.

It isn’t over. He’s here. The righteous father. The man everyone trusts. The man who knows the world has his back. The one who can only fail up.

“She took my kid,” he says, over and over again. “She took my kid.”

This man. You go places and he finds you. He is a hotel you can never check out of.

And his daughter. Cecilia. She is here, too. You lost her, and she found you.

Him, you realize. She found him.

It is always about him.

You are standing a few feet inside the police station. He is at the entrance. A man in blue stands between the two of you.

“Aidan,” the man in blue says. “Aidan, we know. Calm down.”

He doesn’t calm down.

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