It was like the damn things were waiting for them all to come home again.
"Good luck with that," he muttered.
Bracing himself, he kept going, entering the kitchen that had been Wellsie's dream.
Fritz had thoughtfully left lights on, and the shock of seeing everything for the first time since the deaths made Tohr wonder if it wouldn't have been better to come in in the dark: The countertops they had chosen together, and that massive Sub-Zero she had loved so much, and that table they had bought online at 1stdibs. com, and the set of shelves he had put up for her cookbooks. . . all of it was on display, gleaming and clean as the day it had been installed/delivered/assembled.
Shit, nothing had changed. Everything was exactly as it had been the night she had been killed, his doggen keeping after the dust and that was it.
Walking over to the built-in desk, he forced himself to pick up a Post-it note with her handwriting on it.
Tues: Havers - checkup, 11:30.
He dropped the pad and turned away, seriously questioning his sanity. Why had he come here? What possible good could come out of this?
Wanderin
g around, he went through the living room, the library, and the dining room, making a loop of the first floor's public rooms. . . until he felt like he couldn't breathe, until the alchie buzz was beyond gone and his vision and his sense of smell and his hearing were unbearably acute. Why was he -
Tohr blinked as he found himself in front of a door.
He'd come full circle, back to the kitchen.
And he was standing at the way into the basement.
Ah, shit. Not this. . . he wasn't ready for this.
The truth was, Lassiter and his dumb-ass movies had done more damage than good. All those couples up on the screen. . . even though they were contrived instruments of fiction, some of them had filtered into his brain, and triggered all kinds of things.
None of which had been about Wellsie.
Instead, he'd thought only about those days with No'One, the two of them straining with all those blankets between their bodies, she looking up at him as if she wanted so much more than he was giving her, he holding back out of respect for his dead. . . and maybe because he was a fucking coward at his core.
Probably equal bits of both.
Given what was banging around in his head, he'd had to come here. He needed memories of his beloved, images of his Wellsie that maybe he'd forgotten, a powerful blast from the past to compete with what felt like a betrayal in the present.
From a vast distance, he watched his hand reach out and grab the doorknob. Twisting to the right, he pulled the heavy, painted steel panel wide. As the motion-activated lights came on in the stairwell, he was hit with a whole lot of cream: the steps that went downward were carpeted in a mellow buff, and the walls were painted likewise, everything calming and serene.
This had been their sanctuary.
The first step was the equivalent of jumping off the lip of the Grand Canyon. And number two wasn't any better.
He still felt that way when he got to the bottom and there was no more descent to be had.
The basement of the house followed the first-floor plan, although only two-thirds of the space was finished with a master suite, a gym, a laundry, and a minikitchen fleshed out, and the rest functioning as storage.
Tohr had no idea how long he stood there.
Eventually, though, he walked forward, toward the closed door up ahead. . . .
The fact that he opened the thing into a black hole seemed absolutely right -
Fuuuuck, it still smelled like her. Her perfume. Her scent.
Stepping inside, he closed himself in and braced himself as he hit the wall switch, bringing up the overheads gradually.
The bed was made.